What To Do About Philip Weiss?

In the mid 1990s, I worked at United Feature Syndicate -- think Peanuts, Jack Anderson, Dilbert and Miss Manners. I edited newspaper columns on everything from business advice by Bruce Williams ("I wish you well, my friend") to bridge strategy by Philip Alder. Another of my assignments included selecting articles from the New York Observer for national syndication, mostly Andrew Sarris and Hilton Kramer.

I was drawn to the over-the-top way one Observer writer, Philip Weiss, would go after the Clintons, so I approached my boss, Diana Loevy, about breaking Weiss out as a star. He had all the qualities that make a good columnist: strong reporter, terrific writer, highly opinionated, a bomb-thrower. Diana replied with the frankness for which she was famous: "What to do about Philip Weiss? Great writer. But he's crazy."

This assessment occurred years before Weiss became the nation's foremost Jewish critic of Jews, a blogger version of Walter Lippman. See, Philip Weiss is interested in evolutions. For example, he recently applauded Cong. Bill Pascrell for progressing from a caveman who supported the freeing of Jonathan Pollard to the enlightened position of Palestinian statehood.

But the evolution that most interests Weiss is his own.

Weiss was at first an obsessive Clinton defender -- he virtually invented the idea that their troubles were due not to Bill's wandering wiener but to a vast right-wing conspiracy. But then he became a dogged Clinton attacker, single-mindedly keeping alive for years the story of Gov. Clinton's alleged rape of nursing home employee Juanita Broaddrick and showering praise upon Linda Tripp confidante Lucianne Goldberg back when the concept of a "semen-stained dress" seemed like absurd lashon hara.

More recently, however, Weiss has focused monomaniacal attention on the satanic crimes of Israel, which are greater than those of every other nation on earth put together, and twice as evil because Jews have a duty to do good. Weiss chronicled his own fascinating decision to become a blogger in a 4000-word recollection that is precisely 1000 times as long as it should have been: "Because I wanted to." He reveals that marrying a Christian broadened his parochial views because her "values had improved me" then pushes the psycho meter into the red by stating, "The towers fell in part because of our support for Israel¹s occupation of Arab lands."

Most astonishingly, Weiss concludes that the Jewish power structure has colluded to deny him the living to which his blog, MondoWeiss, richly entitles him. Righteous Philip packed his bags at the New York Observer when his Jewish publisher and Jewish editor (whose 30+ years of friendship and support Weiss rewards by sharing private conversations and portraying him as a weak sycophant) declined to pay him the $25000 extra he sought for writing the blog. They didn't fire him. They didn't tell him to stop peddling one-sided Stockholm Syndrome screeds. A paper that is legendary for cheapness and losing money simply declined to add a lush new expense for something most everyone else does for free (including me right here).

Thus was Philip freed to take his ball and go home, launching the independent MondoWeiss as a stand-alone. The business plan seems shaky – the site features a plaintive "this is my chief source of income" plea by the donate button and an ad for "Jim Saxton for Congress," which cannot pull much from Google, since Saxton announced his retirement 15 months ago.

But at least Weiss gets to pursue the truth unencumbered by the Maccabean forces trying to hold him down. At MondoWeiss, every Israeli action is a shanda, every Arab has suffered at the hand of Israel and its American client, every politician is an AIPAC marionette, and every Jew has blood on his hands.

To call Philip Weiss a "self-hating Jew," as do lots of commenters on his site, or even a "Jew-hating Jew" misses the point. The problem with Philip Weiss is not that he hates Jews or himself. Lots of people do that. The problem with Philip Weiss is that he's a total dick.

Weiss has lost the nod to fairness that separates jeremiad from journalism. One doesn't expect impartiality from a blog ­-- the point is that they're opinionated. But given Weiss's long history as an investigator, one might expect the occasional nuance or shade of gray to seep into his version of events. Nope. Israel is always wrong. Every Arab is a saint (except the accomodationist pigs who deserve to be buried neck deep and stoned). Most of all, the power of America's 2% Jewish population is omnipotent, pulling every string. So petty and loathsome are these Jewish puppeteers, they even went so far as to deny a wholesome Arab-American his rightful seat as a freeholder in Passaic County.

Hold on just a minute, bubeleh. New Jersey politics is territory I know pretty well. MondoWeiss takes the position that a Lebanese-American businessman, Sami Merhi, was the victim of an orchestrated Jewish campaign. The idea is that Merhi -- who had spoken out passionately against the 9-11 attacks, in which his own godson had been murdered -- had said some additional things to a New York Times reporter that could be interpreted as being more supportive of Palestinians than was comfortable for many Jews. So the Jews allegedly organized and attacked, knocking Merhi off the ballot in 2004 ­ his Democratic patrons Cong Pascrell and Passaic County Chairman John Currie "had gotten the message" from Jewish donors and caved. Remarkably, this scenario is said to have repeated itself in 2006 ­ Merhi was awarded the "county line" and then had the offer rescinded at the last moment, all because of Jewish meddling. The problem with this story isn't the facts. I don't doubt that prominent Jews did make it clear to Currie and Pascrell (and even Gov. Corzine and Sen. Menendez, also indicted in the article for spinelessness) that they found Merhi an unacceptable choice. No one will get me to argue that Democrats aren't chicken about offending people.

The problem is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with people of any ethnic group expressing their dismay over someone whose remarks they find objectionable. Asian-Americans went nuts when then-Sen. D'Amato imitated Judge Ito in a mock-pidgen speak. And that hurt Alfonse in his subsequent election loss. But no one attributed that offense to some "Japanese lobby flexing its muscle." Only when Jews express dismay is it a "lobby" that is conspiring to "flex its muscle." Does Weiss believe that Jews should decline to participate in the political process or disguise their dismay simply so that Americans don't accuse them of tribalism or pulling the strings or of being a nefarious "lobby"?

(By the way, I do quibble with at least one "fact" in that article ­ the author writes, "in Democratic-friendly Passaic, winning that committee vote was practically the same as winning election in November." In 2004, the year in which Merhi first got okey-doked, two of the seven freeholders were Republicans, and Republicans had a majority as recently as 1997. So while I concede that the Dems probably kicked Merhi off out of fear of offending, it's possible they truly believed that Merhi's issues would actually doom his candidacy. I remember thinking at the time that the Republicans should run George Ajjan, a Syrian-American Republican from Passaic County and coincidentally a MondoWeiss fan and frequent commenter. Had Merhi stayed on the ballot, Ajjan could have beaten him, specifically by courting support in Passaic's rather sizeable Jewish communities, which live peacefully shoulder to shoulder alongside Passaic's sizeable Arab communities.)

So what to do about Philip Weiss? Ignore him, of course. But that's just it. Jews have a hard time not taking the bait. That characteristic is what makes Weiss's blog so infuriating and it's what makes him so curious to see the world differently from the way in which most of his fellow Jews see it. But he'd be a better writer and better man ­ and maybe would find meaningful work ­if he plied his trade with a greater sense of fairness.