Is "blood libel" a generic expression?

linked to at DovBear's blog

Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" to describe claims that her actions contributed to the recent shootings sparked considerable controversy yesterday. Even conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Jennifer Rubin who agreed with the substance of her remarks felt it wasn't the best choice of words. But it earned a defense from an unlikely source: Alan Dershowitz.

The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People, its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

I myself am unfamiliar with the use of the term outside a Jewish context, and Dershowitz hardly proves his case by citing his own use of it to describe a report charging the Jewish state with war crimes. But I was curious about whether his larger point holds up to scrutiny. Certainly there are expressions that have acquired a generic quality even though they have the potential to cause offense because of their historical associations. I think of when President Bush dropped his use of the word "crusade" in 2001, fearing it would offend Muslims. It was a good idea, but his usage of the term was at least understandable. To most English speakers, "crusade" is a generic term for fighting for something. Is the phrase "blood libel," similarly, a generic term for being falsely accused of a terrible deed?

I checked Google News, with its mammoth historical archive of news articles. The phrase "blood libel" gets 1,280 hits for articles between 1950 and 2009. But when I search for articles in this range that don't contain the words "Jew," "Jewish," or "Israel," the hits shrink to 76. In other words, as I suspected, it's uncommon for the phrase "blood libel" to be used outside a Jewish (or Israeli) context.

Uncommon--but not unheard of. Jim Geraghty has dug up several examples, such as when Peter Deutsch in 2000 said Republicans made a "blood libel" against Al Gore when they accused him of disenfranchising soldiers. What is striking, though, is that most of the other examples Geraghty cites concern attacks on entire groups, such as blacks or homosexuals. Charging that all gay men are pedophiles may not constitute an exact historical parallel with the claim that Jews baked Christian children in their matzo, but it isn't all that different either.

Palin is not part of a persecuted minority. She hasn't been legally charged with anything. The criticism that she may have somehow provoked the shooting with violent rhetoric and imagery was directed at her as an individual, not as a member of a group. Her usage of the term "blood libel" in this context is unusual--and certainly inappropriate.

With friends like these

cross-posted at DovBear's blog

It appears that John Boehner is planning to campaign for Rich Iott, the Nazi-impersonating congressional candidate.

It's important to understand how offensive this is: the problem is not that Iott participated in historical reenactments, which are perfectly legitimate, or even that he dressed as a bad guy. The problem is that the whole reenactment is invested with significant historical revisionism that views these SS officers admiringly and makes only the vaguest references to the crimes they committed. The website contains a disclaimer disavowing support for either neo-Nazis or the original Nazis and condemning "the atrocities which made them infamous." What it does not do is make any mention of the Holocaust, Jews, or even genocide.

This approach to the war is Holocaust minimization, a soft form of denial that doesn't engage in any outright conspiracy-mongering about a Holocaust "hoax," but nonetheless describes World War II in a way that greatly downplays the crimes of the Nazis in an effort to make the two sides seem somehow equivalent. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Iott argued that we shouldn't judge these officers because they were doing what they thought was right, that the SS unit he was reenacting had never been charged with war crimes (in fact, one member was recently charged with the murder of 58 Jews), and that "Horrible things...happened on both sides." If you think Iott makes a single mention of the Holocaust during this interview (other than a bare statement that he doesn't deny it), I've got a tea-bag to sell you.

After the refreshing disavowal of Iott by Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, I find Boehner's decision to stick by this guy pretty sickening. It brings to mind another story recently about the Emergency Committee for Israel, a lobbying organization that is supposedly devoted to getting pro-Israel candidates elected ("pro-Israel" in the most hawkish, right-wing sense) but in practice seems more interested simply in getting Republicans elected:

If ECI genuinely cared about electing pro-Israel members of Congress, it would launch big money campaigns against Tea Party candidates, such as Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the source said.

Toomey, for instance, has twice voted against foreign aid packages, which are widely viewed as principal pro-Israel litmus tests, as they include large amounts of financial assistance for the Jewish state. (According to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, Toomey said that he "feels Israel no longer needs economic aid, and should simply receive military assistance.")

Pollak, however, defended Toomey, noting that he voted against foreign aid not out of hostility toward Israel, but "as a matter of larger fiscal principles. He has never shown a particular animosity toward Israel -- far from it."

In short, vote Republican because the Republicans are better for Israel, but vote Republican even when they aren't better for Israel. If that confuses you, don't worry about it, just vote Republican.

What we need to understand is that a lot of the Israel talk by Republicans is not done for the sake of Jews. It is for the consumption of Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber their Jewish counterparts and who aren't necessarily even "pro-Jewish," as can be seen from Pat Robertson's bizarre views.

Or, to paraphrase James Baker, we don't vote for Republicans anyway, so we might as well go be fruitful and multiply.

Scheming, grasping liberals

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

It isn't news when Rush Limbaugh says something offensive, but it is intriguing when he shows an ironic lack of self-reflection.

He wondered, in the wake of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, if Jews were having second thoughts about their support for Obama. "To some people, 'banker' is a code word for Jewish," Limbaugh said, "and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there."

In other words, Limbaugh thinks Jews are automatically inclined to perceive an ethnic insult in criticisms of an institution or profession that anti-Semites identify as "Jewish."

Curious, then, that he doesn't apply the same logic to conservative assaults on Hollywood, which often sound quite similar to attacks by neo-Nazis and their ilk. To test the parallels, I collected a series of quotes from Limbaugh and from Stormfront, the Internet's leading white-supremacist website. Any occurrences of the word "Jew" in the latter, I either removed or replaced with the word "liberal." I then shuffled up the five quotes. Try to see if you can determine which are the Limbaugh ones and which the Stormfront ones. I myself would have been unable to do so.

1. "White people, too, are debasing their own culture with some of the rotgut that shows up on TV, some of the rotgut that shows up in Hollywood movies and so forth. Who's running all this? It's liberals! Liberals run Hollywood."

2. "McCarthyism is actually correctly accusing someone of communism, identifying a communist, right? That's what it was. People that hated McCarthy were the commies that were identified."

3. "Ted Turner marries Hanoi Jane Fonda, tries to go Hollywood, push Hollywood-type liberal politics and it just doesn't work."

4. "You recall, and there have been countless movies about this and books, all the liberals in Hollywood spent decades trying to convince the American public and countless congressional hearings, committees, that they weren't in bed with the communists.... now they're embracing communists as a badge of honor."

5. "Imus made the comment about a group, not an individual, just like NRA members are called gun nuts, paranoid whack jobs and other highly insulting terms by the liberal-controlled media."

(Here are the answers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

You get the point. If you have ever perused Stormfront (a lovely experience, I can tell you), you will find that a great deal of what is said there sounds remarkably, eerily similar to things said by Limbaugh, by other conservative talk-radio commentators, and by their millions of listeners. Both crowds attack liberals, socialists, and communists, usually treating the three categories as interchangeable. Both think Hollywood and the media are "run" by left-wing subversives. Both assail welfare, affirmative action, feminism, multiculturalism, gun control, global warming science, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Both consider themselves at war with "elites." Both embrace conspiracy theories, and both see President Obama as an anti-white radical.

Of course, there are also substantial differences between the dittoheads and the Goebbelheads. Limbaugh is strongly pro-Israel and supports the Iraq War, neither exactly a popular stance among white nationalists (who hate Bush almost as much as they hate Obama). He has never explicitly embraced biological racism; he rationalizes his attacks on blacks and other minorities by saying he is only against the way liberal institutions coddle them. I don't believe he is an anti-Semite, and I disagree with the ADL that his remarks about Obama and the banks were "borderline anti-Semitic." His argument was that Jews might perceive attacks on bankers as veiled bigotry because anti-Semites talk that way, not that the banking industry is actually "Jew-controlled."

I just find it fascinating that he would make such an inference, apparently blind to the fact that his very own career is built on a style of demagoguery closely resembling that of some intensely anti-Semitic groups. He spends day upon day vilifying and demonizing many of the same institutions and organizations as the white-power folks do--Hollywood, the media, the government, the ACLU, the Ivy Leaguers--only he doesn't go around describing his targets as Jewish or Zionist, even though many of them do in fact include a disproportionate number of Jews. But as soon as someone utters a word of complaint about the ways of Wall Street, in swoops Mr. Limbaugh to protect us Yids against the slander. It's nice to know someone cares.

Urban bubbe meises

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

Blogger Wolfish Musings recently wished for a Jewish version of Snopes, the premier site for investigating urban legends. He made this wish after receiving an email listing ten "proofs" of the Moshiach's imminent arrival. As it stands, such a site already exists, and it is called Jewish Legends. Unfortunately, it lacks the scope or professionalism of Snopes.

Snopes was hardly the first urban legend-debunking site, but it took a new approach to the subject. For one thing, unlike previous sites of its kind, Snopes didn't deal exclusively with tall tales. Some of the claims that Snopes investigates end up being true. According to Snopes, what sets urban legends apart is not their truth value but their mode of transmission. They're the types of stories you "know" happened because you heard it from a friend of a friend (or read in an email forwarded to you by a friend). Occasionally such stories may in fact be accurate or nearly accurate. The problem is verifying them, and that's where Snopes comes in. It categorizes the truth value of stories with a red light for false, a yellow for uncertain, and a green for true.

Jewish Legends adopts the same color-coding, but with Stars of David instead of traffic lights. Unlike Snopes, it includes roughly the same number of "green" stories as "red" stories. Because so much of it is true, the site begins to sound more like a weird news page than an urban legends page.

Some of the green stories are reasonable choices, such as the report that Coca Cola tastes better during Passover season than during the rest of the year, because it uses sugar instead of corn syrup. Religious Jews are aware of this fact, but because it's so word-of-mouth, it's the type of claim for which verification is useful, if for no other reason than to convince skeptics.

But why do we need the site to tell us, for example, that the first pro-baseball player was Jewish? That may be a noteworthy fact in itself, but it's not a story that has been passed around by word of mouth. I had never heard the story before I came to the site, so it's probably not something that was in need of investigation.

Likewise, the site puts Christopher Columbus's Jewishness in the yellow category. That belief is not an urban legend by any definition. It is a legitimate hypothesis still being debated by scholars.

I also wonder why the site bothers itself with answering the Protocols or the business about a kosher tax. Once you start getting into the debunking of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, your task is practically endless. And it gives the site a graver tone than a discussion about urban legends ought to have. Is the site going to start taking on Holocaust deniers? That would be a perfect way to kill the fun.

The site's best entries include whether the name of the Satmar sect comes from "Saint Mary," whether the Israeli archaeologist Vendyl Jones was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, whether Mordechai was Esther's uncle, and whether "hip hip hooray" has anti-Semitic origins. (Click the links to find out the answer to each of those questions.) Those are all beliefs that have swirled around the Jewish community for quite some time, and are worthy of investigation. I just wish the site would also tackle more current stuff, like the chain emails targeted at Jews. And the weird news entries, interesting as they may be, should at least be placed in a separate section and be less focused upon.

The site seems to have an Orthodox standpoint, but it never tells you that it does. It considers the existence of the Golem to be an open question. It asserts that the actor Ben Stiller, contrary to popular belief, is not Jewish (his father is, and his mother had a Reform conversion before he was born). I suspect that Ben Stiller would disagree.

Trusting the enemy

Linked to at DovBear's blog

After hearing some of my friends repeating the rumor that Barack Obama had a Muslim upbringing which he has concealed, I checked and found it was flatly untrue. But that was several months ago. Only recently did I discover a fact that puts an ironic twist on the whole matter: the man who initiated the rumor, designed to make Obama look frightening to Jews, is himself a rabid anti-Semite.

The Washington Post traces the rumor to a 2004 article by Andy Martin, a politician who had run that year for the same Senate seat Obama ultimately won. The article wasn't as extreme as some of the later forms the rumor took--Martin didn't attempt to tie Obama to "radical" Islam, and he acknowledged that Obama was currently a practicing Christian--but it was the beginning. Nobody knows who started the anonymous chain emails, but Martin does take credit for being the first to argue publicly that Obama was raised Muslim.

As Wikipedia reveals, Martin is quite a character. (What's printed on Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate, but in this case it provides a range of credible sources, including official court transcripts.) Numerous federal and state courts have dubbed him a "vexatious litigant" due to his having filed hundreds of mostly frivolous lawsuits. He was denied a license to practice law in the state of Illinois because of his unprofessional behavior on various occasions. But I haven't gotten to the most interesting part. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune (reprinted on an Illinois Republican Party website):

In his past, Martin also has expressed anti-Semitic views. When he ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the name of his congressional campaign committee included the phrase "to exterminate Jew power in America," Federal Election Commission records show.

In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he referred to a federal bankruptcy judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." In a related court filing in the case, he also expressed sympathy to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Though he denies having made those remarks, despite what the public records show, he is still pretty open about his views on Israel. A columnist for a Florida newspaper summed it up (the embedded links are my own, pointing to more recent articles where Martin said these or similar things):

While he touts a two-state solution for the Middle East in his "Andy Martin Peace Plan," says he's close to the peace movement in Israel, and has proposed increased compensation for Holocaust victims, the candidate also called for the Bush administration to attack Israel instead of Iraq. He has compared Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler and has written in defense of Hamas suicide bombers.

Here are some highlights from his rambling 1983 affidavit which makes Mel Gibson's drunken rant seem mild by comparison. (I got the text from Justia.com, a legal site with thousands of court records.)

Although I was not a Jew hater when these cases began, any love for the Jews I may have had has been dissipated by barbaric tortures inflicted on me by the Jews. I can see now that anti-semitism has a real root in the ageless manipulation, chicanery and murder by the Jews.... Jews killed the son of God, and seek to deny the fact, and seek to murder and loot and steal from anyone who opposes their efforts at world domination.... I do not believe I can receive Justice from a pack of Jew thives [sic], judges and lawyers.... "Judge" Krechevsky is not neutral or detached. He is part of a Jew conspiracy to steal my property.... I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property.

There's something sadly ironic about the fact that Jews concerned about Obama's relationship with the Jewish community have accepted the words of a real anti-Semite. It may seem strange that he would appeal to a fear of anti-Semitism. My guess is that he enjoys manipulating what he perceives as Jewish power. What's sad is how many of us have taken the bait.

In defense of celebrating black identity

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In 1994, National Review editor David Klinghoffer wrote a refreshingly candid piece about Orthodox Jewish racism. Klinghoffer is a baal teshuva¹ who was shocked by the casual racism he encountered in the frum² world. I mention his article now because it hits upon some of the themes that Obama covered in his race speech. While not condoning bigotry in any form, Klinghoffer argued that some of the bigotry coming from Jews should be understood in the context of their experiences, a consideration he did not extend to American Jews who denigrate blacks.

I began to wonder what Klinghoffer, as a conservative, is saying about Obama now. It turns out that he has defended Obama, sort of, but from a perspective I find highly problematic. In a recent article, he argues, "The Bible makes it clear...that God has chosen some races to teach important lessons to the rest of the world.... [W]hatever unique contribution Africans have to give to the world, it is not racist to suggest that a black church, even a black theology, could be a vehicle for making that contribution."

I think Klinghoffer isn't exercising anywhere near as much caution as he should in using the term "race." The Torah talks about different peoples. The ancient concept of a people is not equivalent to the modern concept of a race. What we call race arose largely as a means of establishing differences where there needn't be.

Klinghoffer was addressing the charge that a "black church" should be considered racist in the same sense that most of us would consider a "white church" to be. But his answer was inadequate. The main purpose of black pride is to raise up a group that has been pushed down.

Whatever the white power movement may insist, whites do not fall into that category. Individual white groups might; there's nothing wrong with ethnically Irish or Italian or Polish people having their own organizations to express pride in their heritage. But an organization for white people is a different matter. Whiteness is an elusive concept that tends to be defined as whatever is left over after you've excluded "other" groups. In practice, it usually ends up excluding many Caucasians.

Some people try to apply the same argument to blacks. Why should we recognize black or African identity at all? Why not talk instead about ethnic Nigerians and Kenyans and Ugandans? In a perfect world, this argument might hold water. But blacks were brought to this country by force and stripped of their previous ethnic identity. No matter where they came from in Africa, they ended up as one group, today known as African American.

You might ask why Obama, who is not descended from slaves, should be considered a part of this group. It's a good question. I will answer it with an anecdote from several years ago. Tiger Woods insisted he was not black but "Cablinasian," an acronym he coined to highlight the many races in his ancestry. Gregory Kane, a black conservative who writes for The Baltimore Sun, retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

For the vast majority of people, even those of mixed ancestry, racial identity is not a matter of choice. It is something thrust upon them. Let's get real: when most Americans look at Obama, they see a black man. The notion that he chose to call himself black to advance his career is preposterous.

Whatever you may think of hip hop music or contemporary inner-city culture, African Americans as a group have made significant positive contributions to America. They are as much a legitimate cultural group as Jews, Italians, Irish, and all the rest that make up this great country. Group identity of any kind has a danger of turning into chauvinism, and often does. But that's the price we pay for having a heterogeneous society. The solution is that people should learn to respect differences, not that they should stop having differences.

Glossary
¹returner to the faith
²religious

The Macho Right

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In his book The Conservative Soul, bleeding-heart conservative Andrew Sullivan writes, "Even the most passionate of the [Bush] Administration's defenders cannot argue that [waterboarding] is not 'cruel, degrading and inhuman' treatment.... The notion that 'waterboarding' is not torture under the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning is preposterous" (p. 169).

I contrast that with Rudy Giuliani's statement about being unsure whether waterboarding is torture. How do you possibly resolve a disagreement like this? Unless you go to the extreme of testing waterboarding on yourself, as Daniel Levin did, it's basically one person's opinion against another's. Frankly, I doubt the former New York mayor, who built his reputation on dogged machismo, is likely to be swayed by, let's face it, a prissy gay Englishman.

Sullivan attributes the Bush view of torture to "the fundamentalist psyche," which holds that "what matters is his intent, not the empirical analysis" (p. 170). This forms part of Sullivan's larger theory that the world is divided into two types of people, fundamentalists and...well, everyone else, I guess. Into the first category he includes various Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Zionists, Islamists, Nazis, and Communists. He characterizes fundamentalism as hostile toward reason, and among the unreasonable qualities he lists are, oh, a black-and-white "us vs. them" mentality. Hmmmmmmm.

The chip in his theory is that Giuliani is no fundamentalist, by the plain meaning of the word as well as its legal meaning. I therefore propose an alternative theory that is equally simplistic, but at least it knows it is. The assault on reason here is coming not from the Religious Right, but from the Macho Right.

Contrary to popular belief, members of the Religious Right are quite capable of reasoned thought, at least when it suits their purposes. Reason is absolutely irrelevant to members of the Macho Right, who are driven not by reason, but by testosterone.

Even if you've never heard the term, you surely are familiar with the right-wingers who seem to build their whole outlook on machismo. "We gotta be tough on crime. We gotta bomb the commies/Muslims/insert-your-own-enemy back to the Stone Age. We gotta stop the liberals who want to take guns away from the real men who own them."

It's no wonder all those tough-guy movie stars, at least the ones who aren't into martial arts, vote Republican: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Eastwood, and Willis.

Schwarzenegger, who has never clearly explained why he's a Republican, is a perfect example. You remember when he characterized his Democratic opponents as "economic girlie men" (never mind that he supports universal health care). Then some gay rights organizations, eager to play Charlie Brown to Lucy's football, complained that his remarks were insulting to homosexuals. Uh-huh.

To qualify for the Macho Right, you don't have to be religious. You don't even have to be conservative in a traditional sense. You certainly don't have to be genuinely tough. As we have seen, right-wingers are more than willing to paint true American heroes like John McCain and John Kerry as spineless sissies.

Some notable examples of Macho Rightists in the media are Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly. You remember Savage. He's the guy who got kicked off of MSNBC because he referred to a caller as a "sodomite" and told him to "get AIDS and die."

Savage, an irreligious Jew, can hardly be accused of Bible-thumping. Macho Rightists aren't fueled by the Bible, which may even provide them with some distractions, such as the admonition to love the sinner. They're the types of people who are given to saying things like, "Get your hands off me, you faggot!!!!"

When Hillary Clinton called Ann Coulter "heartless," referencing her book Godless, Coulter replied, "Oh, lighten up, girl." Apparently realizing the flaw in Hillary's approach, Joe Maguire titled his anti-Coulter book Brainless. That of course has more bite, but it still misses the point. Macho Rightists don't care about brains. They care about cojones.

After all, who else is the emblem of the Macho Right today than President George W. Bush, that tough, macho cowboy who's just like...well, certainly not like the folks from Brokeback Mountain. Those are just sissies who herd cows.

I was once listening to a Macho Right acquaintance of mine rail against bicycle helmets. He wasn't talking about government regulation. He simply hated seeing kids wear them, claiming that today's parents are raising a generation of wimps who can't handle the world.

I had a nasty bicycle spill when I was fifteen. I was wearing no helmet or kneepads. Luckily, I didn't land on my head, but what if I had? I might not be here now to talk about the incident.

The experience gives me a slight advantage when arguing with Macho Rightists. I wouldn't stand a chance against them if all I had were statistics and reasoned arguments. When a Macho Rightist talks, there is absolutely nothing you say, no reasoned argument, that can possibly sway them. On the contrary, the slightest appeal to reason makes you sound like the wuss they know you are. The only way to combat their rhetoric is through more macho rhetoric.

Bill O'Reilly has actually used Macho Right logic to argue against the death penalty. He says that we should give the convicts life in prison so that they can suffer more.

It's hard to say how many Macho Rightists there are, but you know them when you hear them. If you ask any of them whether they belong to the Macho Right, they aren't likely to admit it. The term probably reminds them too much of the Village People.

In defense of Orthodox liberalism

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

R. Harry Maryles writes in this this post, "It is a fact that the conservative principles are generally more in line with Orthodox Judaism than are liberal principles. Although that isn’t 100% the case, I think it is true most of the time."

I care to disagree. But I should note that if Harry had begun the sentence with "It is my opinion..." rather than "It is a fact..." I would not have objected. He is entitled to his views, but they are debatable. Still, I have heard similar sentiments from many other frum people, and it is a topic worth discussing.

A large part of what has inspired the rightward shift among frum voters in recent decades parallels the influences on evangelical Christians: the "traditional values" of which the Republican Party has appointed itself the sole bearer. While those values have nothing to do with the conservative philosophy of unfettered capitalism, Republican politicians created a marriage between these two meanings of conservatism. It is an unhappy marriage. Religious conservatives were duped by Reagan, and many of them have recently woken up to the fact that they've also been duped by Bush.

I've always been amazed at the mental acrobatics of those who argue that Judaism fits the philosophy behind economic conservatism. Their rationale depends partly on the standard but inaccurate translation of tzedakah as "charity." In modern American society, charity is simply a praiseworthy act. In ancient Israel, however, tzedakah was the law of the land. The conservative tenet that we must encourage volunteerism in place of government aid runs contrary to much traditional Jewish thought.

When I raised this point on Harry's blog, Bari noted differences between the ancient Jewish system and modern liberal programs. For example, in halacha a person gets to decide which poor people to give to. When I pointed out that one of the highest forms of tzedakah is giving to someone unknown, Bari replied, "And it's theft if you take it from me to give it to someone else who I don't know. When the govt. does it, maybe it's not theft, but it's not right Al Pi Din Torah."

Bari is walking on thin ice here. Either you think that it's okay to have the government enforce donations to the poor, or you don't. If you don't, but you make an exception for Judaism's specific mandates, and you declare anything else to be "theft" or something close to it, then you're not being philosophically consistent.

Having said that, I should point out that there is a good deal more to politics than philosophy. I don't fault any frum person for taking conservative positions on particular issues. There is room in Yiddishkeit for a variety of political perspectives, once we move past ideology and get into specifics. The problem is that many of us have a hard time stepping outside our own political perspectives and acknowledging that other viewpoints have legitimacy. When we feel strongly about an issue, it is easy to fall into the trap of ascribing simplistic motives to the other side and of not recognizing how complex the issue really is. I'm sure I have been guilty of this before, but I definitely see it in frum conservatives. It is implicit in Harry's statement that "conservative principles are generally more in line with Orthodox Judaism," which almost makes it sound like we can just do a head-count of political positions and declare this one as being more in line with Torah values, that one as being less, and so on.

So let me be clear: On almost any major issue in American politics today, a case could be made for both sides without sacrificing one's commitment to Torah principles. There are possible exceptions, like gay marriage or opposition to stem-cell research. But most issues fall into one of the following three categories:

1) Issues where the Torah's view is irrelevant. One example is gun control. Occasionally I have heard Orthodox rabbis on both sides of this debate attempt to "spin" their favored position as more Torah-based, but their arguments are unconvincing, for the disagreement (properly understood) does not stem from any fundamental difference of values and has no real bearing on halacha. So too with the vast majority of American political issues.

2) Issues where the Torah's view is relevant, but where there is still rabbinic support for both sides. An excellent example is the death penalty. Harry's mentor R. Ahron Soloveichik not only opposed the death penalty but believed that every Jew should.

3) Issues where Jewish law may seem more in line with one side, but where pragmatic considerations might tilt it the other way. This category includes many "social issues" that religious conservatives focus upon, such as abortion.

In sum, I welcome debate on the specifics of any issue. At the same time, I believe that there is much in common between traditional Judaism and many core liberal ideals. It's not absolute, but then neither is the pact that R. Lapin and co. have attempted to make with the Christian Right. And frankly I think the latter poses a greater danger to our freedom as Jews than the fuzzy liberal tolerance that so many frum people claim to despise. Christian conservatives may play nicey-nice to us, but in the long run they're being disingenuous, as becomes clear in the slip-ups by the less shrewd among them (e.g. Katherine Harris). You have to be extremely deluded to believe that the Christian Right views us as an equal partner. No doubt we should stand up for what we believe in, whether economic or social, but we must also be careful not to be so blinded by ideology that we enter into an unhealthy relationship.

Religious tabloids

(Cross-posted at DovBear's blog.)

I see that Krum has posted about Yated Ne'eman's biases. I don't know if I've ever heard a bigger understatement. Yated Ne'eman doesn't just slant. It lies.

This became abundantly clear to me a few years ago when the paper did an article on Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. Rabbi Eckstein is controversial because of his attempts to build bridges between Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians. The Atlanta Jewish Times did a good profile of him in this article.

One day, Yated attacked Rabbi Eckstein. That in itself did not surprise me. It was the manner of the attack that caught my attention. According to Yated, Rabbi Eckstein had recently converted to Messianic Judaism:

In ads and books, [Eckstein's organization] has made numerous alarming remarks over the years, including Eckstein's declaration in one of his books that he had become a Jew for J. Eckstein has denied that he is a Jew for J.

Now, that's a pretty serious charge. But what was particularly confusing is that the two above sentences border on contradicting each other. One sentence says that R. Eckstein announced in a book that he'd become a Jew for Jesus, the next sentence claims that he has denied the charges. The conflation of the two sentences makes the paragraph come off rather like a Wikipedia article.

But this is one of the strange things I've noticed about Yated. It's not just that the paper lies. The paper lies, but unconvincingly. Even if I'd known nothing about R. Eckstein, I still would have been scratching my head after reading this article.

So, what is the truth of the matter? In 2001, R. Eckstein released a novel called The Journey Home. In that novel, a fictional version of R. Eckstein travels with a fictional version of a real-life Christian friend of his in the Holy Land. At one point, the rabbi says, "While I still don't believe in Jesus as the Christ as Jamie does, and view him instead as a Jew who brought salvation to the gentiles, in some respects, that is exactly what I have become--a Jew for Jesus."

Now, I can understand why some Orthodox Jews were alarmed by this statement. But that doesn't give anyone the right to lie about R. Eckstein. If Yated had clarified that this was a fictional story, and that even the fictional version of Eckstein was not embracing Messianic Judaism, the attack on Eckstein would have been more credible.

Of course, the article does quote someone defending R. Eckstein by pointing out that the claim against him was based on "words taken out of context from a story that was totally fictitious." But the article never explains what this remark means. It leaves readers with the impression that the rabbi really did become a Messianic Jew. Who cares if he claims that his comment was taken out of context? That's what they all say!

A couple of months ago, Rabbi Harry Maryles wrote on his blog about an article in Yated written by Dr. David Berger against Lubavitch. I objected to Harry's source, both because Dr. Berger is a known anti-Chabad zealot and because Yated is not a reliable source. Harry agreed with me, admitting that Yated was biased and even dishonest. But he insisted that they lie not overtly but "by omission." I remembered that Harry had on another occasion mentioned being friends with Rabbi Eckstein. Knowing this, I showed him the Yated article on Eckstein. This was Harry's response:

OK. I admit this stretches the outer reaches of truth, but although they are obviously wrong, I do not think they think they were deliberately lying. They were presenting the views of their misinformed Gedolim as fact. This is not the same as a deliberate lie.

I find the above statement disturbing to the max. So it's supposed to be better if Gedolim came up with the false information rather than the paper itself? And where did the Gedolim get the false information? At some point, somebody had to be lying--either that, or they were so careless they literally didn't care whether what they were writing was true or not. The article didn't just print a false rumor. It printed the rumor, but also printed the fact that R. Eckstein disputed the charges, and it vaguely hinted as to why the charges were disputed. But it still stated the false claim as fact.

Harry asked Dr. Berger, who is Modern Orthodox, why he had chosen to print his article in Yated. Dr. Berger contributed a lengthy explanation. He said that he was actually impressed by Yated's standards, because the editor censored a few sentences from his article. In Dr. Berger's words,

I argued that this additional information is critically important, but the editor felt that it was not important enough to overcome the larger editorial policy. I did not draw a line in the sand and allowed the deletion. While I think the editor's decision was mistaken, I admire the commitment to avoiding what he sees as unseemly content, a commitment that overrode any desire to add additional unfavorable information about Lubavitch. I ask myself if I can think of any other forum that would be so fastidious, and I come up empty.

Sarcastically, I replied, "Yeah, they think it's unseemly to mention Jesus by name, but they don't have a problem with falsely accusing someone of worshipping him."

Anyone familiar with Yated knows that distortions of this magnitude are hardly uncommon. The article on R. Eckstein appeared at least a year before the Slifkin controversy erupted, with all the lies and false rumors that went along with that account. Yated is essentially a mouthpiece for the forces responsible for the Slifkin fiasco.

Not too long ago, an article in the Baltimore Jewish News (the Orthodox spinoff of the Baltimore Jewish Times) talked about how Orthodox families in Baltimore handled exposure to secular media. A couple of the families interviewed were uncomfortable getting newspapers like The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times because of their perceived liberal and/or anti-Israel slant. One family preferred The Wall Street Journal, while another preferred, er, Yated Ne'eman.

There's nothing wrong with getting your news from the WSJ, because that publication, like The New York Times, is a legitimate newspaper, ideological slant or no. Sure, they may have occasional lapses from their fairly high standards, but at least they have standards. To prefer Yated, on the other hand, is laughable. Yated isn't a real newspaper; it's a frum tabloid rag. It's amazing to me that the same people who accuse others of being brainwashed are the most eager to brainwash themselves.

Bush is like Chauncey Gardiner

This is a post I wrote long ago, and recently posted to DovBear's blog.

Being There is one of the best films I have ever seen. It came out in 1979 but seems remarkably relevant today. I'm not the first person to have noticed similarities between President Bush and Chauncey Gardiner, but I did come to this conclusion independently.

Peter Sellers stars as a mentally retarded man, Chauncey, who, through a series of accidents, gets mistaken for a great thinker. His actual understanding of the world is so limited that he thinks a television set is people in a box. His only area of expertise is gardening. But nobody seems to notice this, and they interpret his literal statements about TV-watching and gardening (e.g., "As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well, in the garden") as profound metaphors about the world. When he tells someone he can't read, the person thinks he means that he doesn't have the time in this busy world. (Sound familiar?) Gradually, he becomes famous, appearing on talk shows and meeting with public officials. All the while, nobody seems to notice that he doesn't have a clue what's going on! Everyone assumes he's this sophisticated, high-class thinker and misinterprets the simple, mundane things he says as brilliant kernels of wisdom. The film ends with the suggestion that the people around him might have him run for president.

None of this is meant to be taken literally, of course. The story is a satire designed to skewer the vapidity of television culture. I don't think the author of this tale, Jerzy Kosinski, ever foresaw that the situation he was describing would actually come true one day.

You might call me a Bush hater, but that would be a mistake. The Bush haters greatly overestimate Dubya's intelligence. Sure, they all say "Bush is a moron," reciting those words like a mantra, but they don't act like they really believe it. They give the man an awful lot of credit for the actions and policies of the Bush Administration, as though he's somehow in charge of everything rather than (as I see it) a puppet being controlled by others. When a reporter asked him for his opinion following the revelation of Deep Throat's identity, this was his response: "I don't have an opinion yet." Open-minded, huh? I'm sure that's how his admirers have spun it. I have a more sinister explanation: he hadn't yet discussed the matter with his advisors, who would tell him what his opinion should be.

He's like that a lot. You think he's the one who came up with those words about the sacrifice in Iraq being worth it? He never writes his speeches. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; most politicians have speechwriters. But the thing about Bush is that, in everything he does, he seems to rely heavily on the efforts of other people--Dick Cheney, Karl Rove ("Bush's Brain"), Condaleeza Rice. Remember Fahrenheit 9/11 and all the vacation time he spends? It often seems like Cheney's really the acting president, while Bush goes off to play golf, or jog, or relax somewhere. He has had this reputation ever since he was governor of Texas, a position, I should point out, that has so little power it's almost symbolic.

But what's truly amazing is how little the public notices this, even when they disagree with him. Take the aftermath of 9/11. He looks noble, delivers a nice speech he didn't write, and suddenly he's the most popular president ever. His handling of 9/11 was no more impressive than I would expect from any other president. He was just fortunate enough to be around when this great tragedy happened, and he has continually exploited its political value ever since. When he arrives with Bin Laden in chains, I'll give him credit. Until then, he should shut his trap.

I may be making the same mistake I mentioned before, of crediting Bush with the actions of others in the administration. It's often hard to tell who's really making the decisions, since most of Bush's public appearances are scripted. When he's forced to make off-the-cuff remarks every now and then, he ends up saying stupid things that reveal a startling lack of understanding. Rove is actually on record having instructed Bush to make as few public appearances as possible during his 1998 gubernatorial run. They wanted to keep him out of the limelight as much as possible, otherwise people were bound to notice that the emperor has no clothes.

What about his handling of debates? Wasn't there a consensus that he won all those debates against Ann Richards and Al Gore? What we have to realize is that ever since the first televised presidential debate in 1960, the press has had a strange tendency to judge a candidate's performance based on criteria that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of what the person is saying. In 2000, Al Gore was said to have "lost" the debates because of his body language and subtle behavior--he rolled his eyes a lot, stepped into Bush's space--making him come off, supposedly, as arrogant and rude. Then there was the matter of Gore's alleged "exaggerations," like saying he went to a Texas fire site with James Lee Witt, when in reality he went with another official, and traveled with Witt during another incident. The press jumped on Gore for this minor blunder, acting like he was a liar, all the while ignoring Bush's misstatements during the same debates (and there were several). The emphasis on all this trivial stuff ended up overshadowing the fact that the polls taken right after two of the debates showed that the initial consensus was that Gore had won. Only after the press started focusing on these irrelevant details did people change their minds.

If you actually listen to what Bush says during the debates, a different picture emerges. He frequently doesn't answer the questions given to him, sometimes completely changing the subject to talk about something else (i.e., something he's rehearsed). When he does come up with answers of his own, they are startlingly simplistic. A lot of what he does is just repeat key themes over and over, a technique that has proven effective. And his admirers mistake the simplicity for clarity.

As Roger Ebert wrote in his book The Great Movies II, Bush has never said anything Chauncey Gardiner couldn't have said. This is not to suggest that Bush is actually retarded--I'm not prepared to back that up, and it isn't true. He seems to have certain kinds of smarts. But he's intellectually vapid, and proud of it. (He actually boasted to having been a C student.) He's like Chauncey in the sense that he's a know-nothing who's being controlled by the people around him.