NYC Mayor Ed Koch dies on Daniel Pearl's yahrzeit- revives concern about democracy's needed vigilance against Islamism

NYC Mayor Ed Koch (Photo: NY Daily News)

ED KOCH, the voluble three-term mayor who helped bring New York back from the brink of fiscal ruin in the 1970s and came to embody the city with his wry, outspoken style, has died at the age of 88 of heart failure in NYC.

As mayor from 1978 to 1989, the forceful, quick-witted Koch, with his trademark phrase "How'm I Doin?," was a natural showman and tireless promoter of both himself and the city.

New York writer Pete Hamill said in a 2005 discussion of Koch's legacy, "Here was a mayor who was a combination of a Lindy's waiter, a Coney Island barker, a Catskill comedian, an irritated school principal and an eccentric uncle.  He talked tough and the reason was, he was tough."  

In The Algemeiner, Dovid Efune says: 

Mayor Ed Koch (Courtesy: Vanity Fair)

It was only three weeks ago when he (Mayor Koch) told me in an interview that he felt President Obama had betrayed Israel with his nomination of Chuck Hagel. “Frankly, I thought that there would come a time when he would renege on what he conveyed on his support of Israel,” Koch said, adding, “it comes a little earlier than I thought it would.”

We published Koch’s articles nearly every week, and it was clear to me, just by the sheer volume of those which focused on Israel, that the Jewish State, and his Jewishness for that matter, were topics that were very close to his heart.

“Why would you expect Israel to cooperate in its intended lynching?” he asked recently in a passionate letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron. He viciously defended Israel’s right to self defense and called out those who displayed hypocrisy in their dealings with Israel on a regular basis.

“I’m of the belief that the leaders of the Jewish community have to do more to make Jews aware, young Jews aware, of the importance of Israel,” he told me in another interview late last year.

It is therefore noteworthy and fitting to point out that besides the ‘Hear o Israel’ prayer, the only other quote that Koch has engraved on his tombstone is the final statement of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish journalist who was kidnapped and beheaded while in Pakistan investigating Al Qaeda back in 2002.

“My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish,” reads the defiant etching, attributed to “(Daniel Pearl 2002, just before he was beheaded by a Muslim terrorist.)”

Koch explained that “the sense of justice that Judaism teaches” was the reason he elected to have the words “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith,” etched on the gravestone he prepared for himself. ...

How befitting that the day of his passing, Feb 1st 2013 comes 11 years to the day after the brutal murder of Daniel Pearl, that icon of Jewish pride. They will forever share a yahrzeit, and in many ways a legacy." 

That Mayor Koch died on Daniel Pearl's yahrzeit draws deserved attention to Pearl's legacy- and the Islamic supremacism which so threatens the West and Judaism. 

Photo courtesy Hiram 7

The late Christopher Hitchens was honored to present the 2010 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA.  He consoled Daniel's surviving parents Judea and Ruth Pearl from the last scene of Shakespeare's Macbeth, "Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier's debt.  He only lived until he was a man that which no sooner had his prowess confirmed.  In the unshrinking station where he stood.  But, like a man, he died.  Your cause of grief must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end."  

Mr. Hitchens then warned about anti-Semitism- particularly within Islam- as the precursor warning of fascism and tyranny. 

"Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny, fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilization- and has to fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college - the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe, today as I'm talking. And we can only expect this to get worse. And we must make sure that our own defenses are not neglected.

Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this pest, by its right name. To make unceasing resistance to it. Knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving, some of the time (at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it!"

Mayor Koch's public service  is remembered in this WABC TV News obituary:

In an interview conducted in 2007, Former Mayor Edward I. Koch reflected on his life and political career, and talked of how he would like to be remembered.


Asked by reporter Tim Weiner: "How do you want to be remembered?" Mayor Koch replied, "I want to be remembered as being a proud Jew who loved the people of the City of New York. And did his best to make their lives better."  

A documentary about his life opened just prior to his demise.  Glenn Whipp writes in the L.A. Times:

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died the same day a new documentary about his life and legacy opened in New York.

"Koch," which will open in Southern California theaters beginning March 1, offers evidence that the combative mayor had mellowed little in his later years. Filmmaker Neil Barsky conducted extensive interviews with Koch in his Manhattan apartment in 2010 and early 2011, where the former mayor, who ruled New York from 1978 to 1989, spoke of his controversial time in office, offering no restrictions on subject matter or time.

Here is the trailer:


The N.Y. Times reviews "Koch"



Asked by reporter Tim Weiner: "How do you want to be remembered?" Mayor Koch replied, "I want to be remembered as being a proud Jew who loved the people of the City of New York.  And did his best to make their lives better."

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) defended the Iraq War, opposed Islamism and anti-Semitism

Christopher Hitchens, author and public intellectual, died Friday, 15 December of pneumonia resulting from esophageal cancer in Houston, Texas.

Mr. Hitchens lived one day beyond the ceremony to end the Iraq war. He supported the liberating the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples from Saddam Hussein.

From Wikipedia:

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and he has held numerous public debates on the topic with George Galloway and Scott Ritter. Though he admits to the numerous failures of the war, and its high civilian casualties, he sticks to the position that deposing Saddam Hussein was a long-overdue responsibility of the United States, after decades of poor policy, and that holding free elections in Iraq has been a success not to be scoffed at. He argues that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, is a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should be the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.

An updated summary of his views on Iraq and the war on terror can be found in his memoirs Hitch 22. . . .

British politician George Galloway, founder of the socialist Respect Party, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil-for-Food programme, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true." Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

Journalist Eli Lake eulogizes Mr. Hitchens in the Daily Beast:

Mr. Hitchens never stopped saying and writing that the (Iraq) war was just and that American arms were needed to end the regime of Saddam Hussein. But Christopher did not arrive at this position simply because his old colleagues at the Nation Magazine did not. He came to support the Iraq war after befriending many Iraqis, and particularly Kurds, who told him about the horrors of that dictatorship. For Christopher, supporting the war was an expression of his anti-totalitarianism. He would later say that the war pitted the anti-totalitarian left against the anti-imperialist left.

Christopher Hitchens delivers 8th Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture: "Antisemitism is the common enemy of humanity, and has to be fought against tenaciously - most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic jihad"

Christopher Hitchens decries anti-Semitism in lecture at UCLA  
by Cynthia Lee March 04, 2010 in UCLA Newsroom

Christopher Hitchens appeared Wednesday, March 3rd, before a packed audience at UCLA to portray anti-Semitism as "the godfather of (all other forms of) racism" and "the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war."

Alternating between black humor, biting sarcasm and insightful analysis, Hitchens assumed the podium at Korn Convocation Hall to deliver the eighth annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA to an audience of more than 400 people, including Pearl's father, Prof. Judea Pearl, an emeritus professor of computer science at UCLA and president of a foundation formed to continue his son's mission of promoting cross-cultural understanding through journalism and music.

Daniel Pearl, a prominent Wall Street Journal reporter and the paper's South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. ...

Before Hitchens began his remarks, Judea Pearl explained that in the initial years following his son's death, the family had not wanted to dwell on the "negative, deranged mindset behind the ideology of his murderers," but instead had concentrated on the positive aspects of Daniel's legacy.

"But recently, we came to recognize that if we want to be true to our mission of rolling back the tsunami of hatred that is currently sweeping our planet, we must first map its undercurrents, analyze its anatomy and understand its circuitry in full scientific detail," Prof. Pearl said.

Prof. Pearl's Op/Ed at the time of last year's memorial was published in the Wall Street Journal:

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy? ...

The media have played a major role in handing terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television, for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.

Then came the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, the unrepentant killer who, in 1979, smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl with his rifle after killing her father before her eyes. Al Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs. ...

Danny's picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: "You did not die in vain."