Thomas Wictor

I was sent a comment that a Jewish man wrote about my post “The utter depravity of Palestinian culture.” I’ll get to the comment in a minute. But for ten years I was a member of an utterly depraved culture. After I describe it to you, I want those of you who think it’s “racist” to criticize Palestinian culture to explain to me why it isn’t racist to criticize the culture to which I belonged.

Here’s the comment I was sent.

This is one of the most racist and offensive links I’ve ever clicked on Facebook. If you have any respect, please remove this trash.

Palestinians celebrated the murder of five Israelis killed with knives, a gun, and a meat cleaver.

But this Jewish man was more upset at my words than at the murder of five humans and the jolly triumphalism that followed.

Pointing out the rancid dysfunctions of a culture is not racism. What is racist is the condescension and paternalism expressed toward people simply because they have darker skins. Maybe my clarity comes from having a Mexican mommy.

I’m completely colorblind. There are physical differences between the races—which we’re not supposed to talk about—but mentally and morally nothing separates us. What’s bitterly ironic about Jewish anger over my post is that it’s precisely the way Hitler viewed the world.

In formulating their ideology of race, Hitler and the Nazis drew upon the ideas of the German social Darwinists of the late 19th century. Like the social Darwinists before them, the Nazis believed that human beings could be classified collectively as “races,” with each race bearing distinctive characteristics that had been passed on genetically since the first appearance of humans in prehistoric times. These inherited characteristics related not only to outward appearance and physical structure, but also shaped internal mental life, ways of thinking, creative and organizational abilities, intelligence, taste and appreciation of culture, physical strength, and military prowess.

The people who think my post is “racist trash” have accepted Nazi ideology. You believe that Palestinians are defined by their culture and ethnicity. In your minds these traits are innate.

Fine. I’m not one of you.

The most depraved culture I’ve experienced

From 1992 to 2002 I was a music journalist, nine of those years spent in Los Angeles. I wrote a book about it.

In 1995 I met “Roger” and “Dolores,” my guides in the depraved culture of the Los Angeles entertainment world.

Photocollage by Tim Wictor.

I was such a different person in 1995 that I can’t claim to be the same individual anymore. What changed me was the suicide of my best friend in 2001, being diagnosed with Meniere’s disease in 2011, my parents’ extremely hideous deaths in 2013, being robbed of my life’s savings by Mike Albee and Lura Dold in 2013 and 2014, and then discovering a terrible secret after my parents died.

When I met Roger and Dolores, I wasn’t able to perceive that they enjoyed my company for one reason only: I couldn’t hide my horrified reactions to life in the LA entertainment scene. It became a game of exposing me to greater and greater depravity, to see how far I’d let them go.

You need to understand that EVERYBODY in the LA entertainment milieu is depraved. I knew about the accusations against Bill Cosby nearly twenty years ago. And what you’ve heard about him is nothing compared to what I was told about him.

But I was told such things about EVERYBODY. A beloved comedian is a serial wife batterer whose spouse had to go to a shelter with their four children. He got away with it because EVERYBODY gets away with EVERYTHING in Los Angeles.

I’m still shocked that Phil Specter was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of Lana Clarkson.

We all knew that Spector was a gun nut. He’d pulled a gun on John Lennon during a recording session. Women went home with him and performed sexual acts on him in the hopes that he’d help their careers. He’d always put his gun in their mouths. One night he finally lived out his fantasy and pulled the trigger.

I know an actress who crashed her car into someone—breaking the woman’s arm—and then fled the scene. The cops didn’t go looking for her until she’d had a chance to sober up. No charges were filed, and the case was settled out of court.

Lindsay Lohan carjacked an SUV, abducted three men, ran over someone’s foot, and chased her assistant’s mother for five miles.

She ran red lights and drove so fast and recklessly that her passengers screamed at her that she’d be arrested.

“I’m a celebrity,” she said. “I can do whatever the f*** I want.”

And she was right! Although the chase ended in the Santa Monica Police Department parking lot, charges were dismissed after Lohan’s insurance companies paid off everyone involved.

These are the cases you know about. I know about the pedophile rings comprised of people whose names you know. You’ve heard of the “casting couch”? It never went away. For women to get anywhere in Hollywood, they have to make themselves available to men who deliberately don’t bathe in order to show how powerful they are.

“You have to go to bed with me even though I stink! Ha-ha!”

At every party I went to—and I can’t count the number—people told three kinds of jokes: black jokes, gay jokes, and Jew jokes. I’ve never met people more obsessed with Jews. And they routinely use whatever pejorative you can imagine. It’s always 1933 in Hollywood.

One day I went to Roger and Dolores’s house and met a household-name actress. After I was introduced to her, she continued her story of a run-in she had with a “Jewess.” I’d never actually heard that word spoken aloud. She also used the term “oven dodger.”

All I can say to Jews who support the ideals piously intoned by Hollywood: You should hear what they say about you behind your back.

The entire culture is about degradation. It’s about the hatred of women, non-Caucasians, and Jews. It’s about polluting, destroying all standards, corrupting innocence, and celebrating debauchery.

This is the ideal.

I know her story, and I know how her life will end. In a recent radio interview, she sounded like a chain-smoking barfly in her sixties. Google “celebrities with terrible personal hygiene,” and you’ll see what I endured for ten years. They loved being dirty, crude, selfish, bigoted libertines who spent every second of their lives corroding themselves and trying to harm others.

Now, those of you whose lips are clamped in a grim little line of outrage, tell me why it’s okay for me to criticize this culture but not Palestinian culture? Hollywood doesn’t produce mass-murdering terrorists.

The Palestinians could use some Hollywood expertise in their movies. This is just pitiful. Hamas says it shows the destruction of an Israeli tank.

In reality it’s just video of two Israeli tanks firing their main guns.

The first tank fires.

The tank round is caught in flight.

The second tank fires.

The round takes some of the smoke and dust with it.

The smoke and dust dissipate.

Here’s what happens when a tank is actually destroyed by a projectile. The ammunition “cooks off.”

That was in Syria, where the army has no skill whatsoever. Tanks in an urban environment must be protected by dismounted infantrymen to engage enemies armed with antitank weapons. Miraculously, the tank commander was ejected and ran away.

While I oppose everything Bashar al-Assad does, I hope that Syrian man lived. His survival was a billion-to-one shot. It literally may never have happened before.

Save your outrage for things like war and terrorism, not words written by someone who has no power or influence.