Stacey A. Ward ~ No McCain!'s Blog
•
Religion
A Yom Kippur Letter to Joe Lieberman's Rabbis: Please Ask Him...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/a-yom-kippur-le...
Jesse Kornbluth
Posted October 9, 2008 | 11:30 AM (EST)
A Yom Kippur Letter to Joe Lieberman's Rabbis: Joe Is McCain's Best Jewish Friend. Please Ask Him To Beg McCain to Stop Encouraging Hate
Yom Kippur, 5769
New York City
Rabbi Daniel Cohen
Congregation Agudath Sholom
Stamford, Connecticut
Rabbi Barry Freundel
Kesher Israel Congregation
Washington, D.C.
Dear Rabbis Cohen and Freundel,
Please forgive the presumption -- not only don't we know one another, I'm the kind of "cultural Jew" who makes even Reform Rabbis weep.
But as far as I can tell, now that Joe Lieberman and his family have moved from New Haven to Stamford, you, Rabbi Cohen, are his primary Rabbi in Connecticut. And you, Rabbi Freundel, lead the congregation where Sen. Lieberman worships in Washington.
Sen. McCain loves Joe Lieberman -- he wanted him as his running mate, if press reports are accurate.
Sen. McCain listens to Joe Lieberman.
Sen. Lieberman is, if you will, John McCain's rabbi.
So I thought I would write to you and ask you, as Sen. Lieberman's rabbis, to talk to Sen. Lieberman about the hatred that the McCain-Palin campaign is encouraging --- and the special understanding we Jews have of how that hatred plays out.
Why this public forum? Because I feel this is an urgent moment for American Jews. And because, in this moment, the men who can perhaps do the most to help us all -- Jews, Gentiles and Muslims alike -- should be identified and challenged to step up and do the right thing.
And make no mistake: Your voices do matter. If Joe Lieberman is the devout Jew he professes to be, you two are the most influential voices he can hear. He'd never listen to me. But to you -- how can he turn away?
I often think about Kristallnacht http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht , that terrible night in Germany when it became unmistakably clear what the Nazis intended for the Jews. Almost a hundred Jews murdered, tens of thousands deported, windows smashed, businesses seized -- and hundreds of synagogues burned. Quite the "November surprise," if you will. But even after this horrific orgy of violence in 1938, there were many German Jews who didn't get it, who thought they were safe, who thought this was where it ended.
Now we know better. We say "Never again." But look around you, gentlemen. History does repeat, and in this case, with spooky echoes of Germany's darkest decade. A bad economy. A search for someone who can be dehumanized and blamed. The cries for "justice". And then....?
How would we recognize Kristallnacht if it happened today?
My fear: It's on the horizon, and coming closer every day.
Today "The Other" is Barack Obama. At a McCain-Palin rally the other day, there was a cry from a yahoo in the crowd: "Off with his head!" http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/08/1517943.aspx John McCain and Sarah Palin have not condemned that man. Indeed, they promise to ratchet up their "questions" about Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. At this point, it seems, they'd find nothing upsetting if the audiences at their rallies showed up with torches and pitchforks.
Jews, above all others, should fear this kind of hate speech. It may start with the demonization of one black man. Then it will move on to greedy Wall Streeters and "Jewish bankers" and a "liberal media" owned and controlled by Jews. [It's already happening: The Anti-Defamation League http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Internet_75/5366_75.htm reports "a dramatic upsurge in anti-Semitic statements" on financial message boards on the Web. ] And then -- it sounds crazy, but it sounded crazy to many Jews in Germany -- the mob will come for us. Because that's where this goes. It's where it always goes. No matter where it starts, it ends with the Jews -- we're the ultimate "Other."
On your synagogue's web site, Rabbi Cohen, I note that you have a large family. Six daughters? Mazel tov. We have only one, but she is as precious to us as your girls are to you and your wife, and the thought of having her wrenched from my hand at some 21st century equivalent of a railroad freight yard -- it wakes me in the night.
I know I am asking a hard thing of you -- to confront Joe Lieberman and ask him to talk to John McCain, and, if McCain won't stop this madness, to call upon Sen. Lieberman to condemn his friend.
But maybe if I make this request both public and personal -- maybe if I invoke the images of Germany, just seven decades ago -- and ask that you do what you can to keep our children from harm, you will see how crucial this moment is to each and every Jew. And how much power you have to help us, all of us, who dare to hope for better from this country but find ourselves, in the middle of the night, awake and terrified.
A healthy and productive New Year to you and yours.
Jesse Kornbluth
Jesse Kornbluth
Posted October 9, 2008 | 11:30 AM (EST)
A Yom Kippur Letter to Joe Lieberman's Rabbis: Joe Is McCain's Best Jewish Friend. Please Ask Him To Beg McCain to Stop Encouraging Hate
Yom Kippur, 5769
New York City
Rabbi Daniel Cohen
Congregation Agudath Sholom
Stamford, Connecticut
Rabbi Barry Freundel
Kesher Israel Congregation
Washington, D.C.
Dear Rabbis Cohen and Freundel,
Please forgive the presumption -- not only don't we know one another, I'm the kind of "cultural Jew" who makes even Reform Rabbis weep.
But as far as I can tell, now that Joe Lieberman and his family have moved from New Haven to Stamford, you, Rabbi Cohen, are his primary Rabbi in Connecticut. And you, Rabbi Freundel, lead the congregation where Sen. Lieberman worships in Washington.
Sen. McCain loves Joe Lieberman -- he wanted him as his running mate, if press reports are accurate.
Sen. McCain listens to Joe Lieberman.
Sen. Lieberman is, if you will, John McCain's rabbi.
So I thought I would write to you and ask you, as Sen. Lieberman's rabbis, to talk to Sen. Lieberman about the hatred that the McCain-Palin campaign is encouraging --- and the special understanding we Jews have of how that hatred plays out.
Why this public forum? Because I feel this is an urgent moment for American Jews. And because, in this moment, the men who can perhaps do the most to help us all -- Jews, Gentiles and Muslims alike -- should be identified and challenged to step up and do the right thing.
And make no mistake: Your voices do matter. If Joe Lieberman is the devout Jew he professes to be, you two are the most influential voices he can hear. He'd never listen to me. But to you -- how can he turn away?
I often think about Kristallnacht http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht , that terrible night in Germany when it became unmistakably clear what the Nazis intended for the Jews. Almost a hundred Jews murdered, tens of thousands deported, windows smashed, businesses seized -- and hundreds of synagogues burned. Quite the "November surprise," if you will. But even after this horrific orgy of violence in 1938, there were many German Jews who didn't get it, who thought they were safe, who thought this was where it ended.
Now we know better. We say "Never again." But look around you, gentlemen. History does repeat, and in this case, with spooky echoes of Germany's darkest decade. A bad economy. A search for someone who can be dehumanized and blamed. The cries for "justice". And then....?
How would we recognize Kristallnacht if it happened today?
My fear: It's on the horizon, and coming closer every day.
Today "The Other" is Barack Obama. At a McCain-Palin rally the other day, there was a cry from a yahoo in the crowd: "Off with his head!" http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/08/1517943.aspx John McCain and Sarah Palin have not condemned that man. Indeed, they promise to ratchet up their "questions" about Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. At this point, it seems, they'd find nothing upsetting if the audiences at their rallies showed up with torches and pitchforks.
Jews, above all others, should fear this kind of hate speech. It may start with the demonization of one black man. Then it will move on to greedy Wall Streeters and "Jewish bankers" and a "liberal media" owned and controlled by Jews. [It's already happening: The Anti-Defamation League http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Internet_75/5366_75.htm reports "a dramatic upsurge in anti-Semitic statements" on financial message boards on the Web. ] And then -- it sounds crazy, but it sounded crazy to many Jews in Germany -- the mob will come for us. Because that's where this goes. It's where it always goes. No matter where it starts, it ends with the Jews -- we're the ultimate "Other."
On your synagogue's web site, Rabbi Cohen, I note that you have a large family. Six daughters? Mazel tov. We have only one, but she is as precious to us as your girls are to you and your wife, and the thought of having her wrenched from my hand at some 21st century equivalent of a railroad freight yard -- it wakes me in the night.
I know I am asking a hard thing of you -- to confront Joe Lieberman and ask him to talk to John McCain, and, if McCain won't stop this madness, to call upon Sen. Lieberman to condemn his friend.
But maybe if I make this request both public and personal -- maybe if I invoke the images of Germany, just seven decades ago -- and ask that you do what you can to keep our children from harm, you will see how crucial this moment is to each and every Jew. And how much power you have to help us, all of us, who dare to hope for better from this country but find ourselves, in the middle of the night, awake and terrified.
A healthy and productive New Year to you and yours.
Jesse Kornbluth
A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF FORGIVING AND REPENTANCE
A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner
A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF FORGIVING AND REPENTANCE
You Don't Have to be Jewish to Use these Next Days to Seek Forgiveness and to Forgive Others:
(The ten days of Repentance that Jews observe this year (2008 secular, 5769 Jewish calendar) from the eve of Rosh Hashanah Sept. 29thh to the end of Yom Kippur at nightfall October 9th can be used by anyone, including atheists and people from any and every religion, to focus on this spiritual practice-or any other time in the year that works best for you. Muslims may also find this of value as they complete the Ramadan season. The practices are useful for atheists and agnostics and skeptics of all sorts--you don't have to believe in God to try these practices.)
Practice 1: Repentance
Carefully review your life, acknowledge to yourself who you have hurt and where your life has gone astray from your own highest ideals. Find a place where you can be safely alone, and then say outloud who and how you've hurt others and how you've hurt yourself. In the case of others, go to them and say clearly what you've done and ask for forgiveness. Do not mitigate or "explain"-just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness.
To assist you in this process, download the High Holiday Workbook 5769 called "America Needs Repentance" at www.Beyttikkun.org. (click on the picture of the workbook when you get to www.beyttikkun.org) Or, on some computers it might be possible to simply click here. This supplement can provide you with more detailed ways to make this Repentance work effectively.
We do not start from the assumption that anyone has become evil. Rather, we vision any 'sins' as "missing the mark." We are born pure and with the best of intensions to be the highest possible spiritual being we can be, as though we were an arrow being shot straight toward God to connect more fully, yet at various points in our lives the arrow gets slightly off track and misses the mark. Repentance is really about a mid-course adjustment to get back on trace.
Practice 2: Forgiveness
Every night before going to sleep or every morning before engaging in your various tasks, projects or interactions with others, review your life, recall who you feel has hurt or betrayed you and toward whom you are still holding resentment or anger. Then, find a place to say this out loud:
MEDITATION OR PRAYER OF FORGIVENESS
YOU, my ETERNAL FRIEND, YHVH, THE POWER OF TRANSFORMATION AND HEALING IN THE UNIVERSE, WITNESS now that I forgive anyone who hurt or upset me or who offended me by
- damaging my body, my property, my reputation, hurting my feelings, shaming me, undermining my friendships or hurting my income or scaring me or making me angry
-
- or damaging people that I love-
whether by accident or purposely-- with words, deeds, thoughts or attitudes.
I think particularly of……fill in here anyone in your life who may have done some of the above).
I forgive (name each person) and every person who has hurt or upset me, whether or not I can remember them at this moment.
May no one be punished because of me.
May no one suffer from karmic consequences for hurting or upsetting me.
Help me, Eternal Friend, to keep from offending You and others.
Help me to be thoughtful and not commit outrage by doing what is evil in Your eyes.
Whatever sins I have committed, blot out, please, in Your abundant kindness, and spare me suffering or harmful illnesses.
Help me become aware of the ways I may have unintentionally or intentionally hurt others,
- and please give me guidance and strength to rectify those hurts--- and to develop the sensitivity to not continue acting in a hurtful way.
Let me forgive others,
- let me forgive myself--but also let me change in ways that make it easy for me to avoid paths of hurtfulness to others.
I seek peace, let me BE peace.
I seek justice, let me be just.
I seek a world of kindness, let me be kind.
I seek a world of generosity, let me be generous with all that I have and to everyone I encounter in my life and to those whom I do not encounter but who need my help..
I seek a world of sharing, let me share all that I have.
I seek a world of giving, let me be giving to all around me.
I seek a world of love-- let me be loving beyond all reason,
beyond all normal expectation, beyond all societal frameworks that tell me how much love is "normal,"
- beyond all fear that giving too much love will leave me with too little.
And let me be open, aware, sensitive and receptive to all the love that is already coming to me, from:
- the love of people I know, -
- the love that is part of the human condition,
- the accumulated love of past generations that flows through and is embodied in the language, music, agriculture & recipes for cooking or preparing food, technology, literature, religions, agriculture, and family heritages that have been passed on to me and to us.
Let me pass that love on to the next generations in an even fuller and more conscious way.
Source of goodness and love in the universe, let me be alive to all the goodness that surrounds me.
And let that awareness of the goodness and love of the universe be my shield and protector.
Hear the words of my mouth and may the meditations of my heart find acceptance before You, Eternal Friend, who protects and frees me.
Amen.
Composed by Rabbi Michael Lerner based on the previous writing of Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi. If you wish us help to spread the consciousness represented in this prayer, please join our Interfaith organization The Network of Spiritual Progressives (which is also open to atheists and agnostics who don't relate to organized religion but who do acknowledge a spiritual dimension to life and reality). Please join us at www.spiritualprogressives.org or by calling 510 644 1200 or by emailing pete@tikkun.org or RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org. And please help us build this movement. If you live in the Bay Area, you may also wish to join Beyt Tikkun synagogue or come to some of our Torah studies (you don't have to be Jewish to do so). Info at www.BeytTikkun.org.
If you wish to be in direct contact with Rabbi Lerner, send an email to RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org (you will have to fill out a short form from "Spam Arrest" which they'll send to you, and then your message will be received). Rabbi Lerner does not consult the email from Monday night till Wednesday night of this week, since he is observing Rosh Hashanah. In general, he reads any personal letter labeled "personal" in the subject matter, but may not be able to respond to each note--please forgive him for that, but as he is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun, editor of Tikkun magazine, and chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives he has more than full plate, and can't always respond to requests, but will always read and learn from your correspondence.
Please feel free to send this spiritual practice to everyone you know! And please direct them to our website www.spiritualprogressives.org
web: www.tikkun.org
email: info@spiritualprogressives.org
Click here to stop receiving future emails
Copyright © 2008 Network of Spiritual Progressives®.
2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255
Jewish Victim of Israeli Right-wing Terror Speaks Out...
[Editor's note: It is a sad way to enter the High Holidays, but for those of us who are religious Jews and believe that we have an obligation to repent not only for ourselves but for our community, it is important to pay attention when the same right-wing Jews who are murdering and causing pogroms against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank are now using their violence against peace-oriented intellectuals and writers inside Israel. It is striking that the U.S. media has largely ignored this story, though if the attack had been by an Arab you can be sure it would have been front page news.
In the past, we at Tikkun have received many threats, and our editor Rabbi Michael Lerner continues to be subject to vile attacks and distortions, plus actual death threats from right-wing Israelis. For those who believe that this is all just paranoia and nobody should take them seriously, the bomb that almost killed Tikkun author and Ha'aretz columnist Zeev Sternhell, one of the most famous historians who taught at the Hebrew University about French fascism and who has written in Tikkun about he dangers of the Israeli right and the way it has caused Israel to lose its way, should now be a confirmation that the verbal violence against peace advocates in the Jewish world in the U.S. not only leads American politicians to blindly follow AIPAC politics, but may constitute a real physical threat.
. What is needed now from soon-to-be-interim Prime Minister Tzipi Livni is what Ehud Olmert never delivered: not just more negotiations, but changing the facts of the ground by unilaterrally dismantling many West Bank settlements, removing the roadblocks that exist within the West Bank (not the ones leading to Israel inside the Green Line) and releasing from the prison camps thousands and thousands of Palestinians who have never been convicted of any crime and are held, tortured, and then released without ever having a chance to defend their innocence. Unless the facts on the ground change, and Israel makes dramatic steps against the settlers, the settlers will continue and escalate their violence against fellow Jews who want peace. Bring the settlers back within the Green Lines, and create facts of peace insted of facts of war. And provide resources for protection of the Jews most well-known for speaking out for peace. And yes, even writing this feels scary, because who knows what right-winger will read it and escalate their violence? But this is the kind of question Jews should be addressing during aseret yemey teshuva--the 10 days of repentance.
May we all be inscribed for a year in which the US, Israel, and all others on the planet make major leaps forward toward a world of peace, justice, ecological sanity, and generosity of spirit! Shana tova! ]
Prof. Zeev Sternhell Speaks Out from His Hospital Bed
Interview By Akiva Eldar in Ha'aretz, Sept.29, 2008 Tel Aviv Erev Rosh Hashanah
Professor Zeev Sternhell's house on Jerusalem's Agnon Street is easily located by the iron gate with the broken glass. Sternhell says the bombing could have ended with him having to have both legs amputated.
Fortunately, last Thursday night he and his wife Ziva had returned from abroad and their suitcases, left in the narrow hallway, separated him and the pipe bomb that had been attached to the door.
The living room is filled with flowers and the telephone doesn't stop ringing. The news is quoting ministers' statements from the cabinet meeting.
Advertisement
Sternhell, while still in the hospital, drew a direct line between the state's surrender to the extreme right rampaging in the territories and the terrorist or organization that tried to kill him.
"What are those ministers talking about," he asks, when Vice Premier Haim Ramon blasts the government on the television news for fearing "those hooligans," as Ramon called them.
Sternhell: "Who has to deal with the outposts? Me? You? Who's to blame for the semi-autonomous state in the territories? Groups of settlers do whatever they feel like. Police officers and reserve soldiers go home with broken arms. How did they let things deteriorate to this lack of control in the West Bank? I told my students that not intervening for a weak child who needs help against a strong child is intervening for the strong child. Whoever fails to enforce the law and protect the Palestinians from the settlers who attack them is cooperating with the hooligans and lawbreakers."
The settlers argue that they are the weak child. Especially since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip.
"I understand exactly what it's like to be a refugee and I'm sorry the Gush Katif settlers were not allowed to build a new life within the Green Line. [But] every time the government takes a step in the right direction, like pulling out of Gaza, it hastens to console the settlers and promise them this will go no further.
"I'm suggesting an alternative to exclusive ownership of the land that justifies occupation. It would be based on a rational view of universal rights, especially the right to liberty and dignity, including for the Palestinians. This is the social-democratic approach that shaped 20th century Europe. It would strengthen Zionism, unlike the insistence on exclusivity over all the Land of Israel which rejects the other's rights, undermines the Zionist ideal, and is a proven prescription for disaster."
Are the extreme right wing and settlers anti-Zionists?
"Certainly. The right wing advocating the greater Israel is the real post-Zionist body. Whoever supports the occupation, i.e. a binational state, is no Zionist. This could also be said of politicians who drag their feet in negotiations intended to bring about a two-state solution for two nations. They're putting off this solution to the unforeseeable future, endangering the Jewish state's future."
Will you use the bombing to increase your influence?
"My job is to criticize. I have no intention of returning to politics. I'm glad my injury shocked the cabinet and Knesset. But what remains of [prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin's murder, which caused a much greater shock? A one-day annual festival.
The politicians must declare war on the extreme right and occupation - that's the swamp where those mosquitoes breed. Otherwise they won't even be a footnote in history."
As a member of the Zionist left and a historian specializing in 20th century fascism, are you pleased with the role of the Israeli left in the confrontation with the right?
"The Israeli left has made no political mark. It has good people, like [MK] Ophir Pines and [Education Minister] Yuli Tamir, but they have no impact on their party. No one is trying to shape the future of war and peace, or of social progress. Instead, the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, even as the free market's mythology is crumbling around us and begging for state intervention to save it. This is the very moment when the left should rear up and proclaim its difference, remind us that the rightist ideology is a total failure and delivers only political, social and economic disaster. A left-wing party worthy of the name should be shouting from the rooftops by now."
In an interview with Haaretz six months ago you said your children's and grandchildren's future did not seem secure.
"I fear that unless an immediate change takes place, in 50 years my granddaughters will have no reason to live here. If we're doomed to be a minority in a multinational state, why live in Tel Aviv rather than California? For that I had to sacrifice so much? Our grandchildren will not understand the justification for the colonial reality here. That's the greatest danger to our society.
"Despite the difficulties my generation has experienced, we were always accompanied by the hope of a better future. My students don't have the feeling that next year will be better, they feel that tomorrow is not safe. We believed we were going in the right way, that justice was on our side.
"Today young people's conviction of that is crumbling. Occupation is rotting our society. The terrible violence in the territories is spilling over the Green Line. This is inevitable - different standards and laws for different people cannot exist without affecting all of society. I'm not seeking absolute justice, only an end to building a de facto apartheid, only to ensure the creation of a society that future generations will not be ashamed of."
*************************************************************
Uri Avnery
27.9.08
It Can Happen Here!
THE GERMAN name Sternhell means bright as the stars. The name fits: the positions of Professor Ze'ev Sternhell indeed stand out sharply against the darkness of the sky. He warns against Israeli fascism. This week, Israeli fascists laid a pipe-bomb at the entrance of his apartment and he was lightly injured.
The choice of victim seems surprising at first. But the perpetrators knew what they were doing.
They did not attack the activists who demonstrate every week against the Separation Wall in Bil'in and Na'alin. They did not attack the leftists who mobilize every year - this year, too - to help the Palestinians pick their olives near the most dangerous settlements. They did not attack the "Women in Black" who demonstrate every Friday, or the women of "Machsom Watch", who keep an eye on events at the army checkpoints. They attacked a person whose entire activity is in the academic field.
The struggles on the ground are essential. But their main purpose is to influence public opinion. That is the main battlefield, and there the man of letters has an important part to play.
On this battlefield, two visions confront each other, two visions that are as far apart as the West is from the East. On the one side: An enlightened Israel, modern, secular, liberal and democratic, living in peace and partnership with Palestine as an integral part of the region. On the other side: a fanatical Israel, religious, fascist, cut off from the region and civilized humanity, a people that "dwells alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations" (Numbers, 23:9), where "the sword will devour for ever" (2 Samuel 2:26).
Ze'ev Sternhell is one of the outstanding guides of the enlightened vision. His positions are bright as the stars, resolute and incisive. Not a surprising target for the Neo-Nazi pipe-dreamers and pipe-bombers.
THE FIELD of Sternhell's academic expertise is the origins of Fascism, a subject that has occupied me all my life. The reasons for our interest are similar: Nazism left an indelible stamp on our childhood and fate. As a child, I witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany. As a child, Sternhell saw it in Poland, when, after the death of his father, he lost his mother and sister in the Holocaust.
"He who has been scalded by boiling water is cautious even with cold water," a Hebrew adage goes. Those who experienced Fascism bursting into their lives in childhood are sensitive to the slightest symptom of the outbreak of this disease. In 1961 I wrote a book called "The Swastika" (which exists only in Hebrew), in which I tried to crack the code of the roots of Nazism. At the end of the book I posed the question: Can it happen here? My unequivocal answer was: Yes, indeed.
Because of this, I am sensitive to every warning sign in our society. As a journalist and magazine editor, I shone the searchlight on all such signs. As a political activist, I fought against them in the Knesset and in the street.
Sternhell, on his part, after a military career, is a pure academic. He uses the instruments of academia: research, teaching and publication. He strives for exact definitions, without seeking popularity or avoiding provocation. In one of his articles years ago he asserted that the violent response of the Palestinians to the settlements is quite natural. By this he attracted the lasting wrath of the settlers and the extreme Right, which made an effort to prevent him from receiving the Israel Prize, Israel's highest distinction.
Now the pipe-bombs are speaking.
WHO LAID the bomb? A lone individual? A group? A new underground? The terrorists from the settlements? That's for the police and the Shin-Bet to find out.
>From the public point of view, the matter is much more simple: it is quite clear in which flowerbed these poisonous weeds grow, which ideology serves as fertilizer, and who is spreading it.
Israeli Fascism is alive and kicking. It is growing in the flowerbed that produced the various religious-nationalist underground groups of the past: the group that tried to bomb the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount, the underground that tried to assassinate the Palestinian mayors, the "Kach" gang, the perpetrator of the Hebron massacre Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of peace activist Emil Gruenzweig, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin and all the underground groups that were uncovered at an early stage before their deeds could bring them to public notice.
These acts cannot simply be attributed to individuals or "rogue groups". There exists a definite fascist fringe at the margin of Israel's political society. Its ideology is religious-nationalist, and its spiritual leaders are mostly "Rabbis", who formulate its world view and the practical application. These Jewish idolaters do not work in secret. On the contrary, they offer their wares on the open market.
This sector is concentrated in the "ideological" settlements. That does not mean that all settlers are fascists. But most fascists are settlers. They are concentrated in certain well-known settlements. By accident or not by accident, all these settlements are located in the heart of the West Bank, beyond the Separation Wall. The first of these, in the Hebron area, were installed with the help of "leftist" leader Yigal Allon, and in the Nablus area by "leftist" leader Shimon Peres.
DURING THE last months, there has been a marked increase in the number of incidents in which settlers attack Palestinians, soldiers, policemen and "leftists".
These acts are committed openly, in order to terrorize and deter. Settlers riot in the Palestinian villages whose lands they covet, or for revenge. These are "pogroms" in the classical sense of the term: riots by an armed mob intoxicated with hatred against helpless people, while the police and the army look on. The Pogromchiks destroy, injure and kill. These days it is happening more and more frequently.
In the few cases when the army or the police intervene, they do not turn on the settlers, but on the Israeli peace activists who come to help the beleaguered Palestinian farmers. The spokesmen of the Security Establishment and the commentators try to sound balanced and speak about "rioters from the Left and the Right". That is a false even handedness, which itself belongs to the Fascist arsenal of tricks.
The Settlers' pogroms are violent by nature, both in thought and deed, while the peace activists are non-violent on principle. If there is violence, it comes from the army and the border police, the pretext being that local boys have been throwing stones. What is not mentioned is that the well-protected soldiers and border policemen pursue the Palestinian demonstrators into the alleys of their villages.
The "boldness" of the extreme right-wing thugs - or "rightist activists" as the media insist on calling them courteously - is increasing by the day. They do whatever they want, knowing full well that no harm will befall them. The police do not interfere, since anyhow the courts will not mete out meaningful punishment.
ANYBODY WHO knows the history of Nazism is familiar with the shameful role played by the courts and the other law-enforcement agencies in the German republic vis-à-vis the law-breakers whose declared purpose was to put an end to the democratic system. The judges imposed ludicrously light penalties on Nazi rioters, whom they considered "misguided patriots", while treating Communist rioters as foreign agents and traitors.
Now we are experiencing this phenomenon here. The law-breaking settlers get symbolic sentences, while Palestinians who are accused of much lesser offenses get harsh penalties. Nowadays, even a settler who sets his dog on a company commander goes free, as does a settler who breaks the bones of a battalion chief.
The army's internal justice system can only be called monstrous: the commander who held up a bleeding woman in labor at a checkpoint causing the death of the child, was punished with two weeks detention. The commander who told a soldier to shoot a handcuffed Palestinian prisoner in the leg was "transferred", meaning that this war criminal can serve in another unit.
DOES THE increase in the number and severity of such incidents testify to the increasing power of Israeli Fascism? At first sight, one might get this impression.
However, on second thought I think that the opposite is true.
The fanatical settlers know that they have lost the support of public opinion in Israel, and that ordinary people consider them dangerous thugs. Their actions, as seen on television, arouse distaste, even abhorrence. The vision of "All of Eretz-Israel" has not only lost altitude - it has crashed on the ground of reality. The Zealots are acting out of weakness and frustration.
Much as the Nazis hated the German republic, these fanatics are starting to hate the State of Israel. And with good reason. They see that they have no place in a national consensus that is solidifying around the concept of "Two States for Two peoples", whether it is being accepted for negative reasons, such as demographic fears or the burdens of occupation, or for positive reasons, such as the hope for peace and prosperity after the withdrawal from the occupied territories.
The discussion about the borders is still going on, but the majority sees the Separation Wall as the future border. (As we made clear right from the beginning, the wall was not really being constructed in order to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, as was claimed, but as a future border between the two states.)
The Israeli establishment wants to annex the lands between the wall and the Green Line, and is prepared to give the Palestinians Israeli areas in return. What does this tell the settlers?
Most settlers live in settlements near the Green Line, which according to this concept will be joined to Israel. These are, not by accident, the non-ideological "lifestyle" settlers, those who were looking for cheap apartments and "quality of life" at a short distance from Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem. These settlers will, probably, agree in the end to any peace that leaves them in Israel.
The great majority of the extreme settlers, those motivated by a religious-Fascist ideology, live in the small settlements east of the wall, which must be dismantled when peace comes. This is a small minority even among the settlers, supported by a radical minority on the extreme right. That is where violent Israeli Fascism is growing.
ONCE UPON a time it seemed that a Red Line ran parallel to the Green Line - that nationalist-religious terrorism would hurt "only" Palestinians, not Israelis. Even Rabbi Meir Kahane, a born fascist, said so.
That illusion was shattered with the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. Israeli Fascism was found to be like any other classical Fascism, which thunders against the "foreign enemy" but directs its terrorism against the "enemy within". The pipe-bomb at the entrance of Sternhell's home must turn on all the red lights, as it joins the murder of Emil Gruenzweig and the threats on the lives of other conspicuous peace activists.
The decisive battle, the battle for Israel, is entering a new phase - much more violent, much more dangerous. But more serious than any danger to individuals is the danger to Israeli society as a whole. Especially if it does not mobilize all its resources - government, police, Security Service, the law, the courts, the media and the educational system - for an all out battle against this danger.
I do not believe that Fascism will win in our society. I believe in the strength of Israel democracy. But if I am pushed into a corner and asked: "Can it happen here?" I am bound to answer: "Yes, it can."
Copyright 2008 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun is a registered trademark.
2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-644-1200
Fax 510-644-1255
Humanist Network News Podcast: Andy Rooney on Atheism
HNN Podcast: Andy Rooney on Atheism
Humanist Network News #35
Show Notes
Segment 1: Andy Rooney on Atheism
Andy Rooney is America's favorite curmudgeon, known for his commentaries on the CBS news program 60 Minutes and for his syndicated newspaper column. Most people know Rooney for his lighthearted, somewhat perplexed observations about everyday things. But in this short interview with HNN, Rooney gets serious about his atheism. He also shares his views on all the faith talk coming from the candidates in the presidential election.
End: 5:15
Segment 2: Spokesmen for Secularism in the U.K.
Terry Sanderson is the executive director of the London-based National Secular Society. Keith Porteous Wood is the president of the National Secular Society. In this segment, the two secular activists swap humorous stories about appearing in the national media spotlight. They also explain their recent victory in seeing the blasphemy laws repealed in Britain. As part of the celebration of the repeal of these laws, they convince a famous Shakespearean actor (who also appeared in the Lord of The Rings) to read one of the blasphemous poems that had been subject to prosecution under the blasphemy laws. Not the most dignified role this famous actor has played, but one that he accepted enthusiastically nonetheless.
End: 26:26
Links:
Andy Rooney's Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rooney | National Secular Society http://www.secularism.org.uk/ | Podcast Awards http://podcastawards.com/
Call the HNN listener Comment line: (877) 659-1515.
Editor's Note: Though we recommend subscribing to our podcast using a program like iTunes (see directions in blue box above), you can start listening right now by:
* Direct Download: http://media.libsyn.com/media/ihs/035-HNN_09_24_2008.mp3 (right click the link to save the mp3 file or left click to listen).
* HNN flash Podcast Players: (streaming)
o http://www.myspace.com/humaniststudies
o http://www.humaniststudies.org/podcast
o http://ihs.libsyn.com
o Go to the podcast player in the blue box above
Humanist Network News #35
Show Notes
Segment 1: Andy Rooney on Atheism
Andy Rooney is America's favorite curmudgeon, known for his commentaries on the CBS news program 60 Minutes and for his syndicated newspaper column. Most people know Rooney for his lighthearted, somewhat perplexed observations about everyday things. But in this short interview with HNN, Rooney gets serious about his atheism. He also shares his views on all the faith talk coming from the candidates in the presidential election.
End: 5:15
Segment 2: Spokesmen for Secularism in the U.K.
Terry Sanderson is the executive director of the London-based National Secular Society. Keith Porteous Wood is the president of the National Secular Society. In this segment, the two secular activists swap humorous stories about appearing in the national media spotlight. They also explain their recent victory in seeing the blasphemy laws repealed in Britain. As part of the celebration of the repeal of these laws, they convince a famous Shakespearean actor (who also appeared in the Lord of The Rings) to read one of the blasphemous poems that had been subject to prosecution under the blasphemy laws. Not the most dignified role this famous actor has played, but one that he accepted enthusiastically nonetheless.
End: 26:26
Links:
Andy Rooney's Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rooney | National Secular Society http://www.secularism.org.uk/ | Podcast Awards http://podcastawards.com/
Call the HNN listener Comment line: (877) 659-1515.
Editor's Note: Though we recommend subscribing to our podcast using a program like iTunes (see directions in blue box above), you can start listening right now by:
* Direct Download: http://media.libsyn.com/media/ihs/035-HNN_09_24_2008.mp3 (right click the link to save the mp3 file or left click to listen).
* HNN flash Podcast Players: (streaming)
o http://www.myspace.com/humaniststudies
o http://www.humaniststudies.org/podcast
o http://ihs.libsyn.com
o Go to the podcast player in the blue box above
An Inspiring Christian Indeed | Ken Coates and Amnesty Intn'l
Donate by September 30th, and your gift will
be matched dollar-for-dollar! http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=8eIDJLMoGhIPL2J&s;=eiISJ7MJId...
http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=euIOK8PXLoKTKgL&s;=eiISJ7MJId...
Dear Amnesty International Supporter,
I’m 87 years old and still going strong for Amnesty International. In fact, I’ve been a member for more than 30 years. Won’t you join me? http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=ekIPK3PMLnK3KmL&s;=eiISJ7MJId...
I’ve been an activist and a volunteer for Amnesty International for several decades now—and I take my responsibilities very seriously.
At my retirement home in Claremont, California, I’ve recruited 150 people to write letters for prisoners of conscience every month. And until a few years ago, I was the oldest Amnesty International “student area coordinator.” I went around to Claremont High School, Whittier High School, and the other high schools and college chapters in Southern California and helped them get set up.
I’m writing today to ask you to join me in supporting Amnesty’s life-saving work: Please renew your membership with Amnesty International today! http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=7dJBLIMkFgJQI2K&s;=eiISJ7MJId... And if you contribute by September 30th, your donation will be DOUBLED by a generous donor!
I’ve put my own money where my mouth is. In fact, I've recently calculated that over the last 30 years, I’ve given more than $15,000 in support of their work! You see, I was a pastor in the United Church of Christ for most of my adult life, so I was never rich—but I had enough and always shared it every year with Amnesty to help all of the courageous people around the world unjustly imprisoned for their beliefs. My donations to Amnesty have helped change the lives of people I’ve never met.
May I ask you to do the same by renewing your membership with a gift of $50, $100, $500, $5,000—whatever’s right for you? http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=aqLHIRNwHjIXKcJ&s;=eiISJ7MJId...
At Amnesty International, we need all the support we can get. Please join me—and renew your membership today.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ken Coates
Amnesty International member since 1976
http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=9fIEKTNDKjIOL6K&s;=eiISJ7MJId...
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. Messages sent to this email address are not read. If you have a question or comment, please use our interactive online help system. Subscribe to our RSS feeds.
© Copyright 2008 | Amnesty International USA | 5 Penn Plaza | New York, NY 10001 | 212.807.8400
An Open Letter to God, from Michael Moore
An Open Letter to God, from Michael Moore
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Dear God,
The other night, the Rev. James Dobson's ministry asked all believers to pray for a storm on Thursday night so that the Obama acceptance speech outdoors in Denver would have to be cancelled.
I see that You have answered Rev. Dobson's prayers -- except the storm You have sent to earth is not over Denver, but on its way to New Orleans! In fact, You have scheduled it to hit Louisiana at exactly the moment that George W. Bush is to deliver his speech at the Republican National Convention.
Now, heavenly Father, we all know You have a great sense of humor and impeccable timing. To send a hurricane on the third anniversary of the Katrina disaster AND right at the beginning of the Republican Convention was, at first blush, a stroke of divine irony. I don't blame You, I know You're angry that the Republicans tried to blame YOU for Katrina by calling it an "Act of God" -- when the truth was that the hurricane itself caused few casualties in New Orleans. Over a thousand people died because of the mistakes and neglect caused by humans, not You.
Some of us tried to help after Katrina hit, while Bush ate cake with McCain http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/images/200508... and twiddled his thumbs. I closed my office in New York and sent my entire staff down to New Orleans to help. I asked people on my website to contribute to the relief effort I organized -- and I ended up sending over two million dollars in donations, food, water, and supplies http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDa... (collected from thousands of fans) to New Orleans while Bush's FEMA ice trucks were still driving around Maine three weeks later.
But this past Thursday night, the Washington Post reported that the Republicans had begun making plans to possibly postpone the convention. The AP had reported that there were no shelters set up in New Orleans for this storm, and that the levee repairs have not been adequate. In other words, as the great Ronald Reagan would say, "There you go again!"
So the last thing John McCain and the Republicans needed was to have a split-screen on TVs across America: one side with Bush and McCain partying in St. Paul, and on the other side of the screen, live footage of their Republican administration screwing up once again while New Orleans drowns.
So, yes, You have scared the Jesus, Mary and Joseph out of them, and more than a few million of your followers tip their hats to You.
But now it appears that You haven't been having just a little fun with Bush & Co. It appears that Hurricane Gustav is truly heading to New Orleans and the Gulf coast. We hear You, O Lord, loud and clear, just as we did when Rev. Falwell said You made 9/11 happen because of all those gays and abortions. We beseech You, O Merciful One, not to punish us again as Pat Robertson said You did by giving us Katrina because of America's "wholesale slaughter of unborn children." His sentiments were echoed by other Republicans http://mediamatters.org/items/200509130004 in 2005.
So this is my plea to you: Don't do this to Louisiana again. The Republicans got your message. They are scrambling and doing the best they can to get planes, trains and buses to New Orleans so that everyone can get out. They haven't sent the entire Louisiana National Guard to Iraq this time -- they are already patrolling the city streets. And, in a nod to I don't know what, Bush's head of FEMA has named a man to help manage the federal government's response. His name is W. Michael Moore. I kid you not, heavenly Father. They have sent a man with both my name AND W's http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/08/20080830-2.html to help save the Gulf Coast.
So please God, let the storm die out at sea. It's done enough damage already. If you do this one favor for me, I promise not to invoke your name again. I'll leave that to the followers of Rev. Dobson and to those gathering this week in St. Paul.
Your faithful servant and former seminarian,
Michael Moore
http://www.MichaelMoore.com
P.S. To all of God's fellow children who are reading this, the city New Orleans has not yet recovered from Katrina. Please click here http://troublethewaterfilm.com/content/pages/learn_what_you_c... for a list of things you can do to help our brothers and sisters on the Gulf Coast. And, if you do live along the Gulf Coast, please take all necessary safety precautions immediately.
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Dear God,
The other night, the Rev. James Dobson's ministry asked all believers to pray for a storm on Thursday night so that the Obama acceptance speech outdoors in Denver would have to be cancelled.
I see that You have answered Rev. Dobson's prayers -- except the storm You have sent to earth is not over Denver, but on its way to New Orleans! In fact, You have scheduled it to hit Louisiana at exactly the moment that George W. Bush is to deliver his speech at the Republican National Convention.
Now, heavenly Father, we all know You have a great sense of humor and impeccable timing. To send a hurricane on the third anniversary of the Katrina disaster AND right at the beginning of the Republican Convention was, at first blush, a stroke of divine irony. I don't blame You, I know You're angry that the Republicans tried to blame YOU for Katrina by calling it an "Act of God" -- when the truth was that the hurricane itself caused few casualties in New Orleans. Over a thousand people died because of the mistakes and neglect caused by humans, not You.
Some of us tried to help after Katrina hit, while Bush ate cake with McCain http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/images/200508... and twiddled his thumbs. I closed my office in New York and sent my entire staff down to New Orleans to help. I asked people on my website to contribute to the relief effort I organized -- and I ended up sending over two million dollars in donations, food, water, and supplies http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDa... (collected from thousands of fans) to New Orleans while Bush's FEMA ice trucks were still driving around Maine three weeks later.
But this past Thursday night, the Washington Post reported that the Republicans had begun making plans to possibly postpone the convention. The AP had reported that there were no shelters set up in New Orleans for this storm, and that the levee repairs have not been adequate. In other words, as the great Ronald Reagan would say, "There you go again!"
So the last thing John McCain and the Republicans needed was to have a split-screen on TVs across America: one side with Bush and McCain partying in St. Paul, and on the other side of the screen, live footage of their Republican administration screwing up once again while New Orleans drowns.
So, yes, You have scared the Jesus, Mary and Joseph out of them, and more than a few million of your followers tip their hats to You.
But now it appears that You haven't been having just a little fun with Bush & Co. It appears that Hurricane Gustav is truly heading to New Orleans and the Gulf coast. We hear You, O Lord, loud and clear, just as we did when Rev. Falwell said You made 9/11 happen because of all those gays and abortions. We beseech You, O Merciful One, not to punish us again as Pat Robertson said You did by giving us Katrina because of America's "wholesale slaughter of unborn children." His sentiments were echoed by other Republicans http://mediamatters.org/items/200509130004 in 2005.
So this is my plea to you: Don't do this to Louisiana again. The Republicans got your message. They are scrambling and doing the best they can to get planes, trains and buses to New Orleans so that everyone can get out. They haven't sent the entire Louisiana National Guard to Iraq this time -- they are already patrolling the city streets. And, in a nod to I don't know what, Bush's head of FEMA has named a man to help manage the federal government's response. His name is W. Michael Moore. I kid you not, heavenly Father. They have sent a man with both my name AND W's http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/08/20080830-2.html to help save the Gulf Coast.
So please God, let the storm die out at sea. It's done enough damage already. If you do this one favor for me, I promise not to invoke your name again. I'll leave that to the followers of Rev. Dobson and to those gathering this week in St. Paul.
Your faithful servant and former seminarian,
Michael Moore
http://www.MichaelMoore.com
P.S. To all of God's fellow children who are reading this, the city New Orleans has not yet recovered from Katrina. Please click here http://troublethewaterfilm.com/content/pages/learn_what_you_c... for a list of things you can do to help our brothers and sisters on the Gulf Coast. And, if you do live along the Gulf Coast, please take all necessary safety precautions immediately.
Dobson vs. Obama
Dobson vs. Obama
By Peter Wehner
Saturday, June 28, 2008; 12:00 AM
Earlier this week, Focus on the Family's James Dobson criticized Sen. Barack Obama, accusing him of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit ... his own confused theology," of having a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution" and of appealing to the "lowest common denominator of morality."
Dobson's judgment was based on Obama's keynote address at a "Call to Renewal" conference on June 28, 2006. In fact, this speech was impressive in many respects. As an evangelical and conservative who has deep concerns about Obama's policies and political philosophy, I nonetheless welcome such a statement by a leading Democrat.
For one thing, Obama took on liberals "who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant" and "caricature religious Americans ... as fanatical." He went on to say: "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.... To say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of our morality, much of which is grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."
ad_icon
So Obama was doing what people like Dobson have long urged: making the public square more hospitable for people of faith and calling for a halt to their demonization. Obama made his case in ways I found to be respectful and authentic.
Dobson took particular umbrage, for at least one obvious reason, with this passage from Obama's speech: "And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount -- a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our Bibles now. Folks haven't been reading their Bibles."
Dobson was critical of Obama's biblical references here and suggested that he had set up a series of straw men to support his "confused theology." But as I understand him, Obama was pointing out why the words of Scripture do not provide a ready policy blueprint for modern American society. Indeed, many of us have grappled with how to arrive at a theologically informed and fair-minded reading of the Bible that takes its moral principles seriously without simplistically applying to our time the cultural norms of previous eras. The chief defect of Obama's speech was that he didn't provide more insight into how to navigate these theological waters.
The passage of the speech that prompted Dobson's "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution" and "lowest common denominator of morality" comments was this: "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."
Dobson paraphrased this as "unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe in." But that's not what Obama was saying at all. Rather, he was arguing that in a pluralistic nation like ours, politics depends on people of faith being able to persuade others based on common and accessible ground and appeals to reason -- which sounds entirely reasonable. Christians who oppose abortion can make an effective case by talking about sonograms, fetal development and the moral imperative to protect the most vulnerable. That doesn't mean one's faith shouldn't inform the question of abortion -- or, for that matter, war, poverty and other issues. After all, President Lincoln's argument against slavery was partly grounded in faith. But appeals to the Bible or church teaching aren't sufficient in a pluralistic nation. That's why Lincoln talked primarily about the Declaration of Independence.
There are certainly reasons for evangelicals to have concerns about Obama -- based on his extreme views on abortion, judicial nominees, Iraq (his plans for a precipitous withdrawal would probably trigger mass death and perhaps even genocide) and other issues. But critics of Obama have an obligation to provide a fair and honest critique, and the attacks leveled by Dobson fall terribly short of that standard.
If Christian conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to make serious arguments and speak with intellectual integrity. In this instance, Dobson didn't. He has set back his cause and made some of us who are evangelicals and conservatives wince.
======================================================
Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former deputy assistant to President Bush.
The Myth of the Moral Majority
The Myth of the Moral Majority
Books: Here's the church. Here's the steeple. Open the doors and—hey, where did all the evangelicals go?
By Debra Dickerson
Listen to the interview with Debra Dickerson
http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/05/the-myth-of-t...
This February, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the most comprehensive of its surveys of the "religious landscape" of the United States. Front and center was the finding that 26 percent of American adults—around 54 million—are evangelical Protestants. The idea that 1 in every 4 of us thumps a Bible only confirmed what many had assumed to be gospel since 2000, when evangelical voters were credited with winning the White House for George W. Bush and the media began its grand genuflections toward a resurgent fundamentalism, casting evangelicals (and more broadly, "values voters") as a politicized wedge that politicians ignored at their peril.
And who could blame them? Not only are evangelicals supposedly our biggest religious voting bloc, but Pew reports that nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and 40 percent attend church weekly according to Gallup Polls. But what if those numbers—and everything we've assumed they tell us about the power of the religious right—are wildly wrong?
Take that 40 percent church attendance stat. Looking around her half-empty Southern Baptist church outside Dallas, Christine Wicker had her doubts. Wicker, a veteran Texas newspaper reporter, was born again when she was nine but drifted away from her evangelical roots in adulthood. A few years ago, she returned to the Southern Baptist Church to both renew her faith and write The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, an insider's look at evangelicals' power, wading in where secular journalists feared to tread. When she started looking into the numbers on church attendance, she found that researchers could vouch for only 18 percent of Americans being regular churchgoers—less than half the accepted figure. That led her to wonder about the already widely reported claim that 25 percent of Americans are evangelicals; could the real number also be less than half that?
In size, only the Catholic Church dwarfs the Southern Baptist Church, the biggest evangelical denomination and by far the most organized and fastidious of the Protestant record keepers. But Wicker discovered that the numbers the Southern Baptist Convention (sbc) releases for public consumption tell a much different story than the ones it uses internally. The organization claims 16 million members, but as one reverend cracks, "the fbi couldn't find half of [them] if they had to." A 2006 sbc report states that only 11 million of its members live in the same area as their home church anymore; that number includes those who've been double- or even triple-counted elsewhere. It also includes perennial no-shows and those who attend services at "bedside Baptist" (they sleep in on Sunday but show up for Easter and Christmas). And that's not to mention those who've lost their religion or converted to another faith. If their names were ever on "the roll" at a Baptist church, they're probably inscribed there for life.
With more digging, Wicker came across a 2007 sbc report that found only 5.4 million adults attended services regularly enough to be considered church members. Further complicating matters, many of those who regularly filled the pews weren't official members, and, most significantly, 1 in 8 wasn't saved or born again. Factoring all this in, Wicker calculated that there are fewer than 4 million devoted Southern Baptists. Her math seems to be backed up by collection-plate totals: If the church truly has 16 million members, then they contributed a miserly $3.50 each to a nationwide fundraising campaign last year.
And it's not just the Southern Baptists who appear to be playing number games. The National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group that does not include the sbc, claimed 30 million members on its website. When Wicker contacted the association for comment, the figure changed to 4.5 million. No one there could—or would—explain the sudden 85 percent drop in believers. (However, the group's website currently describes its lobbying arm as the voice of "30 million Americans united under a common banner.")
The emperor's-new-clothes flimsiness of these widely accepted exaggerated numbers says much about the cold calculation of far-right religious leaders. Moral Majority and Focus on the Family have happily staked their clout on coreligionists who never knew they were being counted—often twice or three times—among the faithful for political ends. "The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history," Wicker concludes, "a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly."
Though she doesn't delve into those weaknesses, Wicker's findings speak volumes about the limitations of a Fourth Estate that accepted and uncritically deferred to the power of the religious right. Having been handed a ready-made story line by the thou-shalt-not brigades, the media became transfixed by a phenomenon they couldn't fully fathom but felt bound to report on. Those unexamined numbers and claims of followers in theological lockstep launched a thousand cover stories and columns—rarely prompting questions about what a term as broad as "evangelical" really meant on the ground. Whether they viewed it as a new political reality, a megatrend, or a bogeyman, the media embraced the idea of a reenergized, monolithic Christianity and faithfully chronicled something that didn't exist.
Part of the problem is that the national-level journalists who control the discourse tend not to be, nor have they ever been, committed religionists as adults. Newsrooms are determinedly secular, and self-consciously so. Afraid of being tagged as godless liberals, most journalists would never dream of calling BS on believers. Which may explain why Wicker's book could only have been written by a born-and-bred Baptist.
Innumeracy and gutlessness aside, why did we never ask ourselves if the label "evangelical" tells us anything more than the yarmulke or the head scarf on the person next to us at Starbucks? To assume that evangelicals overwhelmingly oppose divorce, abortion, and gay rights; that they believe in school prayer and intelligent design; and that they're overwhelmingly politicized is a gross oversimplification that evangelicals themselves ought to find disquieting. As Wicker suggests, perhaps one's answer to the drone who interrupts dinner to ask your "religious preference" is more reflex than exit poll.
Wicker finds that many of the most active believers belong to both a small "home" church and a megachurch where they "vacation." And as the most recent Pew study shows, 44 percent of Americans say they have switched their religious affiliation or moved between periods of declaring a faith and religious free agency. Religious identity, it turns out, is as fluid as any other.
It is with believable regret that Wicker pulls the threadbare rug out from under the "powerful" Christian far right. "Just as I had finished convincing myself that the evangelical church was smarter and had more to offer than ever—I'm still convinced of that—I was hit with the growing suspicion that the entire faith might be sinking fast," she writes.
She's probably right that old-school fundamentalism is going the way of the dinosaurs. The Southern Baptist Church's much-publicized effort to baptize a million souls in 2006 was a dismal failure; only one-third of that number "bathed in Jordan's water." According to George Barna, an independent evangelical researcher who tracks spiritual trends, 20 million born-again Christians are moving beyond formal churchgoing, meeting in small groups, often in each other's homes. He predicts that by 2025, local churches will have lost half of their current "market share." No doubt many of those leaving the church find fire and brimstone as anathema as any liberal but still believe that there is a living God who loves them.
If there are as few evangelicals as Wicker claims, can we ink-stained wretches go back to ignoring them? Not so fast. Religion will always be of more cultural significance than the mere number of its adherents, especially as the United States becomes ever more diverse and other religious traditions clamor to be heard. We will have to go on respecting Christianity and deferring to its oversize voice in public affairs if only because all those bedside Baptists might just stop sleeping in on Sunday if the beliefs they rarely dust off suddenly come under attack.
Still, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation makes plain that the media must be doggedly skeptical whenever faith-based constituencies claim their place in the public square. Maybe all us godless liberal journalists need to get religion about confronting America's most sacred cow.
Debra J. Dickerson, a self-described "millionth generation Southern Baptist," blogs at motherjones.com.
Illustration: Edel Rodriguez
Books: Here's the church. Here's the steeple. Open the doors and—hey, where did all the evangelicals go?
By Debra Dickerson
Listen to the interview with Debra Dickerson
http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/05/the-myth-of-t...
This February, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the most comprehensive of its surveys of the "religious landscape" of the United States. Front and center was the finding that 26 percent of American adults—around 54 million—are evangelical Protestants. The idea that 1 in every 4 of us thumps a Bible only confirmed what many had assumed to be gospel since 2000, when evangelical voters were credited with winning the White House for George W. Bush and the media began its grand genuflections toward a resurgent fundamentalism, casting evangelicals (and more broadly, "values voters") as a politicized wedge that politicians ignored at their peril.
And who could blame them? Not only are evangelicals supposedly our biggest religious voting bloc, but Pew reports that nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and 40 percent attend church weekly according to Gallup Polls. But what if those numbers—and everything we've assumed they tell us about the power of the religious right—are wildly wrong?
Take that 40 percent church attendance stat. Looking around her half-empty Southern Baptist church outside Dallas, Christine Wicker had her doubts. Wicker, a veteran Texas newspaper reporter, was born again when she was nine but drifted away from her evangelical roots in adulthood. A few years ago, she returned to the Southern Baptist Church to both renew her faith and write The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, an insider's look at evangelicals' power, wading in where secular journalists feared to tread. When she started looking into the numbers on church attendance, she found that researchers could vouch for only 18 percent of Americans being regular churchgoers—less than half the accepted figure. That led her to wonder about the already widely reported claim that 25 percent of Americans are evangelicals; could the real number also be less than half that?
In size, only the Catholic Church dwarfs the Southern Baptist Church, the biggest evangelical denomination and by far the most organized and fastidious of the Protestant record keepers. But Wicker discovered that the numbers the Southern Baptist Convention (sbc) releases for public consumption tell a much different story than the ones it uses internally. The organization claims 16 million members, but as one reverend cracks, "the fbi couldn't find half of [them] if they had to." A 2006 sbc report states that only 11 million of its members live in the same area as their home church anymore; that number includes those who've been double- or even triple-counted elsewhere. It also includes perennial no-shows and those who attend services at "bedside Baptist" (they sleep in on Sunday but show up for Easter and Christmas). And that's not to mention those who've lost their religion or converted to another faith. If their names were ever on "the roll" at a Baptist church, they're probably inscribed there for life.
With more digging, Wicker came across a 2007 sbc report that found only 5.4 million adults attended services regularly enough to be considered church members. Further complicating matters, many of those who regularly filled the pews weren't official members, and, most significantly, 1 in 8 wasn't saved or born again. Factoring all this in, Wicker calculated that there are fewer than 4 million devoted Southern Baptists. Her math seems to be backed up by collection-plate totals: If the church truly has 16 million members, then they contributed a miserly $3.50 each to a nationwide fundraising campaign last year.
And it's not just the Southern Baptists who appear to be playing number games. The National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group that does not include the sbc, claimed 30 million members on its website. When Wicker contacted the association for comment, the figure changed to 4.5 million. No one there could—or would—explain the sudden 85 percent drop in believers. (However, the group's website currently describes its lobbying arm as the voice of "30 million Americans united under a common banner.")
The emperor's-new-clothes flimsiness of these widely accepted exaggerated numbers says much about the cold calculation of far-right religious leaders. Moral Majority and Focus on the Family have happily staked their clout on coreligionists who never knew they were being counted—often twice or three times—among the faithful for political ends. "The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history," Wicker concludes, "a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly."
Though she doesn't delve into those weaknesses, Wicker's findings speak volumes about the limitations of a Fourth Estate that accepted and uncritically deferred to the power of the religious right. Having been handed a ready-made story line by the thou-shalt-not brigades, the media became transfixed by a phenomenon they couldn't fully fathom but felt bound to report on. Those unexamined numbers and claims of followers in theological lockstep launched a thousand cover stories and columns—rarely prompting questions about what a term as broad as "evangelical" really meant on the ground. Whether they viewed it as a new political reality, a megatrend, or a bogeyman, the media embraced the idea of a reenergized, monolithic Christianity and faithfully chronicled something that didn't exist.
Part of the problem is that the national-level journalists who control the discourse tend not to be, nor have they ever been, committed religionists as adults. Newsrooms are determinedly secular, and self-consciously so. Afraid of being tagged as godless liberals, most journalists would never dream of calling BS on believers. Which may explain why Wicker's book could only have been written by a born-and-bred Baptist.
Innumeracy and gutlessness aside, why did we never ask ourselves if the label "evangelical" tells us anything more than the yarmulke or the head scarf on the person next to us at Starbucks? To assume that evangelicals overwhelmingly oppose divorce, abortion, and gay rights; that they believe in school prayer and intelligent design; and that they're overwhelmingly politicized is a gross oversimplification that evangelicals themselves ought to find disquieting. As Wicker suggests, perhaps one's answer to the drone who interrupts dinner to ask your "religious preference" is more reflex than exit poll.
Wicker finds that many of the most active believers belong to both a small "home" church and a megachurch where they "vacation." And as the most recent Pew study shows, 44 percent of Americans say they have switched their religious affiliation or moved between periods of declaring a faith and religious free agency. Religious identity, it turns out, is as fluid as any other.
It is with believable regret that Wicker pulls the threadbare rug out from under the "powerful" Christian far right. "Just as I had finished convincing myself that the evangelical church was smarter and had more to offer than ever—I'm still convinced of that—I was hit with the growing suspicion that the entire faith might be sinking fast," she writes.
She's probably right that old-school fundamentalism is going the way of the dinosaurs. The Southern Baptist Church's much-publicized effort to baptize a million souls in 2006 was a dismal failure; only one-third of that number "bathed in Jordan's water." According to George Barna, an independent evangelical researcher who tracks spiritual trends, 20 million born-again Christians are moving beyond formal churchgoing, meeting in small groups, often in each other's homes. He predicts that by 2025, local churches will have lost half of their current "market share." No doubt many of those leaving the church find fire and brimstone as anathema as any liberal but still believe that there is a living God who loves them.
If there are as few evangelicals as Wicker claims, can we ink-stained wretches go back to ignoring them? Not so fast. Religion will always be of more cultural significance than the mere number of its adherents, especially as the United States becomes ever more diverse and other religious traditions clamor to be heard. We will have to go on respecting Christianity and deferring to its oversize voice in public affairs if only because all those bedside Baptists might just stop sleeping in on Sunday if the beliefs they rarely dust off suddenly come under attack.
Still, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation makes plain that the media must be doggedly skeptical whenever faith-based constituencies claim their place in the public square. Maybe all us godless liberal journalists need to get religion about confronting America's most sacred cow.
Debra J. Dickerson, a self-described "millionth generation Southern Baptist," blogs at motherjones.com.
Illustration: Edel Rodriguez
Tikkun: Network Spiritual Progressives | Israel at 60
A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner
Israel at 60
by Rabbi Michael Lerner | Editor, Tikkun
Please join with me in prayer and/or in acts of kindness and generosity this Thursday, May 8 when Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, and also the next Thursday, May 15, when Palestinians commemorate their Al Nakba (the catastrophe)--to pray for peace, justice and well-being for Israel, to pray for peace, justice and well-being for Palestine, and to pray for peace, justice and well-being for all the people of the earth. Let love and kindness prevail, and non-violence and peace be our guide on the way. Take some time those days to re-dedicate your time and energy to heal and transform our planet. Here are some of my reflections on this occasion:
When I was a child, Zionism was the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people. While the United States and all other countries-including the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries-closed their doors to Jews seeking refuge from the murder of millions of Jews by the fascists, and while the Palestinian people's leadership used their influence with the British to ensure that Jews would not be able to settle in our ancient homeland both during and immediately after the Second World War as hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons' camps in Europe, the Zionist movement championed the need for a state of the Jewish people with its own army and its own territory. For a people who had been stateless for twenty centuries, who were forced to depend on the often-absent "good will" of their hosts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the prospect of a homeland, prayed for everyday by Jews around the world for two thousand years, seemed to be at once impossible and yet the only imaginable redemption from the trauma of the Holocaust and the previous centuries of suffering and insecurity.
Jews jumped from the burning buildings of Europe into Palestine not because we were servants of imperial or colonial interests, but because we were desperate and because no one wanted us or would protect us. Unfortunately and tragically, we landed on the backs of Palestinians who were already there, and we hurt many of them in our landing. So scarred were we by our own pain-having just witnessed the death of one out of every three Jews alive on the planet-that we were unable to notice or take seriously the pain that we were causing to the Palestinian people in the process. When our army uprooted Palestinians from their homes and villages, it was in the midst of a struggle for survival in which Jews were determined to be as ruthless towards others as others had been towards us.
Yet, there were alternatives. We could have remained a minority in an Arab country and hoped for the goodness of the Arab people to prevail, particularly if Jews had been able to align with Arabs in the anti-colonial struggle against the British and French. The Zionist movement could have made dramatic overtures to the feudal landlords who owned much of the land in Palestine and who feared that our ideas of socialism would lead to a revolution against their interests, though that would have furthered alienated us from the Arab masses. We could have reached out, as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes did, to a growing Palestinian nationalist movement and tried to create a bi-national state, though at the time the hostilities and acts of terror from Palestinian extremists toward the Jewish minority, and by Zionist extremists toward Palestinian civilians, made this option appear unlikely to a Jewish population that had unwisely trusted the people of Europe to act with some level of human decency, and then were betrayed and murdered. We could have rejected the Histadrut's "Jewish only" policy of membership in its powerful union and its health care system, and those efforts might actually have paved the way toward a less violent reception by the Palestinian majority. We could have put our energies into demanding that the United States open its gates and let Jews settle here, perhaps resettling Jews in Hawaii and California, though in so doing they would have had to contend against the post-WWII conviction of many Jews that only a state of our own with an army of our own could ever be trusted to provide us with security in light of the failure of the US and other Western countries to save us from fascism and its genocide, not to mention the growing conviction of many Jews that with a state of our own we could create for the first time in two thousand years a vigorous Jewish culture, a political polity that reflected our values, and a society in which Jews would not have our lives subordinated to the will of a non-Jewish majority).
In retrospect there is much to be said for the Buber/Magnes position of giving far more attention to attempting to build ties of reconciliation and mutual respect with Palestinians before establishing a Jewish state. But the Zionist movement was made up of "realists" who didn't believe in the possibility of reconciliation, the Palestinian people were led by similar "realists" who didn't believe that it would be possible to live in peace with Jews, and hence refused to allow Jewish immigrants (although immigrants of any other religion were welcome), and the British did everything in their power to set both communities against each other (as it did wherever it held colonial power, encouraging ethnic clashes so as to undermine anti-colonial unity). Both sides had embraced nationalist rhetoric, and both sides had left behind the loving messages of their respective religions. Both sides were traumatized by their own history, and by outrageous acts of violence perpetrated by the other. I've detailed this history in my book Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books 2003). And I'm well aware that partisans on each side have plenty of "facts" to use to "prove" that it was really the other side that caused all the problems, and that there is no "moral equivalency" between, for example, the slaying of Jews in Hebron in 1929 and the slaying of Arabs in Deir Yassin in 1948. The list of atrocities is long on both sides, and only those who wish to "win" for their side continue to insist that it was they who were innocent and the others were "evil" in intent as well as in action.
The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes--some by fear of being subject to terrorist attacks consciously planned to evoke that fear by Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and the Zionist terrorist groups that they led, some (at least a hundred thousand) by acts of the Israeli army (now fully documented by Israeli historians), and still others by fear of being caught in a war zone (but then, Jews had no place to avoid the war zone, no neighboring countries to which to flee, no more in 1948 than we had when we were being slaughtered by the millions from 1939-1945, and for us, that was decisive about why we felt we had a right to stay), intensified angers. But these relationships could have been repaired had Israel allowed the refugees to return home after the armistice was reached in 1949. It did not. Instead Israel declared those who had left, whether by force or by fear, as a "hostile population," and shot as "terrorists" those who sought to sneak over the border in ensuing years to return to their homes. Those actions, particularly the brutal murders by Ariel Sharon and his Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) unit in the early 1950s, provoked counter-acts of terror by Palestinians. The story has only intensified in killings of civilians ever since.
Surrounding Arab states have not helped the matter. Their decision by some Arab leadres(not that of ordinary Palestinians living in their homeland without democratic mechanisms to choose the people who spoke for them) led to the 1947-1949 War and to disaster for Palestinians. For at least five decades thereafter, those Arab states, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, rejected every attempt by Israel to make peace. Except for Jordan, all of those states have been wildly insensitive to the needs of their Arab brothers and sisters, and have used their cause as a political football to embarrass Israel, whose existence they hoped to overcome. It's only in the last decade that most of these states have come to accept that there is no military solution likely to yield a better deal for the Arabs than what they could get through negotiations. Moreover, many of those Arab states have treated Palestinian refugees at least as poorly, and sometimes considerably worse (e.g. Lebanon) than have the Israelis. Yet, as the example of Egypt and Jordan shows, those states no longer act as a bloc, and even the most extreme among them have finally come to accept the reality of Israel and have given up most of their fantasies that Israel would some day disappear. Only the non-Arab state of Iran still has leadership holding on to that illusion.
When I look back and watch the irrational and self-defeating behavior of both sides, and when I interview people on both sides of this struggle, one concept shouts out to me: PTSD-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The trauma on both sides has led people to be unable to think rationally about what is in their own best interests. For the Palestinians that trauma led them to reject the proposal of a two-state solution that was offered them in 1947, and for them to encourage the surrounding Arab states to reject every offer made by Israel in subsequent decades even after those states were decisively defeated in the 1967 War. In later decades, starting in the 1980s, it was the Jews who rejected reasonable offers for peace, and instead imagined that their military might would allow them to crush the Palestinian national movement. Illusion after illusion after illusion.
Even today, Israel has been faced with an offer by the Arab states for full recognition and peace if Israel would simply return to the pre-1967 borders. However, Israel will not accept, though it knows full well that in the negotiations the Palestinians would allow the Jews to hold on to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and would even consider trading some close-to-the-border land to allow some of the major Israeli settlements if Israel gave an equal amount of land back to the Palestinians and made a credible and serious offer to provide reparations for Palestinian refugees. If Israel were to approach this kind of offer in a spirit of open-heartedness, it could soon work out details that would provide Israel with adequate security.
Arrogance of power? Subordination to the religious messianism of the West Bank settlers? Sure, those play a role. But in my view, it is PTSD that is decisive in keeping Israelis from looking at their actual situation: a tiny minority in a world surrounded by Arab and Muslim states whose power will only grow in the coming decades and whose anger at Israel grows in intensity as they watch the state that claims to be the representative of the Jewish people act in horrendous and cruel ways toward Palestinians. Any rational assessment would lead Israelis to accept the terms being offered to them, and to do so in a way that manifested a spirit of generosity and caring for those whom it had hurt, tortured, falsely imprisoned, killed, or wounded. Similarly, it is PTSD that can best explain how Palestinians would embrace Hamas or Hezbollah and fantasize that they can eventually destroy Israel rather than work out an agreement that allows Israel to exist as a Jewish state (that is, as a state that gives affirmative action in regard to immigration to Jews who have a reasonable claim to fear of persecution where they are currently living-but not a state that is run by Jewish religious law except in the cultural sense that Jewish holidays are given the same official public priority in that state that Christmas is given in the United States).
How do you deal with two peoples who are suffering from PTSD? Well, we know what you don't do. You don't try to coerce them into situations in which they perceive themselves as vulnerable to re-experiencing the insecurity and pain that caused the trauma in the first place.
This is why I've argued against any attempt to force Israel through coercion into accepting solutions that make it feel more vulnerable. It's not that using coercion would be wrong or immoral, but that it will have the exact opposite effect than intended. Disinvestment in Israel, for example, would only reconfirm the basic feeling (based on a great deal of historical reality) that "the whole world is against us, but that this time we will not be led like sheep to the slaughter in the way that European Jewry allowed itself to be destroyed" (a false description of European Jewry, but nevertheless the dominant perception in Israel). The Massada Complex remains a central frame through which Israelis experience their reality: the courageous Jews who preferred death to surrendering to the Roman imperialists who were seeking to outlaw Jewish life in what the Romans had named "Palestine." In this case, the Israelis are armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons. There is enough willingness on the part of the majority to use those weapons even if in the process they destroyed themselves..
Thus, the situation cannot be analogized to that which existed in the 1980s and early 1990s in South Africa. On the one hand, the entire world recognized that apartheid was fundamentally evil. There is no such consensus about Israel or its policies. Apartheid meant that there was a legal structure preventing blacks from voting, participating in the same schools or same beaches as whites. There is no such set of laws within the pre-1967 boundaries of the State of Israel. There is certainly deprivation of rights in the West Bank and Gaza, but those deprivations stem from a political assessment of the alleged dangers that Israel faces, not from a commitment to degrade all Palestinians (though this distinction is rapidly losing its force as the settlers become more active in periodic pogroms against Palestinian civilians). On the other hand, the minority of whites in South Africa were not part of a people who had always suffered systematic persecution, and though they had some reason to fear wh