August 17, 2006 Issue                                       

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Opinion

A Better Bureaucracy

Chestnut Hill has a bad reputation.

Word about Chestnut Hill, from the café tables at Starbucks to the gray rooms of City Hall, is that it is a tough place to do business. Whether you’re a contractor working on a home addition, a businessman looking to open a new restaurant or just a homeowner who wants to put up a fence, knowledgeable people look at you and shake their heads in a show of empathetic dismay, pat you on the shoulder and say something positively discouraging like, “Good luck with that.”

Business and community leaders hate to hear about this reputation. And for good reason. A lot of what makes Chestnut Hill difficult for business is exactly what makes it a neighborhood a lot of people want to call home.

Still, the reputation persists. And because of it, there is the chance that Chestnut Hill is missing out on some businesses and development that most of us do want. The zoning review process of the Chestnut Hill Community Association is responsible for most of that reputation. That process, currently performed by the Development Review Committee, The Land Use Planning and Zoning Committee, the Traffic, Transportation and Parking Committee, can take months of time and often leaves applicants frustrated by numerous and long meetings. Board member Susan Pizzano, who as Vice President of the Physical Division is responsible for the zoning committees, offered a proposal to streamline the association’s zoning process (see story, page 8) aimed at curbing that frustration.

Pizzano’s proposal will seem to most to be a long time coming. Her idea of eliminating the Development Review Committee in favor a an advisory committee will bring important people into the process and do away with needless duplication. Many of the members of the Development Review Committee are already members of Land Use Planning and Zoning. Susan’s idea of giving Land Use Planning and Zoning one good look at a proposal to prevent applicants from seeing the same people three times will definitely make the CHCA more business friendly, and in many cases of home improvement, more neighbor friendly. Right?

Larry McEwan, the Development Review Committee’s co-chair cautions that snipping his committee out of the equation could cause more confusion. The DRC, he says, acts as a clearinghouse for applicants who often don’t have any of the right materials to show the association’s zoning committees in the first place. If these applicants skipped the DRC, they still might have to attend multiple meetings as they are sent away with instructions to produce better drawings or to amend certain plans prior to review. The responsibility for making sure an applicant appears at a meeting with everything he or she needs will fall to one person.

“It’s going to require the Vice President of the Physical Division to be someone with design expertise and a firm grasp on zoning,” he said.

McEwan’s concerns are good ones; certainly not concerns that should prevent the association from making a smart move to streamline its zoning review process. Perhaps a firm set of standards can be established so that every applicant knows what is required before a meeting. If he or she is unprepared, it’s not the fault of the association that he or she has to come back again.

The CHCA has a chance to change its reputation a little bit for the better. Pizzano’s proposal is a good place to start.

Pete Mazzaccaro

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With Israel, peaceful solutions ignore ugly truth
by JIM FOSTER

Having been born during the early days of the Second World War, I learned about it, the reasons why it was fought, and the steps the victors took to prevent it from ever happening again. A key element in that learning process was the acclaim given the creation of the United Nations; the guarantee that the sacrifices of 400,000 Americans and nearly five years of war again on foreign soil would not be repeated.

Less concentration on the detailed aspects of two other major postwar events was part of that condensed review of the immediate past, and those were the Nuremberg Trials and the massive movement of Jewish refugees to the newly expanded state of Israel. Sure, I remember news regarding the desperate numbers arriving in the Middle East and the controversy that started almost immediately, leading to cultural and ethnic clashes in what was then a British protectorate. It took me years to understand why those folks did not simply return to the towns and cities they were originally from, how Nuremberg figured in, and the almost accidental way the State of Israel was originally created, but given the current situation it is worth a look back.

Few recall the Balfour Declaration, an almost incidental World War I postscript by the British Foreign Secretary during the war that was added to the reshuffling and renaming of the entire Middle East by the victorious British and French after President Wilson left them to their own devices. Yielding to pressure from a valued Austrian-turned-British-citizen who helped the British during the war, the British Foreign Secretary Balfour granted, with the outline drawn on a map, the long-desired request of the then Zionist movement; a small sector of land to be designated as the Jewish homeland. Once done, all those of Jewish ancestry would have free access to this territory, and to the true believers this was the opportunity of a lifetime. However, very few came to this largely desolate desert area and the few who did lived in harmony with the Arab settlements in a sector largely ignored by the world’s major powers now focused on rebuilding their own war-torn world. The British Government did not encourage large-scale emigration and limited it through quotas.

Fast forward to post World War II (late 1945-46) and we find a world teeming with refugees, many being Jews who had been rounded up from all parts of Europe under Hitler’s “Final Solution” but escaped extermination. This is the point where a revised version of the postwar history we all learned needs to be told.

Anti-Semitism, and its working tool, Nazism, was not just the concentrated political arm that took control of Germany and forced its policies on the rest of Europe entirely by expansionist military tactics only after 1939. Far from it. Nazism, and much of what it espoused, was welcomed in much of Europe during its development in the late twenties, and it made serious inroads 1932. Half of France supported it, Austria welcomed it, Nazi-like political leaders, such as Quisling in Norway, embraced it, and much of the rest of Europe aligned with it, as the economic and political miracle that made its leader, Hitler, Time Magazine’s 1936 “Man of the Year.” Let us never forget that large segments of our society also supported Nazi Germany and welcomed its place as a major world power; intentionally looking away from the rampant racism, anti-Semitism and human rights abuses.

When the war was over the victorious powers were faced with a dilemma of substantial proportions. The ugly secret that no one wanted to telegraph to the world was that most of those Jewish refugees were turned in to the Nazis by Europeans of all nationalities in all of the occupied countries. Yes, a few were hidden and protected, but the vast majority were outed and the numbers of Nazi collaborators far outweighed a number acceptable to the postwar legal process of prosecuting war criminals and co-conspirators. The military and civilian tribunals designated to bring justice knew the negative political consequences of trying all those in every town who sold out and bringing the survivors home would pre-empt that process if true justice was to be done. Remember, we justified two wars to our citizens as “Saving the world for Democracy.” That “saving” was about to become a very costly and protracted process. At the same time, we needed to find another way to deal with the Jewish refugees who would somehow slide under the radar as much as possible. The last thing they wanted to do was to bring them all home immediately and be faced with holding mini-Nurembergs all over Europe. That could last 25 years, at least. The British-created Jewish homeland was one answer. After all, Britain was one of the victorious allies and the least they could do was create a government there that could ease the population shift and that is exactly what happened — they did the very least they could.

The remedy: Hold a massive public trial with the best legal minds of the world participating. Put the most visible figures of the despotic regimes on public trial, follow that up with second and third-tier collaborators, taking as long as possible to get the job done, very least they could — and when the heat was turned up in clashes between the existing Arab culture and the Jews arriving daily in massive numbers, Britain took down its flag and walked away. Now the chaos was a world problem and one of the first for the newly-established United Nations.

The decision was wracked with controversy from the very outset. The British were far from enthusiastic. Even the most respected leaders in some circles foresaw never-ending problems. Apparently even George Marshall, military and post-war architect of the peace was said to have told Harry Truman he would not vote for him in 1948 if he supported the creating of the State of Israel. We can debate after-the-fact, but at the time it was a choice between rekindling anti-Semitism in courtrooms throughout Europe and dealing with an Arab vs. Jewish settler problem. Frankly, I do not know of any other way world reconstruction could have gotten moving without exposing the very ugly underbelly of world anti-Semitism that led to the mechanized slaughter of six million. The gamble was that a rapidly rebuilt and progressive world would raise living standards, put the past quickly behind and possibly eradicate old-world prejudices and hatred. Well-intentioned as they were, it seems the unintended consequences are still with us.

Tell me I am wrong if you don’t recognize the above pattern in the expanding world terror movement that advertises its dedication to the slaughter of an even larger group. That movement now has a stronghold in many countries, has captured the dependent classes in many others and now has commandeered much of the rest of the world into looking past their top-down totalitarian, fanatical religious leadership that is unified in their determination to end democracy as we know it. Why are those dedicated world peace human rights demonstrators of the 1960s and ‘70s now willing to give a pass to every 8th Century restrictive culture with no gender equality, voting rights, or human rights — even to the point of looking the other way as they make suicide bombing one of the first-taught principles in their educational systems. If this is not a parallel to those who looked the other way when Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin first appeared because they could not be bothered to stop them early, I do not know what is.

Israel has become the scapegoat for the world’s phony liberals who have rationalized themselves into appeasers with the UN as their temple. The consequence of that organization, built with all the promise of learning from the past, is now a dismal failure. This academic debating society has sold out millions of the world’s most dependent citizens and its policies are now the mental escape hatch for those who would never fire a shot to stop a despot if they could talk about it long enough until the press stops asking why.

Ninety million world citizens died from non-natural causes in the 20th century, most because good men did nothing when they could, and then were forced to aid in the goals of the despotic maniacs. Not recognizing the pervasive undercurrent of world terrorism that values no human life, including their own, is to revisit those days.

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