Exile--another killer goes free

a review of Richard North Patterson's book, Exile

by Steve Lewis

I've always had a mild love/hate reaction to author Richard North Patterson's books. Patterson is another one of the lawyers-turned-authors but unlike the others Patterson has moved into political thrillers from the inside, as an upwardly mobile political climber himself. Using well-written but still basically sycophantic odes to political leaders whom he continually pats on the back for their moral anguish at making the tough decisions, Richard North Patterson conveniently forgets these political rascals are the same ones that have dragged America onto the verge of another world war, this time with all of Islam.

Very much like one of his morally challenged main characters Richard himself has advanced in a calculated trajectory for higher public recognition than his work really deserves. From courtroom dramas to heading Common Cause and friendships with political shakers and movers at the highest levels of government, Richard has done all right for himself if not for political truth which is why I am writing this criticism after reading “Exile”, Richard North Patterson's thriller about an assassination of an Israeli Prime Minister on U.S. Soil.

My beef with Mr. Patterson's viewpoint as expressed in by his main character in Exile, a high-profile secular Jewish lawyer with political ambitions, is that he uses a veneer of ethical issues in his books without ever delving into the deeper morality of the political events he's now using as topics for creating popular novels, each well-written, no doubt about that, but also ones which politicians will read and move our ambitious lawyer's career ever forward. Scoping out the political landscape in America post-9-11 and seeing which way the political wind is blowing, Richard North Patterson has in his political wisdom allied himself to the Israeli/Jewish lobbies immense political power in America, especially in Washington D.C., the turf the main characters in Mr. Patterson's later books are all headed towards.

I don't like liberal hypocrisy that masks a political agenda that ends up killing innocent people, and I don't like Zionism and unfortunately for Richard North Patterson, I find he's mixed the two together in “Exile”. In a compelling read Exile makes his political deception all that much more irritating for this American who knows as one, like Richard, who's been there, but unlike Richard North Patterson, has come away with the only moral conclusion possible: Israel is a complete abomination as a supposedly religious state and total hypocrisy as a “democracy”. For Arabs in Israel and for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israelis are another fascist oppressor in the same order now as Nazis and South Afrikaaners in their racist treatment of Palestinian Arabs, and like them, being Europeans and foreign invaders, Israelis enjoy Western nation support—at least until they go too far in the eyes of the world in fascist acts of violence towards their victims.

Exile is good for getting glimpses of what life is like for Palestinians living under the jackboot of Israel's occupation but one has to wonder where on earth Richard's ethics have disappeared to when his main character sees the appalling conditions most Palestinians are living under and yet sides with their oppressors, laying out the oppressor's false religious claims to their victim's land as if these were believable documents shoring up a contentious claim in court. No attempt is ever made by Mr. Patterson to question the logic of a religious mindset that cares nothing for historical truth, international laws, ecology, or morality when these things interfere with the Cult's religious objective of taking another people's land away from them and claiming it for themselves alone.

Zionism cares not about international laws that protect people from foreign invasion. Zionism cares not about racism in their doctrines that exclude non-Jews from land ownership and major decision-making in Israel. Zionism cares not about lying about history of Jews, covering up the Khazar Jewish conversion even today in order to sell the world the Jewish homeland concept of Israel. A tiny country in the Near East, Palestine, becomes the focus of Jewish immigration and the land soon is filled with millions of European and American Jews posing as “Semites”. Ecology be damned if it counters “Eretz Yisrael” as Israelis fill Palestine with European and American Jews and thus stack the “Right of Return” deck in their favor to exclude that right from the indigenous population. All this happens because the West turns a blind moral eye on what Jews do in Israel. Now Richard North Patterson's book aids the Zionist cause along its road to perdition.

Patterson dedicated Exile to Alan Dershowitz with the same false moral window dressing Dershowitz used defending O.J. Simpson, the same ethically-challenged rationale as all lawyers use, to defend the morally indefensible by hired intellectual guns who make money, large amounts of it, off of a very faulty criminal justice system where money spent on lawyers fees often decides justice or its lack. O.J. goes free in America and so does Israel in Patterson's book, but both are guilty when facts are objectively presented instead of a lawyer's propaganda to sell his case.