A student recently asked me about the connection between karate and integrity. As I understand it, integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is looking. Few karateka practice their art with integrity; instead, they drown in hypocrisy. I like to cite Malcolm Dorfman, the loudest mouth in all of karate Babylon, as the primary example. He has never been responsive to his overriding obligation to promote the beautiful and enduring values associated with karate training. Driven by limitless self-regard, he has never demonstrated the good judgment and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional karateka from amateurs. Two instances illustrate his abject vulgarity. In February 2019, he publicly criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, on Facebook:
“I cannot believe that this person is now the ‘darling’ of the Democrat Party. How low they have sunk to laud this socialist, anti-American, anti-Semite, anti-Israel, ignorance-personified, loudmouth. I am of the opinion that this smells of a Soros creation” (www.facebook.com/malcolm.dorfman; posted February 24 2018; retrieved March 6, 2019).
Dorfman is entitled to express his opinion but, as one who routinely claims to follow the budo code, he should be ultracareful about revealing the foulness of his mind. In a separate comment, directed at the accompanying close-up photograph of Ocasio-Cortez, he wrote ad hominem:
“While only a brain transplant can truly sort out this deviant of society, for an aesthetic improvement, she should definitely go to [a] cosmetic dentist to sort out those fangs. She needs him badly.”
All-pervasive North Korea-level acquiescence being the defining feature of any Dorfman post, his sycophants embraced his attack. Now, I have seen Dorfman’s feet and toenails up close—they must be among the ghastliest sights in the karate world. He needs a good podiatrist to sort them out. In attacking a gifted and promising young politician in such a vulgar fashion, he illuminated how undignified, repugnant, and unprincipled he is—not a beacon of budo.
He gave us yet another typically graceless Facebook post in March 2018 following the death of the theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking. I assume readers are familiar with Hawking’s phenomenal stature. Gradually paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease over the decades, he was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life, eventually losing his speech and having to communicate through a speech-generating device. Reacting to Hawking’s death, the feculent Dorfman wrote:
“What is the word one should use to describe a supporter of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions of Israel), yet to function, needs and uses a computer-based communications system which runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team? Sadly, brilliance does not offset HYPOCRISY” (www.facebook.com/malcolm.dorfman; posted March 15, 2018; retrieved February 7, 2019).
If Dorfman can label Professor Hawking a hypocrite, then I reciprocate by illustrating his own startling hypocrisy. In 1976, he appeared in Karate Olympiad (retitled Kill or Be Killed in the United States in 1980 to capitalize on the popularity of American genre films). This silly film’s plot involved a famous martial artist who travels to the Namib Desert for what he thinks is an Olympic-style competition but is actually a trap set by Baron von Rudloff, an ex-Nazi general still bitter over the humiliating defeat of his martial arts team at the 1936 Summer Olympics.
The relevance to Dorfman is his participation in a film with a Nazi theme and filled with direct references to Adolf Hitler and the swastika. This is no fabrication. Watch the film on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVHFcQlOiM0. Hitler used the 1936 Games to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy and antisemitism, and the official Nazi Party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, strongly advocated that Jews be banned from the Games.
Dorfman evidently ignored this when he agreed to participate in the film, which no good little Israel-loving Zionist Jew would have done. What else but his venal hypocrisy and desperate need for self-validation could explain his vile failure to do the right thing by taking a principled stand against overt glamorization of Nazism?