By RON JAGER—
In recent weeks, the level of accusations and counter-clarifications between Israeli Cabinet ministers and White House spokespersons concerning statements made by Secretary of State Kerry seem to be much more emotionally charged even according to Israeli standards. In the latest flare-up, two of Prime Ministers Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers went even further, lashing out at Kerry and accusing him of undermining the Jewish state’s legitimacy and the chances of reaching a peace agreement. What is it about John Kerry, in his unrelenting crusade to help Israel achieve a peace agreement with the Palestinian Arabs that has made the political discourse so vocal, so heated, and so personal?
Kerry was quoted at a recent defense conference in Munich Germany: “You see for Israel there’s an increasing de-legitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it. There are talk of boycotts and other kinds of things,” Kerry said. “Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable. It’s illusionary. There’s a momentary prosperity, there’s a momentary peace.” In response Netanyahu said international pressure on Israel would backfire and only cause the Palestinians to harden their positions. “Attempts to impose a boycott on the State of Israel are immoral and unjust. Moreover, they will not achieve their goal,” he said.
While Netanyahu refrained from taking aim at Kerry, some of his ministers were harsher. Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, called Kerry’s comments “offensive, unfair and insufferable.” “You can’t expect the state of Israel to conduct negotiations with a gun pointed to its head,” he said. Economics Minister Naftali Bennett, from the Jewish Home party, said all “the advice givers” should know that Israel will not abandon its land because of economic threats. “We expect our friends around the world to stand beside us, against anti-Semitic boycott efforts targeting Israel, and not for them to be their amplifier,” said Bennett, a fierce critic of the Kerry-led talks. “Only security will bring economic stability, he said.
This kind of tit-for-tat is all too reminiscent of memorable segments from Woody Allen movies in which an extended Jewish family are all sitting around the dinner table and arguing about how to solve the problems of the world never doubting that their argument is the most valid. A classical Jewish debate.
It seems that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree and in Archie Bunkers infamous words, it’s all in the family, even if his is an apostate. By making a simple check in Wikipedia we learn the following:
Kerry was raised as a Roman Catholic by his Catholic father and Episcopalian mother. As a child, Kerry served as an altar boy. Although the extended family enjoyed a great fortune, Kerry’s parents themselves were upper-middle class; a wealthy great aunt paid for Kerry to attend elite schools in Europe and New England. He also attended St. Paul’s as a teenager.
It was discovered in 2003 by genealogist Felix Gundacker that Kerry’s paternal grandparents were born Jewish as “Fritz Kohn” and “Ida Lowe” in Austria, changed their names to “Frederick and Ida Kerry” from “Kohn” in 1900 and converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1901. or 1902. Fritz’ elder brother Otto had earlier, in 1887 or 1896, also embraced Catholicism. The “Kerry” name, widely misinterpreted as indicative of Irish heritage, was reputedly selected arbitrarily: “According to family legend, Fritz and another family member opened an atlas at random and dropped a pencil on a map. It fell on County Kerry in Ireland, and thus a name was chosen.” Leaving their hometown Mödling, a suburb of Vienna where they had lived since 1896, Fred and Ida, together with their son Eric, emigrated to the United States in 1905, living at first in Chicago and eventually moving to Brookline, Massachusetts, by 1915.
The village where Fritz Kohn was born in 1873 was at that time known as Bennisch and was a part of Silesia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but is today known as Horní Benešov in the Czech Republic. After learning of his ancestral connection with their village, the mayor and citizens sent congratulatory correspondence to John Kerry with regard to his political pursuits.
For a time, Fred Kerry was a prosperous and successful shoe merchant. He and Ida along with their children Richard (who would become the father of John Kerry) and Mildred were able to afford to travel to Europe in the autumn of 1921, returning on October 21. A few weeks later, on November 15, Fred Kerry filed a will leaving everything to Ida and then, on November 23, walked into a washroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. The suicide was front-page news in all of the Boston newspapers, reporting at the time that the motive was severe asthma and related health problems, but modern reports cite family sources saying that the motive was financial trouble: “He had made three fortunes and when he had lost the third fortune, he couldn’t face it anymore”, according to granddaughter Nancy Stockslager.
John Kerry has said that although he knew his paternal grandfather had come from Austria, he did not know until informed by The Boston Globe on the basis of their genealogical research that Fred Kerry had changed his name from “Fritz Kohn” and had been born Jewish, nor that Ida Kerry’s brother Otto and sister Jenni had died in Nazi concentration camps.
John Kerry’s alleged Jewish roots notwithstanding, the fact remains that he is a man who is “economical with the truth” (to put it nicely), starting with his traitorous allegations during the Vietnam War and continuing right up to his duplicitous dealing with Israel these past few months. The man is a total embarrassment to America.