Throughout his life, Ed Koch took great delight in being a hair shirt. If something he said made you uncomfortable, that was your problem — and his pleasure.
The habit didn’t die with him.
Among several inscriptions on his tombstone is a sequence that is meant first to stir the heart, and then to provoke the faint of heart. It begins, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”
Under those words, in parentheses, the inscription continues: “Daniel Pearl, 2002, just before he was beheaded by a Muslim terrorist.”
Each of those lines meant something special to Koch, and, having planned the tombstone for years, he wanted to make a point in sharing them permanently.
The first proclaims Koch’s pride in his Jewishness. The second reflects his belief that anti-Semitism is growing and that too many people, including some Jews, are blind to it, or worse.
“He had great admiration” for Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Diane Coffey, Koch’s longtime friend and chief of staff, told me yesterday. “Ed asked me what I thought about including his words, and I said, ‘If you want to, of course you should.’ ”
In fact, Koch was so taken by Pearl’s last words, which, like his murder, were filmed by his killers, that the ex-mayor hoped they would become part of a prayer for all Jews.
“I believe those words should be part of the annual services on the Jewish High Holiday of Yom Kippur, and should be repeated by the congregants,” Koch wrote in 2011.
Last year, he went further, telling The Wall Street Journal that Pearl’s words are “as important as the most holy of all statements in Jewish ritual. I think that every Saturday, we ought to say, ‘My father’s a Jew, my mother was a Jew, and I’m a Jew,’ with great pride.”
The second line of the inscription, the citation about Pearl being beheaded by a Muslim terrorist, is unusually provocative for a tombstone. That’s the point. It’s pure Koch — a no-nonsense cry for vigilance that outlives him.
“It was his final act,” said George Arzt, his friend and press secretary. “He was very much concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. He wanted the world to know about it and do something about it.”
Arzt added that it was no accident that the three flags at Monday’s funeral represented the United States, New York and Israel. “He was very upset that too many Jews in the United States, like the ‘J Street’ Jews in Washington, were undermining Israel’s right to determine its own destiny,” Arzt said.
Koch must have been thinking of such people when, in the Journal interview, he offered that “there are Jews who are uncomfortable announcing that they are Jews . . . I’m proud of the word Jew. And that I am a Jew. And that’s why I think we should say it every Saturday.”
For his entire adult life, Koch correctly recognized the abiding danger of ancient Jew-hatred and that Israel could count only on itself and the United States. I am among many who learned those lessons from him. Remember, he was one of the first to smell Jimmy Carter’s animus to Israel, a bias that is obvious now.
One of Koch’s last letters to a public official went to David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, in which Koch blasted him for supporting the creation of a Palestinian state by fiat at the United Nations. He likened the British support to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and asked Cameron, “How will history on this issue recall you?”
The spirit of that challenge is carved in granite on Koch’s tombstone. For all time, every visitor will be reminded of his pride and passion.
A final point: Daniel Pearl was murdered Feb. 1, 2002. Ed Koch died Feb. 1, 2013.
Avenge the other Sept. 11
Leon Panetta comes up short on facts and logic, but otherwise, he gives a splendid interview. The outgoing defense secretary defended the administration’s response, or lack of it, to the Benghazi terror attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, telling a TV interviewer, “This is not 9/11. You cannot just simply call and expect within two minutes to have a team in place. It takes time.”
Actually, it was 9/11—Stevens and the three others were murdered on the 11th anniversary of that most awful day. And for an American envoy not to be properly defended in a lawless Muslim country was a dereliction of duty of the highest order.
As for the initial 9/11, by this time, the Bush administration was already overthrowing the Taliban and driving Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan.
But nearly five months after the Benghazi slaughter, the Obama administration has locked up the creator of the anti-Muslim video it falsely blamed for inspiring the attack, but otherwise — nada, zip, nothing.
How much time does it take, Mr. Secretary?
Menendez is in for a ruff ride
If Sen. Robert Menendez is half as smart as he thinks he is, he’ll follow Harry Truman’s advice that, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
Menendez stands accused of going to the Dominican Republic to bed prostitutes, some underage. He got there via a contributor’s private jet, and he seems to have used his Senate position to help that contributor in a business deal.
Although he belatedly coughed up nearly $60,000 for the flights when the FBI started nosing around, the Jersey Democrat insists he’s as pure as the driven snow. But he ought to be looking for a Rover if Harry Reid is the kind of friend he has.
The majority leader said nice things about Menendez on TV, and the headlines said he backed his colleague. But Reid ended his defense this way:
“I have confidence he did nothing wrong, but that’s what investigations are all about.”
Woof, woof.
‘Bully’ pulpit
Council Speaker Chris Quinn doesn’t subscribe to the idea that government is here to help. In her book, it’s here to punish.
After learning that Cablevision had fired 23 union workers, she blasted the company, saying, “We are not going to let them get away with it, and we are going to find ways to hold them accountable using every level of government we can.”
Yikes. The threat recalls the way she went after Chick-fil-A last summer when the owner dared to say he opposed gay marriage. On her council stationery, Quinn, a candidate for mayor, urged NYU to “sever” its relationship and evict a Chick-fil-A on its campus. She accused the owner of “extreme intolerance and homophobia” and said she doesn’t want the company “in my city.”
Imagine how she would handle real power.
Bull beep!
Beware the Orwellian Speak from the city’s Department of Transportation. It is removing “Don’t Honk” signs because, a spokesman says, the streets are too cluttered. This from the agency that chopped the streets into little bitty mazes with endless signs, bike lanes, pedicabs and pedestrian plazas.