Debate vs Hate?

[Richard]

Applies to a number of on-going issues.

Richard

Holocaust Remembrance Day
Kathy Young, RealClearPolitics, 30 Jan 2010

Wednesday's Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year commemorates the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, was marked by customary calls to combat anti-Semitism worldwide. Yet resisting bigotry is not as clear-cut an issue as it might seem at first glance, at a time when the very definition of anti-Semitism is shifting and constantly questioned. Where some see the cancer of Jew-hatred, others see the charge of anti-Semitism being used to stifle discussion of issues particularly in relation to Israel and the conflict in the Middle East.

Anti-Semitism is probably the world's oldest still-extant form of group hate. But where does legitimate opinion end and bigotry begin? Earlier this week, Israeli Information Minister Yuli Edelstein told the media that the recent United Nations report harshly critical of Israel's military operations in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 was a type of anti-Semitism despite the fact that its author, South African judge Richard Goldstone, is Jewish. Plenty of commentators have criticized the Goldstone report as tendentious, particularly in downplaying the Hamas fighters practice of hiding among civilians. But if the anti-Israel bias is real, is it based on anti-Semitism or on a left-leaning prejudice that favors Third World people over Western democracies and their allies? The latter seems more likely.

Yet, if it too simplistic and unfair automatically to equate critiques of Israeli policies with anti-Jewish prejudice, the truth remains that critiques of Israel often serve as a convenient smokescreen and vehicle for genuine bigotry. Attacks on the Israel Lobby have a tendency to descend into nasty insinuations about Jewish control of major American institutions and American Jews as disloyal citizens who always put Israel first.

A striking demonstration of this occurred earlier this month. Policy analyst Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIAs Bin Laden unit, has portrayed himself as a victim of the Israel Lobby. Scheuer charges that he was fired by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, DC think tank, over a caustic remark about Barack Obama doing the Tel Aviv two-step pandering to Israel backers during the 2008 campaign. Scheuer is also a vocal proponent of the view that the United States should end its support for Israel in order to improve relations with the Muslim world.

On January 4, Scheuer appeared on a C-SPAN program where a caller from Franklin, New York declared that he was sick and tired of all these Jews coming on C-SPAN and other stations and pushing us to go to war against our Muslim friends and went on to say, "They have way too much power in this country. People like Wolfowitz and Feith and the other neo-cons they jewed us into Iraq." In response, Scheuer not only failed to condemn this blatant bigotry but seemed to agree with the caller, saying that whether we want to be involved in fighting Israel's wars in the future is something that Americans should be able to talk about.

Elsewhere in the world, Polish Catholic bishop Tadeusz Pieronek marked Holocaust Remembrance Day with a statement to a Catholic website accusing Jews of using the Holocaust as a weapon of propaganda to obtain unjust advantages such as American support for Israel and to treat Palestinians like animals. And hostility to Israel in the Arab and Muslim world often manifests itself in updated versions of ancient, vicious libels against Jews. Thus, the medieval blood libel claiming that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes finds new life in a story peddled by government-run Iranian television station charging that Israeli doctors helping earthquake survivors in Haiti are really there to harvest human organs for sale.

There are, of course, spurious charges of anti-Semitism made for political advantage. Recently, conservative radio talk show king Rush Limbaugh accused Obama of appealing to anti-Semitic prejudice by going after Wall Street and the banks, since many people equate banker with Jew. Ironically, the Anti-Defamation League, which tends to focus on enemies on the right, then accused Limbaugh of anti-Semitism for these comments, compounding one groundless claim of bigotry with another equally groundless one.

Yet real anti-Jewish bigotry not only exists but seems to be on the rise. Traditional right-wing anti-Semitism, based on religious and cultural prejudice and on the perception of Jews as rootless and subversive, coexists and often overlaps with a new left-wing anti-Semitism that sees Jews as proxies for Israel, and Israel as a carrier of Western imperialism in the Middle East.

Combating these trends from the bully pulpit is important. Yet President Obamas recently appointed special envoy and head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, has been largely quiet, reserving her most outspoken criticism so far for the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, whom she blasted in December 2009 for his harsh remarks about pro-peace Jewish groups.

Fear of being labeled anti-Semitic should not stifle debate about Israeli policies or U.S. policy in the Middle East. But no debate should ever be allowed to become a cover or an excuse for hate and, in this particular debate, theres plenty of hate to go around.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ay_100101.html

[T-Rock]

Applies to a number of on-going issues.

It does and I think the following is an example of pure unadulterated anti-Semitic hate:

http://www.youtube.com/user/PalestinianWatch

Wonder where his bigoted philosophy originates from


Edited due to google censorship - below was the link to the original video
http://www.youtube.com/index?ytsessi...uMd3lcm651sq_8

[Richard]

IMO - a man full of either faith or hate is someone who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

Richard's $.02

[T-Rock]

IMO - a man full of either faith or hate is someone who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

So if only athiests ruled the world, then the world would be capable of clear, rational, realistic thought - Oh, I see

[Richard]

I didn't say that - although it is a concept upon which you and Ernest Hemingway seem to find agreement - however - it seems reasonable to me that such a view is not possible as experience has led me to believe the last god will only expire with the last man.

Richard's jaded $.02

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Broadsword2004

When Ronald Reagan got shot but didn't die, he viewed it that God had saved him specifically to defeat the Soviet Union and end the Cold War, and he did.

MOO, it is too soon to say that (a) President Reagan or the United States defeated the Soviet Union, or (b) that the Cold War is over.

Questions centering around (a) will not be resolved until researchers gain access to a wider array of archival sources.

In regards to (b), I think we are too soon to discount the influence of the remaining communist countries in Asia and the Americas as well as the enduring sentimentality for communism in Russia and parts of eastern Europe.

YMMV.

[Utah Bob]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

So if only athiests ruled the world, then the world would be capable of clear, rational, realistic thought - Oh, I see

Perhaps you missed the word "full", as in no room for anything else.

[akv]

If you as George Friedman believe there are no friends in geopolitics only shared interest. Israel though an ally, isn't as important to the US now, as during the Cold War. Also, since the last Arab Israeli war in 1973, they have become more self reliant in terms of defense, and we have cultivated relations with allied Muslim countries.

I wonder if this makes pro-Israeli groups more touchy about perceived bias?

[JacobGL]

Originally Posted by Richard

IMO - a man full of either faith or hate is someone who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

Richard's $.02

Amen.

[Sigaba]

In regards to the OP, an article from the on-line edition of the New York Times, available here may be of interest.

Lessons on Love, From a Rabbi Who Knows Hate and Forgiveness
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

Postscript Appended

The new rabbi of the Free Synagogue of Flushing began his Friday night sermon with a topic he knew well: hatred’s power, and its antidote.

The rabbi, Michael Weisser, had spoken earlier that day at a Queens mosque. He was warmly greeted by the imam who invited him there. But as he left the mosque, still wearing his tan kipa, the Jewish skullcap that resembles the one Muslims wear, a man driving by who had apparently mistaken him for a Muslim shouted that he should go back where he came from, Rabbi Weisser told the congregation.

“Hatred comes forth from some pre-existing prejudice,” he said, “and only when we create the need within ourselves to hate, do we then develop reasons to justify our hatred.”

Rabbi Weisser is the uncommon leader of an uncommon place, a soft-spoken man from Nebraska who has tangled with the Ku Klux Klan and is now trying to revitalize a small synagogue in the bustling heart of Queens.

The Free Synagogue, the oldest Reform Judaism synagogue in the borough, is a symbol of Flushing’s nearly forgotten past, when the area around Main Street was lined not with Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean restaurants and supermarkets, but with Jewish grocers, tailors and butcher shops.

Signs of that old neighborhood have all but disappeared. In the 1980s, Flushing’s Jewish population began steadily falling, making way for waves of immigrants who transformed the neighborhood into one of the most ethnically diverse in the country. Its last kosher delicatessen, Flushing Delight, on Union Street, shut its doors in 1995.

The Free Synagogue, which decades ago had several hundred members, now has only about 100. Its religious school closed a few years ago.

Yet the synagogue has held on, surviving for 91 years with a loyal core of longtime supporters. Many are elderly men and women, who come from around Queens to sing and pray beneath the stained-glass windows of the domed sanctuary.

Rabbi Weisser, 67, held his first service there in early September. It was a homecoming of sorts: In the 1970s, he studied at Hebrew Union College in Manhattan, where he received his certification as a cantor. He was ordained a rabbi years later, in 2001.

He is a study in contrasts, with a penchant both for meditation and for hitting the gym five times a week. As a young man, he spent a few years in prison for burglaries in New York and New Jersey. “I had a really troubled youth,” he said. “It helped me understand some of the troubles others are going through.”

That empathy taught him a powerful lesson about hatred — and brought him national attention.

In 1991, he was living in Lincoln, Neb., with his wife at the time, Julie Michael, and three of their five children. He was then the cantor and spiritual leader of the South Street Temple, the oldest Jewish congregation in Lincoln. One Sunday morning, a few days after they had moved into their new house, the phone rang.

The man on the other end of the line called Rabbi Weisser “Jew boy” and told him he would be sorry he had moved in. Two days later, a thick package of anti-black, anti-Semitic pamphlets arrived in the mail, including an unsigned card that read, “The KKK is watching you, scum.”

The messages, it turned out, were from Larry Trapp, the Grand Dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, who kept loaded weapons, pro-Hitler material and his Klan robe in his cramped Lincoln apartment. Then 42, Mr. Trapp was nearly blind and used a wheelchair to get around; both of his legs had been amputated because of diabetes.

In a 1992 interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trapp said he had wanted to scare Rabbi Weisser into moving out of Lincoln. “As the state leader, the Grand Dragon, I did more than my share of work because I wanted to build up the state of Nebraska into a state as hateful as North Carolina and Florida,” he said. “I spent a lot of money and went out of my way to instill fear.”

Rabbi Weisser, who suspected the person threatening him was Mr. Trapp, got his telephone number and started leaving messages on the answering machine. “I would say things like: ‘Larry, there’s a lot of love out there. You’re not getting any of it. Don’t you want some?’ And hang up,” he said. “And, ‘Larry, why do you love the Nazis so much? They’d have killed you first because you’re disabled.’ And hang up. I did it once a week.”

One day, Mr. Trapp answered. Ms. Michael, the rabbi’s wife, had told him to say something nice if he ever got Mr. Trapp on the line, and he followed her advice. “I said: ‘I heard you’re disabled. I thought you might need a ride to the grocery,’ ” Rabbi Weisser said.

Then, one night, Rabbi Weisser’s phone rang again. It was Mr. Trapp. “He said, quote-unquote — I’ll never forget it, it was like a chilling moment, in a good way — he said, ‘I want to get out of what I’m doing and I don’t know how,’ ” Rabbi Weisser said.

He and Ms. Michael drove to Mr. Trapp’s apartment that night. The three talked for hours, and a close friendship formed. The couple’s home became a kind of hospice for Mr. Trapp, who moved into one of their bedrooms as his health worsened, and Ms. Michael became Mr. Trapp’s caretaker and confidante.

Mr. Trapp eventually renounced the Klan, apologized to many of those he had threatened and converted to Judaism in Rabbi Weisser’s synagogue.

The relationship later inspired a 1995 book by Kathryn Watterson, “Not by the Sword: How the Love of a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman.”

It has become popular reading among members of the Free Synagogue, where Rabbi Weisser’s arrival has created new optimism and some new traditions. The rabbi started a meditation class on Tuesdays, and plans other new programs in hopes of attracting younger families to the synagogue.

“In Yiddish, there’s a word — mensch,” said Allan Goldberg, a longtime member and former president of the synagogue, describing a term for an honorable person. “He’s a mensch.”

Last Friday night, the topics of hatred and understanding took on a larger meaning, as the rabbi discussed the escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians. He told the congregation that God had taken clay from the four corners of the earth and breathed life into it to create humanity. “Our religion teaches that we’re all made of the same stuff,” he said.

Mr. Trapp, the former Klan leader, died in Rabbi Weisser’s Lincoln home in September 1992, less than a year after they met. The rabbi spoke at his funeral.

“People were taken by the idea that an act of kindness can make a change,” Rabbi Weisser said. “ ‘Need a ride to the grocery?’,” you know?”

Postscript: January 14, 2009
An article in some editions on Jan. 5 about Michael Weisser, the new rabbi at the Free Synagogue of Flushing, Queens, reported that the synagogue’s religious school closed some years ago. The article may have left the incorrect impression that the synagogue currently offers no religious instruction at all. It still provides preschool and family education classes on weekends, as well as preparation for bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs.