No Iranian Ever Called Me a Goy (with apologies to Muhammad Ali)

Via Leftwing-Christian.net

This is a poem I started writing about the middle of last year, but I set it aside. Recently, with all the events in the Middle East, I got it back out and finished it.


Warning: graphic language

No Iranian Ever Called Me a Goy (with apologies to Muhammad Ali)

No Iranian ever called me a goy. It goes without saying.

Or parachuted out of the sky into a chair at the Federal Reserve

in order to preach the gospels of greed, gluttony, and corporate power;

Ain’t no Iranian ever stiffed me for 3 billion of my tax dollars a year, used the money to kill Palestinian children, got me blamed for it, and then whined about “anti-Semitism” when I had the temerity to object;

Ain’t no Iranian named Goldman or Sachs ever been given an $800 billion bailout, passed around plates of caviar in Congress, invented a terrorist bogeyman called Osama bin Laden, or bankrolled candidates who steamed into office and then proceeded to dismantle my constitutional rights after they got there;

Ain’t no Iranian ever drove a TV network around like he was driving a shiny new Cadillac, or made origami butterflies out of the Washington Post and the New York Times, or shat upon what’s left of free speech, curiously while, at the same time, trying to convince me the terrorists are out to get me ‘cause they hate my freedoms.

I love it this time of year. There’s a nip in the air.

I remember that day at Lake Wakan-Tanka

And the Beach Boys were playing

On the radio, and you told me how my

Eyes glowed. A pebble of a boy you were!

Catching hard balls in your catcher’s mitt!—

And I couldn’t wait to be with you.

Why do your eyes look so far away, my darling?

What happened to our song?

They burned the Blue Ridge Mountains;

They blew the mountain tops right off,

And they killed off all the hummingbirds,

Why do you watch the TV? Why do you look

out the window? Why do you just sit there?

Ain’t no kippa-wearing Iranian ever bombed a U.S. Navy ship called The Liberty, run over an American girl with a bulldozer, or squelched calls for Congress to investigate these crimes;

Ain’t no Iranian ever un-Tzipi-ed himself and pulled out his circumcised cock before a blonde, Hollywood shiksa, stuck it in, then went home to his wife and kids, lit the Menorah with his customary smile, and settled down to read the day’s stock returns;

Ain’t no Iranian ever reduced an American president to puppet ruler status (poetic justice maybe) or bombed sewage treatment plants or dumped filth in the ocean; and it weren’t no Iranian who put 1.5 million starving Gazans on the Dr. Dov Weisglass weight loss program, or sat upon a Hill of Shame to watch the white phosphorous clouds hover in the sky like cherubim above the mercy seat;

Here in the shit house,

In the beit chara,

In the hasbara

charnel-and-churnel house,

We will bomb them

And feel only a slight shudder

On the wing…

No Iranian ever sat on the Supreme Court and ruled that giving corporations the right to buy Congress members constitutes “free speech”;

And it weren’t no Iranian who drained art of meaning, rendered poetry tepid and toothless, or plowed novels through the great publishing houses pettifogged with crime and decadence;

Ain’t no Iranian ever turned April into the cruelest month, poured chem-trails out of airplanes, vindicated Orwell, or turned the leaders of France, Germany, and Britain into cuddly puppy dogs sitting up, paws bent, tails wagging, begging for treats;

The kids are tired of eating oatmeal

And instant mashed potatoes.

The Wizard of Oz came to town

With the wicked witch of Murdoch

And her womb of spilled liver and spleen,

The womb of entrails lying in the snow.

Allow me to declare something to you:

While you slumbered on the mattress

And bedsprings of America’s padded ruins,

They hedge-funded their padded bank accounts

And carved their initials into your flesh—

While the schools could not afford books, and

The hospital sent the latest indigent off

In a taxicab—yet still you did not speak.

Ain’t no chauvinistic Iranian ever proclaimed his own genetic superiority over me, or Uzi-Landau-ed me from the cockpit of an F-16 paid for by my tax dollars, or committed war crimes and blocked shipments of pasta while the origami butterflies fluttered in silence;

Ain’t no Iranian ever busted a chair over my head for pointing out, just as a minor trivia fact, that Iranians comprise only 2 percent of the American population, but make up 7 percent of the House, 13 percent of the Senate, and 25 percent of the Supreme Court

And that wasn’t five Iranians dancin’ and high-fivin’ it like a pack of juiced hyenas as the Twin Towers burned, and truth be told it probably wasn’t Iranians who purchased all those put options, and of course Farsi ain’t spoken on Wall Street.

No Iranian with a six-pointed head ever made a million packaging gefilte fish with the kosher symbol on the label, vandalized a Swedish art exhibit called Snow White and the Madness of Truth, or planted a tree of deception that grew to towering heights, sprouting a fruit so bad it was to sicken even the hasbara speakers;

And ain’t no Iranian ever come up and snarled in my face, “We killed Jesus

and we’ll kill you too.”

And we’ll boil his saints

In excrement,

And sing “Hatikva”

While we’re at it…

Day after day they keep killing you,

But you don’t die, my love. I don’t know

What to say any more. First they stripped you

Of your rights, then your pride, and even after they

Shipped your job overseas and you had nothing

Left to lose, still you did not speak out. Why?

America has a cranial fracture.

I used to dream of clouds, but now…darn it,

The vacuum cleaner is broken again, Jean from church

Volunteers at the new food pantry, she said

To stop by; she knows you lost your job;

She’s very nice. They even give away

Baby formula and used clothes; we’ll get by.

Blindness, deafness, and dumbness will protect us.

It wasn’t Iranians who divided and conquered us with their acts of genial toxicity, spraying dispersant on our souls, polluting Dead Dolphin Bay with the tar balls of hell as they painted their mural of lies;

And it weren’t no Iranian banking industry selling Robitussin cough syrup to the oil-spattered Goyim of South Louisiana while strolling arm in arm into a molten Corexit sunrise;

Ain’t no Iranian ever Rham-Emanueled the womb of Camelot and American idealism, our sense of national decency, ejaculating into it the polluted semen of torture condonance, when Rosemary’s Baby became the monster Cheney of the twisted sneer and the Oxford University of the Undead;

And what of those occupied villages over there, where death leaps off the pages of the Katha Upanishad, and the teenage boy says, ‘Now that I’ve seen your face, what can I enjoy? What is death going to do with me today?’—you know where I’m talking about—over there where the occupiers’ boots trample the corpses of saints and martyrs—no, it really doesn’t appear those are Iranians either;

And come to think of it, Mother, those weren’t Iranian casino-capitalist gamblers with their toxic assets lining up for bank bailouts, and I don’t recall seeing a single Iranian on the news talking about how we had to scrap Social Security in order to finance the debt in order to save money in order to give more of it away to the bankers, and it wasn’t blood-sucking Iranian demons who limned a culture of greed, eating their Passover matzo balls out of a war-kettle, singing don’t cry for me Argentina and enjoining the services of a kosher shochet as they disc-jockeyed the land of the free into a lake of fire.

And we will sever their trachea and esophagus, and cut the carotid arteries, and harvest the organs of our donkeys; streams and fountains of time flow through us, for before that fool YHWH was, I was;

Chillul Hashem, the Goyim have become drugged cockroaches in a bottle, and vengeance—vengeance—will be ours, for we have wrapped our nuclear bombs in swaddling clothes and laid them in a manger in Dimona.

By Richard Edmondson

***

I offer the following as a helpful guide to understanding some of the more opaque references in the poem. The explications are arranged in the same order as are the passages encountered by the reader in the descending stanzas of the poem.

• For those Americans who may never have heard, and probably there are many, the USS Liberty was a United States naval vessel bombed by Israel in 1967. The attack, which took place in the Mediterranean off the coast of Egypt, killed 34 American servicemen and left 174 wounded. On March 16, 2003, 23-year-old Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli bulldozer as she nonviolently resisted the demolition of a Palestinian home.
• “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said not long after Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian parliament in democratic elections in 2006. At that time, Israel imposed economic sanctions, which in turn were followed by a full blockade of the Gaza Strip beginning in June of 2007. The territory has been under blockade ever since.
• When asked how he felt about bombing a Gaza apartment building full of civilians, the answer given by Dan Halutz, former chief of staff of the Israel military, was, “I would have felt a slight shudder of the wings.”
• Uzi Landau is an Israeli politician and ardent backer of the settler movement who wants Palestinians to change their educational curriculum so that school children will be given a more agreeable picture of the past 62 years of Israeli occupation. Landau is a member of Yisrael Beiteinu, the political party headed by Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Leiberman, which advocates “transfer” of Palestinians. Israel found itself on the receiving end of international criticism in February, 2009, following news reports it was blocking shipments of pasta from entering Gaza.
• The infamous five dancing Israelis comprise part of a sizeable body of evidence suggesting Israeli involvement in 911. That someone had advance knowledge of 911 is strongly indicated by insider trading in put options on Wall Street just days prior to the attack.
• “Snow White and the Madness of Truth” was the name of a work of art exhibited in Stockholm in 2004. Charging that it was anti-Semitic, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden vandalized the display, which consisted of a small white boat floating in a pool of blood-colored water. Mounted on the boat was a portrait of Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, a 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer who, after witnessing members of her family murdered by the Israeli military in June of 2003, became one of the first Palestinian female suicide bombers.
• Jewish extremists in the West Bank chanted “We killed Jesus and we’ll kill you too” as they attacked and bloodied a 19-year-old Palestine Solidarity activist in 2006.
• The reference to Rahm Emanuel is a play on words. In Semitic languages one of the meanings of the word “rahm” is “womb.”
• Rosemary’s Baby was a 1968 horror film directed by Roman Polanski and based upon the novel of the same name by Ira Levin. The tale relates the story of a young mother who gives birth to a son ostensibly fathered by Satan.
• The Katha Upanishad is an Indian allegory relating the story of a teenage boy who meets death, whereupon the latter subsequently becomes the boy’s teacher.
• A shochet is an individual who performs the ritual slaughter of animals as prescribed by Jewish dietary laws.
• Rafael Eitan, former Israeli military chief of staff, once epitomized Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Eitan, who was chief of staff at the time of the Sabra-Shatila massacre in 1982, died in 2004 at the port of Ashdod when “a freak wave swept him away in mid-conversation on his mobile phone.”
• Chillul Hashem is a Hebrew term meaning “desecration of God’s name.”
  
  River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian