McCain repudiates Hagee - when will Jewish leaders follow?

An article in the Huffington Post - McCain Backer Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God's Will - seems to have made enough waves about pastor John Hagee to persuade John McCain it was time to reject Hagee's endorsement of him. Sam Stein, the Huffington Post writer, learned of an offensive sermon by Hagee from Bruce Wilson's website, Talk 2 Action.

A couple of days before this I was cruising the Talk 2 Action site and came across the audio clip from one of Hagee's sermons in the 1990s, in which he referred to Hitler as a "hunter" who was sent to harry the Jews into Palestine. Wilson introduced the clip by referring to Hagee's book Jerusalem Countdown: "In his 2006 book 'Jerusalem Countdown', Hagee proposed that anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves - the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive."

I just took a look at Jerusalem Countdown (the revised 2007 edition, available on Amazon) and discovered that Hagee put almost the same words as he uttered in his sermon into the book (pp. 132-33).

The Bible is a book of parables and word pictures describing principles of truth from God to man. The prophet Jeremiah puts his pen to parchment and paints a vivid picture of the human agents God intended to use to bring the Jewish people back to Israel.

“But now I will send for many fisherman” declares the Lord, “and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.”
Jeremiah 16:16 (NIV)

I believe this verse indicates that the positive comes before the negative. Grace and mercy come before judgment. The fishermen come before the hunters. First, God sent the fishermen to Israel. These were the Zionists, men like Theodor Herzl who called for the Jews of Europe and the world to come to Palestine to establish the Jewish state. The Jews were encouraged to escape while there was still time. The situation for the Jews in Europe would only get worse, not better.

A fisherman is one who draws his target toward him with bait. Herzl and his fellow Zionists were God’s fishermen, calling the sons and daughters of Abraham home. Herzl was deeply disappointed that the Jews of the world did not respond in greater numbers.

God then sent the hunters. The hunter is one who pursues his target with force and fear. No one could see the horror of the Holocaust coming, but the force and fear of Hitler’s Nazis drove the Jewish people back to the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have – Israel. I stand amazed at the accuracy of God’s Word and its relevance for our time. I am stricken with awe and wonder at His boundless love for Israel and the Jewish people and His divine determination that the promise He gave Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob become reality.

This passage is part of a longer discussion about how the return of Jews to Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel fulfill God’s plan to restore Israel, as outlined in Ezekiel 37. He maintains that even though the state has physically been established, it is still waiting for spiritual life (p. 131).

At the conclusion of Ezekiel 37, the nation of Israel had been physically reborn. Today they have a flag; they have a constitution; they have a prime minister and a Knesset. They have a police force, a powerful military might, and the world’s best intelligence agencies. They have Jerusalem, the City of God. They have a nation. They have everything but spiritual life.

Like the dry bones of Ezekiel 37, Israel waits the spiritual awakening of the breath of God and the coming of Messiah.

Even without discovering the sermon, anyone who read Hagee's book could have found out that he considered Hitler to be the "hunter" who providentially made sure that the Jews (minus the six million who died at the hands of the Nazis!) returned to the land of Israel. For Hagee, Hitler did God's will. I guess those who died in the Holocaust were just the collateral divine damage to enable the state to be established, in Hagee's opinion. For Hagee, this is a sign of God's "boundless love" for the Jewish people. Mass death=love?!

I don't understand how anyone could believe in a God who would do that. As Yehuda Bauer (well-known Israeli historian of the Holocaust) wrote in 2000:

For me, the existence of God after the Holocaust is impossible from a moral point of view. It makes belief in God a vast problem, quantitatively and qualitatively. One and a half million children - of the Chosen People - under the age of thirteen were murdered! This is not a question of free choice because the children didn't have any free choice. It is the Nazis who had the free choice, not the children. So if there is a God that in one way or another controls the destiny of the world - even if that God retires and does not wish to do it, he can and he knows; otherwise he's not a God. He's responsible for the murder - no way out. No answer, human or divine, is satisfactory for the murder of one and a half million children - and if there is an answer from high above, then it is the answer of Satan, and rather than believe in Satan, I will not believe.

I don't come to the same conclusion that Bauer does - that it is impossible to believe in God after the Holocaust - but I agree with him that if one believes that God permitted the Holocaust to occur, that one believes in a Satanic God.

What's more, Hagee is saying that the only place Jews should be living is in Israel - so those of us who live in the United States and other countries are defying God's will, and presumably should suffer the divine consequences.

Tell me again why this man is considered to be "pro-Israel" or "pro-Jewish"? Tell me again why "Jewish leaders" like Joe Lieberman are willing to cosy up to Hagee because of his supposed "support" for Israel?

For my previous posts on Hagee - click here.

Full-blooded Americans?

Kathleen Parker's op-ed last week in the Baltimore Sun is bizarre, especially this section:

Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values and made-in-America. Just as we once had and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.

Who "gets" America? And who doesn't?

The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Mr. Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It's also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Full-bloodedness? Blood equity? Roots? What do they have to do with patriotism or heritage? Parker seems to be arguing, in an extremely inept way, that Barack Obama isn't a true American because his father was Kenyan. During the rest of the article she slams on the usual suspects of multiculturalism and illegal immigration. Her real point seems to be an insistence on a "blood and soil" definition of Americanism.

Feh.

Update: Or, as Molly Ivins said of Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican convention: "It sounded better in the original German."

Why won't some people vote for Obama?

An article in yesterday's Washington Post makes it clear that some white voters don't vote for Obama because he's black (or because they believe the lie that he's a radical Muslim) - Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause. Campaigners for Obama in some states have run into rank racism.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

On another race that's being decided tonight - in the Mississippi first congressional district, the Democrat (Childers) is defeating the Republican (Davis) 53% to 47%, with 58% of the vote counted. It would be remarkable if Childers defeated Davis, as this article from Talking Points Memo describes.

Lebanese bloggers

For those interested in blogging by Lebanese bloggers on the current fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and many others (may it not actually turn into the new Lebanese civil war), I've found these blogs very insightful:

Jeha's Nail
Blacksmiths of Lebanon
Across the Bay
Beirut Spring
From Beirut to the Beltway
Bad Vilbel

Obama and Lebanon

More on Obama and the Middle East, this time Lebanon. An aticle by Lee Smith on Michael Totten's website - The Tea Boy - calls into question his knowledge and tendencies in Lebanon, which according to his analysis might lead Obama to be much too accommodating to Syria. This would definitely not be good for Lebanon, which is backing Hezbollah in its attempt to take over the country. See also the analysis of Jeha - Between the lines. He says: "Could someone tell that neophyte that he is not yet President of the United States? He will have plenty of chances to “engage” with Syria at our expense, when or if he becomes "President of these 57 states". We may be down, but we're not out yet..."

Obama in North Carolina and Indiana

It's very interesting watching the presidential primary results tonight. The television networks called North Carolina for Obama as soon as the polls closed, but they still haven't called Indiana (apparently because one county in the northwestern part of the state is waiting to report all of its votes until after completing the counting of all the absentee ballots). It seems unlikely, however, that he'll take Indiana, even if he does very well in Lake County. It's pretty close, though.

Jeremiah Wright on Zionism and Israel

I used to have hope that Barack Obama's candidacy was really a sign that this country was changing - that it was possible that a black man might actually be the Democratic presidential candidate and even win the presidency. I didn't expect miracles from him if he became president, but his candidacy gave me hope. Now, even since before the Pennsylvania election last week, I started to lose hope - because of the attacks of the Clinton and McCain campaigns, the malicious nonsense being spread about how he's a Muslim and hates Israel, the attacks from a whole host of right-wing pundits. Now, Jeremiah Wright seems to have decided that he wants to completely destroy Obama's chances for becoming the Democratic candidate - out of his own selfish desire to make a name for himself. He made a speech today at the National Press Club. I'm not going to write about all of what he said, only the part that upsets me the most.

As I said on the Bill Moyers' show, one of our news channels keeps playing a news clip from 20 years ago when Louis [Farakkhan] said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion.

This is a nonsensical statement. Zionism is a political movement, not a religion. And Louis Farakkhan did call Judaism a "gutter religion." (See this pro-Farakkhan website for a corroboration of that statement - Blacks and Jews).

And he was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter is being vilified for, and Bishop Tutu is being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago.

Which UN resolutions is he talking about? The 1975 resolution that declared that "Zionism is racism"? Or the one that abrogated that resolution? Somehow I suspect that he's referring to the first one.

Later on in the talk Wright said:

MODERATOR: You have likened Israeli policies to apartheid and its treatment of Palestinians with Native Americans. Can you explain your views on Israel?
WRIGHT: Where did I liken them to that? Whoever wrote the question, tell me where I likened them.
Jimmy Carter called it apartheid. Jeremiah Wright didn't liken anything to anything. My position on Israel is that Israel has a right to exist, that Israelis have a right to exist, as I said, reconciled one to another.
Have you read the Link? Do you read the Link, Americans for Middle Eastern Understanding, where Palestinians and Israelis need to sit down and talk to each other and work out a solution where their children can grow in a world together, and not be talking about killing each other, that that is not God's will?
My position is that the Israel and the people of Israel be the people of God who are worrying about reconciliation and who are trying to do what God wants for God's people, which is reconciliation.

I'm glad to hear that he thinks Israel has a right to exist, but why should Israel be expected to be the "people of God" in his Christian terms? Does he make the same demand of Palestinians or other Arabs? I certainly don't see it in this speech.

Now what about the group "Americans for Middle Eastern Understanding"? The name rang a bell, from my reading online about Daniel McGowan, the anti-semitic Holocaust denying emeritus professor from Hobart and William Smith College. And in fact, it's the same group that's published some of McGowan's prose on its website. The website is: AMEU and the Link is its newsletter.

From what I can see from its website, AMEU isn't interested in dialogue or reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians - it's interested in the dissolution of the state of Israel. And this is the group that Wright is recommending to us a source of inspiration for reconciliation?

My fear about Obama is that no matter what he says about Wright now - however harshly he denounces him - that this means the utter destruction of his campaign.

AAR & SBL - together again?

The AAR has finally come to its senses and decided that it's okay for the AAR and SBL to hold their Annual Meetings at the same time of the year and in the same city.

April 14, 2008

Dear Fellow Members of the American Academy of Religion:

I write today to alert you to an action taken by your Board of Directors at its meeting this past weekend.

In light of the scheduling and logistical problems connected with the proposed Independent Annual Meetings, and given the views our members expressed in our recent member survey, the Board, in its April 12, 2008 meeting, approved a recommendation that the AAR begin scheduling concurrent, yet independent Annual Meetings with the Society of Biblical Literature as soon as is feasible....

I cancelled my membership in the AAR because of its unilateral decision to stop organizing Annual Meetings together with the SBL. I learned of this decision because of an e-mail from the SBL:

The SBL Council discussed this announcement at its meeting on April 26, 2008, and offers the following comment to SBL members.

We are pleased to hear of this new development, and wish to reaffirm our continued interest in meeting at the same time and in the same city as the AAR. The SBL was not involved in the original decision by AAR; nor have we been involved in the present one. We will certainly discuss with AAR the feasibility of meeting in the same city at the traditional time (the weekend before US Thanksgiving) as soon as it is possible given present scheduling commitments and contractual arrangements. We are already scheduled through 2012 (Chicago) and 2013 (Baltimore). Once discussions commence with AAR regarding future concurrent meetings, the SBL Executive Director will report regularly on the progress in making this a practical reality. We firmly believe that holding the SBL Annual Meeting at the same time and in the same city as other organizations involved in the advancement of biblical, religious, theological, and related academic studies is a good idea. It brings together people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to exchange ideas and build relationships.

Great! It made no sense to stop holding the meetings together, and I hope that the two associations will start working immediately to make the joint meetings possible again.

How predictable!

IAEA head slams US for holding back info on Syrian reactor. "Additionally, 'the director general views the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the nonproliferation regime,' it said."

So if the US and Israel had informed the IAEA ahead of time about this reactor, would the IAEA have done anything about it? Or would there have been a long and fruitless series of discussions with the Syrian regime, first trying to get permission to see the reactor, then getting permission to do tests - by which time it would have been fully operational. This way, the reactor is destroyed and the North Koreans are outed as having helped the Syrians. What is bad about that?

Obama's Pastor

Obama is going to have to denounce the statements of the pastor of the church he's belonged to for many years in much stronger terms than he has previously if he has any hopes of becoming president. This ABC news story has many very damaging quotes from Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11.

This is what I find the most offensive - Jeremiah Wright speaking in terms very reminiscent of Ward Churchill's vile article after the September 11 attacks:

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.

He even uses the same metaphor as Churchill - chickens coming home to roost.

And Obama's campaign hasn't been nearly forceful enough in its denunciations of Wright -

In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done."

I don't really care if Obama doesn't think of the pastor of his church in political terms - a lot of other people will, and will identify him with the comments that Wright has made over the years. He has to denounce him, and quickly. I don't believe for a minute that Obama believes the same things as Wright does - but he has to make that crystal clear.

Leon Greenman

This is a moving obituary of "the only Englishman to be sent to Auschwitz," Leon Greenman, who died on March 7 at age 97.

Leon Greenman was the only Englishman to be sent to Auschwitz. His wife and son died in the gas chambers, and for two and a half years he was a slave labourer, subjected to beating and experimentation. He vowed that his life thereafter would be devoted to keeping the memory of such horror alive. His final decades were spent in unceasing testimony against the crimes of Nazism, and determined campaigning against any modern revival of fascism.

South Jerusalem

Matthew Yglesias just tipped me to this new blog - South Jerusalem - written by Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman. Haim's entry on why I like South Jerusalem really encapsulates my favorite things about South Jerusalem - Emek Refaim, Baka, Katamon, Talpiot. This is my place in Jerusalem. I love this line - "Add to that the fact that South Jerusalem is the only place in the world where you can be a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew and feel like you are part of a mass movement." Amen!

Why do writers pretend to be Indians?

This article - Why do writers pretend to be Indians? - may shed some light on the psychology of Ward Churchill.

To the Westerner who 'understands' the terrorist

Another great column by Bradley Burston - To the Westerner who "understands" the terrorist - on yesterday's terrorist attack in Jerusalem.

Today's dead

1) Terrorist attack on Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Kiryat Moshe kills eight yeshiva students, one as young as 15.

2. Islamic Jihad terrorists blew up an IDF jeep on the Gaza border, attacked a rescue crew and killed one soldier. About the roadside bomb that blew up the jeep - "Israeli officials said that the explosive device was large, shaped and sophisticated. They suggested that it was built by militants who had received weapons training in Iran, the main sponsor of Islamic Jihad." Could this be one of the explosively formed penetrators that have been so devastating against American armored vehicles in Iraq? They were used by Hezbollah in the Lebanon war in 2006.

3. Workers at Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha came under fire from the same group of Islamic Jihad terrorists.

4. A Palestinian terrorist was killed by a Israeli airstrike on a rocket-launching team.

5. Seven Qassams were fired into Israel, two hit houses in Sderot, including that of Elisheva Turjeman.

Jews and Hagee

Two good articles on Hagee & Jews - one from Gershom Gorenberg, one from Matthew Yglesias. Both address the question of why there hasn't been more Jewish outrage about Hagee's support for McCain.

Gorenberg, who has written on the type of Protestant theology that Hagee adheres to - dispensational premillennialism (in his book The End of Days) - points out that Hagee's 1996 book, Beginning of the End: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist "expressed uncommon sympathy for" Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin.

Hagee is a fine man to be supporting John McCain - someone who thinks that political assassination is a legitimate way to change a nation's policies!

More on Obama and the Jews (and a little Ralph Nader thrown in for good measure)

The same talk that Obama gave to Jewish leaders in Cleveland (which I quoted from in my last post) also has some more interesting statements from him, as well as the latest slime from Ralpha Nader.

He [Obama] also again noted his disagreement with some of the critical statements on Israel made by the pastor of his church, which he ascribed to the latter's support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa at a time that Israel continued to trade with the regime there.

"He is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with," he said. "And I suspect there are some people in this room who have heard relatives say some things that they don't agree with, including, on occasion, directed at African Americans."

He concluded, "I understand the concerns and the sensitivities, and one of my goals constantly in my public career has been to try to bridge what was a historically powerful bond between the African American and Jewish communities that has been frayed in recent years."

Also on Sunday, Ralph Nader, while declaring his third-party candidacy for the US presidency, attacked Obama for allegedly concealing his "pro-Palestinian" feelings.

"He's run a brilliant tactical campaign, but his better instincts and his knowledge have been censored by himself," Nader charged on NBC's Meet the Press. "He was pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state senate... Now he's supporting the Israeli destruction of the tiny section called Gaza with a million and a half people."

Nader called the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a "real off-the-table issue for the candidates," including Obama, whom he described as "the first liberal evangelist in a long time" to run for president.

"The guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He's got no credibility," an Obama campaign adviser said about Nader.

Obama's campaign on Monday responded to Nader's attacks on the senator's position on Gaza.

"Barack Obama's longstanding support for Israel's security is rooted in his belief that no civilians should have to live with the threat of terrorism," the campaign statement said. "In Gaza, Hamas continues to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians every day, and that's why it is long past time that Hamas renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel's right to exist and abides by past agreements."

Democratic National Committee consultant Matt Dorf, who also does Jewish outreach, also dismissed the Nader accusations as off the mark and meaningless.

"If he thinks there are voters out there to be had by demonizing Barack Obama's record, including on Middle East issues, he's not going to find them," Dorf said. "Nader's going to get even less support than he got last time."

I guess Nader has decided that once again it's his turn to play the spoiler role vis-a-vis a Democratic candidate for President. Nader is a star example of the principle that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." He is seeking perfection, and can't abide anything less than perfect that might actually succeed. For him, ideological perfection is much preferable to doing something that actually might bring practical results.

Obama on Israel

James Kirchick, one of the bloggers on the New Republic's blog Plank, has just posted a dumb comment about something that Obama recently said. He's getting all in a lather at the following statement:

"I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel," leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.

"If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress," he said. He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than "just crushing the opposition" is being "soft or anti-Israel."

Obama made the comments in a closed-door meeting with several members of Cleveland's Jewish community, who will be participating in the crucial Ohio primary to be held next Tuesday.

The candidate stressed his commitment to a secure, Jewish Israel and to pursuing robust diplomacy - while keeping all options on the table - to ensure that Iran doesn't acquire nuclear weapons, according to a transcript of the off-the-record event.

Obama defended - and distanced - himself from criticism that has been leveled at him about some of his campaign advisers and endorsers, but he suggested that too black-and-white a perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict helped no one. He described the debate in Israel as "much more open" than it often is in the United States.

"Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the US pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation," he continued. "All I'm saying, though, is that actually ultimately should be our goal - to have that same clear-eyed view about how we approach these issues."

Kirchick seems to think that Obama is interfering in Israeli politics by mentioning Likud, and compares him to Jim Moran, who said, "I'm never going to satisfy people who think we should be giving unequivocal support to the Likud Party." About this Kirchick says, "Such protestations about the all-encompassing power of 'Likud' is a trope in the victimization rhetoric of peace-processors who constantly blame Israel for the region's woes while pretending to be valiant friends of the Jewish State."

Obama isn't making a statement about Likud being "all-powerful" (which at the moment it certainly is not, since it's in the opposition, not in the government). Instead, he's pointing out that one can be pro-Israel without going along with all of the political positions of the Likud party, a point which is in fact often forgotten in the pro-Israel community. AIPAC, for example, seems quite able to welcome the support of someone like John Hagee (who is really advocating the destruction of Israel in his end-time theology), but does not countenance even mild criticism of Israel's actions.

What I like about these quotations from Obama is that they reveal a real acquaintance with the different political views in the American Jewish community, and a willingness to be a true advocate for peace alongside a firm support for Israel. I hope that this doesn't sink him in the end with Jewish voters who get too scared at what he is saying and misread his willingness to work for peace for a lack of support for Israel.

I think that he is spot on about why the pro-Israel community in the U.S. is often more protective (than Israeli opinion). This is an impulse that I have often felt myself, even though my politics are much to the left of the Likud. I get very tired of hearing the reflexive anti-Israel opinions of the American and European left, many European nations, and of course all of the U.N. resolutions that condemn Israel without also condemning Arab actions against Israel. In the face of that onslaught, it's tempting simply to support Israel and everything it does, out of the conviction that even if Israel adopted the methods of "flower power" tomorrow, it wouldn't matter to those who routinely savage Israel.

American religious groups

I just took a look at the Pew religion survey (which I referenced in the previous entry), and figured out the numbers for each religious group according to the percentages from the survey. I multiplied the percentages by the current number for the U.S. population, which I got from the Census Bureau's website - 303,549,926. Since I was using the Pew survey's percentages, the figures are identical for those religions which had the same percentage in the survey, which is obviously artificial. What has really gotten attention in the press is the fairly large number of unaffiliated people (16%), but I think all of the numbers are interesting.

Following up on an earlier series of posts about the relative numbers of Muslims and Jews in the United States, this survey estimates that the Jewish population is 1.7% of the American population (around 5.2 million people) and that the Muslim population is .6% of the American population (about 1.8 million people). The Muslim figure is at the lower end of the estimated number of Muslims in America. The Jewish figure is in accord with lower estimates of Jewish population made by various recent Jewish population surveys.

Other interesting facts that come from the survey - the total number of Catholics is not much less than the total number of Evangelical Protestants: about 79.8 million vs. 72.5 million. Buddhists and Hindus are 2.1 million and 1.2 million respectively. Unitarians are a little over 900,000, while New Age (including Wiccans and pagans) is about 1.2 million.

American religious groups - estimated total numbers

Evangelical Protestant - 79,833,630
Historically Black Churches - 20,944,944
Mormon - 5,160,348
Orthodox (Christian) - 1,821,299
Jewish - 5,160,348
Muslim - 1,821,299
Unaffiliated - 48,871,538 [this includes: Atheist - 4,856,798, Agnostic - 7,285,198, Nothing in particular - 36,729,541]
Mainline Protestant Churches - 54,942,536 [this includes mainline Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglican/Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, Congregationalist, Quaker]
Catholic - 72,548,432
Jehovah's Witness - 2,124,849
Buddhist - 2,124,849
Hindu - 1,214,199
Unitarians and other liberal faiths - 2,124,849
New Age - 1,214,199

More on McCain/Hagee

Another thing that I don't understand about McCain's acceptance of Hagee's endorsement is what he thinks the effect that Hagee's anti-Catholicism will have on Catholic voters in the general election. Isn't this just a gift that McCain is giving to the Democratic nominee, who can present him or herself as the candidate of religious tolerance? Hasn't it sunk into McCain's consciousness how many Americans are Catholic (it's the largest single Christian denomination in the country, much bigger than the Southern Baptist Convention)? And Catholics don't like having their religion dissed any more than anyone else does.

What Hagee really believes about Jews

Bruce Wilson of the Talk to Action blog has posted a long story about John Hagee's views about Jews - in which it becomes quite clear that he is anti-semitic in so many ways! And this man not only has endorsed McCain for president (and had his endorsement enthusiastically welcomed by McCain), but has also been welcomed by AIPAC (at their annual conference last year). Why are our so-called Jewish "leaders" so oblivious to the dangerous flaws of the people they've embraced as our "friends"?

Israel blues - המצב

Another few events have recently occurred that have made me feel even more hopeless than usual about the situation (המצב) in the Middle East. First of all, the escalation of fighting between Hamas and Israel - the killing of a student at Sapir College, the increase in the range of Hamas rockets to northern Ashkelon. Any response that Israel makes to the Hamas attacks is condemned - if it's military, then because innocent civilians get killed (which they do); if it's through an economic blockade, because innocent civilians, again, are being harmed for the actions of the terrorists. Israel has withdrawn, totally, from Gaza.

Why should Israel be expected to aid people who respond only with violence? Even when Israel opens the crossings between Israel and Gaza to allow humanitarian shipments in, there are attacks at the crossing points themselves. Why can't aid go through Egypt? I actually thought it was good when Palestinians knocked down the wall between Egypt and Gaza and were able to go to Egyptian Rafah and buy supplies. Why can't that be made permanent? (I suppose one of the problems is that this would make it easier for trained terrorists to enter Gaza, which seems to have been the case - some Iranian-trained terrorists who had entered Gaza recently were killed by an IDF strike, which was one of the factors that led to the escalation from Hamas).

I was talking to a (non-Jewish) friend the other day and brought up the topic of Israel/Palestine. I was saying that about 2/3 of Israelis in a recent poll had said that they were willing to negotiate with Hamas for a cease-fire. She pointed out that it's unlikely that Hamas itself actually wants to negotiate with Israel, since what they want is the destruction of Israel. This same friend has met members of the Israeli peace camp and knows that not all Israelis are right wing (and in fact that they are very ill-served by their political leadership). It was actually quite nice talking to her and having the expansive feeling that it was possible to be pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-Palestinan at the same time.

Then there's U.S. politics. Barak Obama is being attacked by right-wingers because he's supposedly anti-Israel (because he actually expressed compassion for Palestinians, among other things). But actually he's just as pro-Israel as Clinton or McCain. Read his recent speech to AIPAC. He says the same thing the other candidates say. One of the things that was giving me some hope was his capability to see that there is right on both sides.

And then McCain gets endorsed by John Hagee, the right-wing nut case who believes that the best way to love Israel is to hope that it gets blown to smithereens in the final war of Armageddon. And the same media that's all over Obama for not renouncing Farakhan vigorously enough does nothing to pressure McCain to renounce Hagee's support. The same Hagee that some deluded Jews have started to believe is really "pro-Israel." I recently received a book in the mail (unsolicited) by someone named David Brog, called Standing with Israel, with a foreward by John Hagee. The purpose of this book is to try to prove to Jews that we should welcome support from the evangelical right wing that supports Israel because it fits into their theological end-times scenario. No thanks, I'm not interested in this pseudo-support, which will turn to outright anti-semitism when Jews or Israel don't act according to the way they've scripted us into their scenario.

And then, from the left side of the spectrum, I found out that local "peace" groups are bringing speakers and an exhibition to Ithaca in order to inform us all about the "Nakba" and the unmitigated disaster that was created sixty years ago when Israel was established. The speakers and exhibition are completely one sided - there's no acknowledgement that there could be any right on the Israeli side, or that there's moral/political ambiguity in this situation.

I think that what's really depressing me the most is that these events, both in Israel and in the American presidential campaign (as well as in the parochial world of Ithaca) lead to a real narrowing of the political space for anyone who does not want to belong to one of the extremes. For a while it seemed to me that Obama's candidacy was helping to create slightly more political space for this middle ground on Israel/Palestine. But then the Hagee endorsement and the attacks on Obama's "anti-Israel" stand are doing their best to make that space vanishingly small. I think that most American Jews are actually in the middle - we support Israel and we want the best for it, we are concerned about the human rights of Palestinians as well as of Israeli Jews, and we want to see a compromise solution that will allow for the creation of a Palestinian state, both to lessen the misery visited upon the Palestinian people and to give Palestinians fewer reasons to want to attack and destroy Israel.

But the extremes of both the left and the right are not interested in any compromise. According to them we must be ideologically pure - anything else is a betrayal of our principles. I don't believe in purity in politics anymore. My basic political premise now is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. The search for purity just ends up with a lot of injured and dead people.

Obama and the Jews

The second piece of depressing news today comes from this article on the Washington Post website - Obama Rebuffs Challenges on His Israel Stance.

It's really infuriating to me that some Jews have started to believe the disgusting rumors passed around about Obama - that he's anti-semitic, anti-Israel, "really" a Muslim who studied in a madrassa in Indonesia, etc. In the debate the other day, Obama did everything he could possibly do to state his support of Israel and his contempt for anti-semitism.

Asked by moderator Tim Russert what he could do to reassure Jewish Americans, Obama cited his belief that Israel's security is "sacrosanct." He also said he has strong support in the Jewish community because of his opposition to anti-Semitism and his efforts to rebuild the relationship between Jews and African Americans.

I found his remarks quite moving, especially when he talked about wanting to rebuild the relationship between Jews and Blacks. It was quite refreshing to hear him talk honestly about the fact that there have been significant tensions between Jews and Blacks over the past several decades. It's this kind of honesty that makes me support Obama.

So why do some Jews so enthusiastically accept Hagee's support, when what he's really hoping for is an apocalyptic war that will kill most Jews in the world, and the same people then denounce Obama for supposedly being anti-Israel? Is there something wrong with their perceptions of reality?

Hagee endorses McCain

Wow, some depressing news today. The first item is John Hagee's endorsement of John McCain for President. (I wrote on Hagee previously - see Hagee).

Hagee's comments about world affairs can make Farrakhan seem pedestrian at times: He eagerly awaits the Armageddon, considers the Catholic Church to be the Anti-Christ, and has said that Jews brought their own persecution upon themselves....

Boy! Anti-semitic and anti-Catholic - a bigotry twofer! It's rare that I find myself agreeing with Bill Donohue, but in this case he's spot on. Here's more on Donohue's objections:

Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement today that Hagee has written extensively in negative ways about the Catholic Church, "calling it 'The Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,' the 'anti-Christ,' and a 'false cult system.'"

Still More on Bill Ayers

This guy really does fascinate me, but I hope my small band of readers isn't getting too bored by my posts about him. It amazes me that he ever managed to become a tenured professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago - a "Distinguished Professor," no less.

I just found a review of his memoir, Fugitive Days, which was published on August 22, 2001, on Slate: Radical Chic Resurgent, which is even more cutting than the New York Times' articles I've been quoting. The review begins: "Chatterbox isn't sure he's ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless as Fugitive Days."

In a Slate article published on Sept. 19, 2001, Timothy Noah writes:

In the wake of Sept. 11, Chatterbox has developed a morbid fascination with Bill Ayers' foiled publicity campaign for Fugitive Days, his memoir of the Weather Underground. As Chatterbox noted before, Fugitive Days tries to pass off armed rebellion against the United States as a sort of lark. In the book, Ayers maintains that he was not a terrorist because terrorists "kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated." Chatterbox demurs. Any group that sets off two dozen bombs, including one at the Pentagon and one at the U.S. Capitol, as the Weather Underground did during the early 1970s, ought to be called a terrorist group. (The Weather Underground doesn't appear to have killed anybody, unless you count the accidental deaths by explosives of a few of its members, but the lack of other casualties seems largely to have been a matter of luck.) Remember, too, that Ayers told his followers, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." This earns Ayers at least some spiritual kinship to Osama Bin Laden.

He continues about Ayers' marketing problems for the memoir after September 11:

But the post-Sept. 11 environment poses a significant marketing challenge to Fugitive Days. Accordingly, Beacon Press has announced that it will "suspend promotional activity for this book out of respect for all those who died, their families and friends." Ayers has posted on Beacon Press' Web site a statement denouncing "the barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings last Tuesday" and expressing regret that his book should be published "in a radically changed context ... the temptation for some is to collapse time." In truth, though, the main thing this "changed context" does is remind the public that people who set off bombs run a significant risk of killing other people, even if, in spite of their public pronouncements, they don't really want to kill other people.

Bill Ayers & Ward Churchill

Unsurprisingly, Bill Ayers supported Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who was fired for fraudulent scholarship.

But the spotlight on Churchill revealed numerous complaints of academic misconduct that had been raised by other academics, but never addressed by CU. He was accused of plagiarism, inventing historical incidents and ghostwriting essays which he then cited in his footnotes in support of his own views.

Those allegations were the ones that brought dismissal today.

R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian, said he was glad that Churchill's supporters did not sway the regents.

"I'm glad that scholarship, or the ideal of scholarship, won out over somebody's weird view of political correctness," he said. "I'm happy that it happened, that he's been found out, and, by his peers - meaning other university people - and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and a liar."

Robertson's book was among those cited by investigators as having been mischaracterized by Churchill.

"Facts are facts and truth is truth, and when you're dealing with history I think it doesn't need to be distorted by people with a warped political objective," Robertson said.

Another author whose work was mischaracterized by Churchill said the firing was appropriate punishment.

"It's important to know Indian history, and it's important to know factual Indian history, not just a bunch of B.S. that someone made up," said Russell Thornton, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Churchill attributed assertions that the Army deliberately spread smallpox among Indians to one of Thornton's book's, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492.

Bill Ayers - apologia

I discovered that Bill Ayers has a blog, and scrolling through it just now, I found his apologia for his terrorist actions. He dresses up his violent acts with a lot of warmed over anti-imperialist rhetoric, but it's still a justification for bombings that could have killed innocent people.

Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn

A very softball interview with Ayers and Dohrn in an issue of In These Times a couple of years ago: Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn. Of course, there's no mention of the terrorist crimes they were involved in.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

Politico posted a story yesterday on Barack Obama's encounters in Chicago with two radicals from the 60s who are responsible for terrorist acts - Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were members of the Weather Underground. My issue is not whether Obama has any serious connection with these two people - I see no evidence of that, and he denounced their terrorist actions through a spokesman for his campaign. What bothers me is how these two people have managed to get away with their crimes with very little or no punishment and subsequently have reached important positions in American academia - both are tenured professors.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life. They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members. Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

I read about this story about a week ago somewhere else on the web and went to look up Ayers' history. What I found was, frankly, disgusting. In September of 2001, Ayers published a sort of memoir/sort of fictional account of his life, Fugitive Days (Beacon Press). A review of the book/interview with him was published on September 11 (obviously, when it was printed on that day, no one knew what it would forever be remembered for - but it's definitely apposite, considering what he had to say about terrorism). (Read this Clyde Haberman article from September 10, 2002, which is an attempt to replicate how September 11 felt just before the attacks - he refers to the article on Ayers). He is totally unrepentant about the acts of violence he committed. Among other things, this is what the New York Times article said about him:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago....

Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education [my emphasis] at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a ''whirlpool of violence.''

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'' He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive. Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail....

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

''I don't think you can understand a single thing we did without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War,'' he said, and the fact that ''the enduring scar of racism was fully in flower.'' Mr. Ayers pointed to Bob Kerrey, former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, who has admitted leading a raid in 1969 in which Vietnamese women and children were killed. ''He committed an act of terrorism,'' Mr. Ayers said. ''I didn't kill innocent people.'' ....

All in all, Mr. Ayers had ''a golden childhood,'' he said, though he did have a love affair with explosives. On July 4, he writes, ''my brothers and I loved everything about the wild displays of noise and color, the flares, the surprising candle bombs, but we trembled mostly for the Big Ones, the loud concussions.''

The love affair seems to have continued into adulthood. Even today, he finds ''a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,'' he writes.

He attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then the University of Michigan but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

In Chicago recently, Ms. Dohrn said of her remarks: ''It was a joke. We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.''

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight -- antiwar militants accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for ''conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.'' Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states....

In the mid-1970's the Weathermen began quarreling. One faction, including Ms. Boudin, wanted to join the Black Liberation Army. Others, including Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers, favored surrendering. Ms. Boudin and Ms. Dohrn had had an intense friendship but broke apart. Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn were purged from the group.

Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers had a son, Zayd, in 1977. After the birth of Malik, in 1980, they decided to surface. Ms. Dohrn pleaded guilty to the original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined $1,500. The Federal charges against Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn had already been dropped.

Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn tried to persuade Ms. Boudin to surrender because she was pregnant. But she refused, and went on to participate in the Brink's robbery. When she was arrested, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers volunteered to care for Chesa, then 14 months old, and became his legal guardians.

A few months later Ms. Dohrn was called to testify about the robbery. Ms. Dohrn had not seen Ms. Boudin for a year, she said, and knew nothing of it. Ms. Dohrn was asked to give a handwriting sample, and refused, she said, because the F.B.I. already had one in its possession. ''I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive,'' she said. For refusing to testify, she was jailed for seven months, and she and Mr. Ayers married during a furlough.....

So Ayers didn't regret setting the bombs, nor does he think they did enough. Everything was ideal on the day he set the bomb at the Pentagon. But it's okay, because he didn't actually kill any innocent people. Well, if the bomb that blew up the townhouse in Greenwich Village had actually been used against (and killed) the army officers it was intended for - would that still have been okay because the officers wouldn't have been "innocent"?

On September 16, an interview with Ayers was published in the New York Times magazine. It appears that the magazine had gone to press before September 11, because the interview with him refers in no way to the terrorist attacks on that day. On that same day a letter to the editor from Ayers was published, completely contradicting everything he'd said in the September 11 article. This letter was obviously written after the September 11 attacks. In it he says:

The barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings on Sept. 11 has in an instant transformed the complex landscape of American consciousness. I'm filled with horror and grief for those murdered and harmed, for their families and for all affected forever. ''Fugitive Days,'' the memoir I've written about my participation in the Weather Underground and the antiwar movement and the events of 30 years ago, is now receiving attention in a radically changed context. My book is a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms. We are witnessing crimes against humanity. The intent of my book was and is to understand, to tell the truth and to heal.

Brent Staples then published an excoriating review of Ayers' book (on September 30, 2001, in the Times) which takes apart all of Ayers' rationalizations and refusals to take responsibility for himself.

Kathy Boudin has served 17 years in prison for her role in a 1981 Brink's robbery that left a guard and two police officers dead and nine children fatherless. She received a sentence of 20 years to life, but in most cases an inmate with her record of model behavior could expect parole. Few people were surprised, though, when Boudin was turned down for parole at a widely publicized hearing in August. Prison officials cited the extraordinary violence of the crime. But looming over the case was Boudin's membership in the Weathermen, a spinoff of Students for a Democratic Society. A group of affluent white kids, they played at being revolutionaries during the 1970's and took credit for bombing two dozen public buildings, including the Pentagon. The group was defunct by 1981, when Boudin joined a band of thugs associated with the Black Liberation Army -- an offshoot of the Black Panther Party -- which executed the Brink's truck robbery and, to judge from bomb paraphernalia and plans found after the robbery, seemed ready to blow up several New York City police stations. The robbery made clear the extent to which the student protest movement of the 1960's had deteriorated into naked criminality.

Boudin, at 58, is confronting the possibility of spending the rest of her middle age in prison. But her former comrades Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, members of the Weathermen high command -- once known as the Weatherbureau -- who led the group through its most violent period in the 1970's, have served no significant jail time. Both of them teach at name-brand universities and are headed for cozy retirements like those of the bourgeois parents they so despised during their Weathermen days. Ayers has further cushioned his future by writing a maddeningly evasive memoir, ''Fugitive Days'' -- one of those books that tell by not telling.

The jacket copy is the kind of agitprop that could have been written by the young Ayers himself. In it we learn that ''Bill Ayers was born into privilege,'' and we are given to understand throughout ''Fugitive Days'' that privilege is a crime, if not a badge of shame.... The class guilt drums on and on....

The Weathermen's other great theme was blackness. They fetishized it. Not just any blackness, mind you, but poor, angry blackness that tended toward violence and criminality....

When the Weathermen move underground, he likens the group to ''black Americans who must know everything about the dominant culture while remaining . . . invisible to that culture.'' When the group blows up a building, the act is cast as revenge for the power structure's ruthless attacks on the ''black struggle.'' This affinity, by the way, is what landed Kathy Boudin -- Bryn Mawr graduate and famous lawyer's daughter -- among the criminals who robbed that Brink's truck.

''Fugitive Days'' contains a great many obfuscations. Chief among them is the author's reluctance to mention Boudin. The two had a longstanding acquaintance that probably began in Cleveland during their S.D.S. days. They would certainly have known each other by 1969, when the Weathermen split off from S.D.S. in pursuit of a more perfect radicalism. Years later, after Boudin went to jail for the armored truck robbery, Ayers and Dohrn took custody of her young son, Chesa, who was not yet 2 years old. The absence of Boudin in the book is peculiar, especially since she became famous in the event that forms the emotional center of ''Fugitive Days,'' the explosion that leveled the Greenwich Village town house the Weathermen were using as a bomb factory in 1970. Boudin survived the explosion, walking naked from the wreckage and onto the F.B.I.'s most wanted list. But the blast killed three people, including Ayers's lover, Diana Oughton, who was later identified from a fragment of finger.

Ayers fixates on the explosion.... Ayers sifts and sifts this event, but somehow avoids mentioning Boudin -- even as he recounts meeting with ''two of the comrades who'd come out of the explosion alive,'' one of whom had to have been Boudin.

We can only guess why he fails to mention her. One possibility is that he wished to avoid adverse publicity at a time when Boudin was seeking parole. There is also a more complicated possibility. Ayers wants us to see Oughton as a revolutionary saint who struggled against the Weathermen's bomb-based violence. He imagines that she blew up the town house deliberately, killing her comrades and herself, to prevent the explosives from being used against their targets. The notion that Oughton resisted the group's more violent tendencies is borne out in Lucinda Franks's 1981 New York Times Magazine account of an argument that is said to have consumed the day and the night before the explosion. Franks suggests that Boudin favored using antipersonnel bombs, and that Oughton had misgivings.

The story of Oughton's struggle is poignant, whether or not it's true. But elsewhere in ''Fugitive Days'' the task of choosing among the true, the near true and the untrue is frustrating. Ayers reminds us often that he can't tell everything without endangering people involved in the story. But his partial retelling reaches fraudulence when he writes, ''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' then backs and fills, saying that he bombed it, not literally but metaphorically, as part of the Weathermen group in charge of the operation. He says that he needed to ''claim'' the explosion in order to write about it, and he adds later that he is not ashamed of any of the bombings and would not rule out planting another bomb someday; ''I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility.''

In Ayers's hands, a career in terrorism becomes a harmless episode out of a John le Carré novel, in which our hero lives on the run, steals explosives, sets off explosions using ''tradecraft,'' as the flap copy puts it -- as if the Weathermen were characters in ''Smiley's People.'' But the Weathermen game was never really a game. Nor was it ever noble, or even moral. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, readers will find this playacting with violence very difficult to forgive.

And Ayers and Dohrn are still tenured professors in Chicago. Boudin was paroled in 2003. The two police officers are still dead. Oughton is still dead. Why and how Ayers and Dohrn have managed to become rehabilitated in the eyes of some liberals is still astonishing to me.

Cats and gardens

Cat on living room table.

Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly has some beautiful photos of his cats for Friday catblogging (especially Domino, on the left). But what I'm really jealous of is the photo of his other cat, Inkblot, supervising gardening! Here in Ithaca it's cold, snowy, and icy, and we're beset by the flu. No sign of spring yet. I'd love to be gardening!

So, herewith, some cat photos -


The cat, of course, sitting on my chair.


Another favorite cat spot, when he wants to sit close to me - on the laser printer.


And then when I'm sitting at the computer and he's looking for a warm (although not a soft!) perch - on top of the tuner.

And, then finally, a little bit of green:


My wandering Jew (plant)

Night Photos - Moon Shadow

Last night I went out in the cold to take a look at the lunar eclipse as it was just starting. I managed to get a few photos which look kind of eerie, and also a photo of the house across the street. One of the moon photos looks like it's surrounded by crackly ice.

Merkavah Vision

Through a referrer file, I came across a blog with a cool name - Merkavah Vision. My sometime correspondent Deane appears to be the blog author. Great graphics. How about some comments on Merkavah Mysticism?

Too much Holocaust?

A fine article by Norm Geras - Too much Holocaust, countering an article by Tony Judt that too much attention is being paid to the Holocaust.

Judt's final difficulty, as it had to be in view of what has gone before, is the relation of the Holocaust to arguments about Israel and the Palestinians. It has several components, some of which have already been foreshadowed in what has gone before. (a) Judt deplores the way the Holocaust is invoked to deflect criticism of Israel by the suggestion that such criticism is a stimulus to anti-Semitism or just is anti-Semitism without further ado. (b) In fact, the reverse is true, he says: it is the taboo on criticism of Israel and a too intense focus on the Holocaust that are stimulants to cynicism and anti-Semitism. (c) Relative to other minority groups in the US and Europe, the Jews are not especially stigmatized, threatened or excluded; they are successful, and prominent in many spheres. (d) The Holocaust may 'lose its universal resonance' if it is too closely attached to the defence of a single country; as things are, if you ask outside the West, ask amongst Africans and Asians, what lessons there are from the Shoah, the responses 'are not very reassuring'.

What is striking about these arguments of Judt's is their unqualified, their completely one-sided, character. It is true that the Jewish tragedy in Europe is sometimes misused to justify or excuse Israeli policies that should not be defended. But to say this without noting that there is also anti-Semitic hostility to Israel, in the Arab world and in the West, some of it perfectly overt and some of it more discreet, is to pretend that anti-Semitism is a smaller problem than it is. To lament such misuses of the Holocaust without mentioning the misuses in the opposite direction that equate Israel with the spirit and the methods of the Nazis is to see with only one eye. The same goes for writing as if the most serious sources of anti-Semitism might be arguments used by defenders of Israel or an over-emphasis on the Shoah. Really? This is a centuries-old hatred, and yet here we find ourselves in a situation where it is defence of the Jewish state and memory of the genocide against the Jews that are the stimulants of anti-Semitism; these, at any rate, are Tony Judt's sources of choice.

New Blog: Stuff White People Like

The Stuff White People Like blog is painfully accurate - catch especially the entry on the Prius or on reading the New York Times on Sunday mornings. It's a bit generationally limited - 80s nights certainly don't draw me in - but it hilariously catches the upper middle class leftish white people aesthetic.

Tompkins County in a sea of blue

Stumper, a blog on the Newsweek website, posted a story today (Stumper: Obama Won One New York County) on Obama's win in Tompkins County, that argued for why this win may portend something for future primary states. I don't know if I buy the author's argument, but he reproduced the cool New York Times graphic of the tan Tompkins Country surrounded by grayish blue. And so here it is:

Tompkins County - votes for Obama

I've been following the election tonight (of course), and the state of New York has gone for Clinton (not a big surprise, since she's a very popular senator) - but the only county in the state that went for Obama is where I live, Tompkins County. I'm not particularly surprised - it's likely that we're the most liberal county in the state. Cornell University and Ithaca College are here, as is a large community of people who came here for college and never left, and lots of old hippies who have also never left. It's just highly amusing to look at the county-level map of New York on the New York Times website and see that this is the only Obama county.

When I went to vote this afternoon in the Fall Creek elementary school, there was a long line of people waiting to vote in the Democratic line. This is the first primary I've ever voted in where I actually had to wait to vote. Usually hardly anyone shows up to them. But it was fun to be part of a crowd. And if the voting went according to the lawn signs that have been put up in Fall Creek, more of them were voting for Obama than for Clinton.

We'll just have to see what happens next....

Arun Gandhi apology and resignation

Arun Gandhi has resigned from the peace institute he headed at the University of Rochester.

He issued an apology a few days after his original column -

I am writing to correct some regrettable mis-impressions I have given in my comments on my blog this week. While I stand behind my criticisms of the use of violence by recent Israeli governments -- and I have criticized the governments of the U.S., India and China in much the same way -- I want to correct statements that I made with insufficient care, and that have inflicted unnecessary hurt and caused anger.

I do not believe and should not have implied that the policies of the Israeli government are reflective of the views of all Jewish people. Indeed, many are as concerned as I am by the use of violence for state purposes, by Israel and many other governments.

This is the point that I found most offensive in his remarks - the conflation of the actions of the state of Israel with all Jews, indiscriminately. If he wishes to condemn the actions of Israel, I have no problems with that, and may agree with him in some instances. But on the other hand, even if Jews don't agree with me or with him, that still does not mean that they are guilty of the inciting to violence that he accused us all of.

I do believe that when a people hold on to historic grievances too firmly it can lead to bitterness and the loss of support from those who would be friends. But as I have noted in previous writings, the suffering of the Jewish people, particularly in the Holocaust, was historic in its proportions. While we must strive for a future of peace that rejects violence, it is also important not to forget the past, lest we fail to learn from it. Having learned from it, we can then find the path to peace and rejection of violence through forgiveness.

It is certainly a feature of contemporary American Jewish life that the Holocaust does sometimes become the core of people's Jewish identity - I think that this is damaging to people who do this. How can something as horrific as the Holocaust be the foundation of a positive identity? The Jewish tradition is ancient and rich - this is what we should be learning about and transmitting to the next generation. But unfortunately, it is not possible to ignore the Holocaust and its continuing impact on Jews, even those in the third generation after the events of the Shoah.

I do have a fundamental theological disagreement with Arun Gandhi, about the role of forgiveness. According to traditional Jewish thinking, if someone offends you in some way - injures you physically, steals from you, defames you - then there is no requirement to forgive that person for the offense. If, however, the perpetrator comes to you and asks for forgiveness, and offers compensation for your losses, then it is incumbent upon you to forgive that person. If you refuse to do so, then the Jewish court (beit din) can offer the perpetrator forgiveness on your behalf. But the perpetrator's repentance and compensation are integral parts of the process of forgiveness.

How, then, can Jews forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust? Those who committed the crimes have not come to the Jewish people either individually or as a group to ask for forgiveness, nor have they offered compensation. Adolf Eichmann had to be dragged out of his hiding place by the Mossad - he didn't turn himself in with statements of regret and remorse. If you watch the movie "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann, he interviewed utterly unrepentant Nazis.

And then, who is it that has the right to give forgiveness? The millions of dead cannot offer forgiveness, because they are gone. The survivors of the killing? Well, have the perpetrators asked their forgiveness? I haven't heard of any such cases. The children of survivors? They are not the ones who directly suffered at the hands of the Nazis? The Jewish people as a whole? How can we offer forgiveness on behalf of others who might not agree with us?

I think that individual forgiveness can be an important part of engaging in a nonviolent struggle against oppression - by someone who has decided to take on that responsibility. But I don't see how Arun Gandhi or anyone else can ask "the Jews" as a people to grant forgiveness.

We certainly cannot blame Germans who lived after the Second World War of complicity in crimes committed before their birth - but I see no reason to forgive those who destroyed one third of the Jewish people.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2008

Norm Geras has posted several moving comments on Holocaust Memorial Day 2008. See especially what he has to say about Hannah Arendt's idea of the "banality of evil" and about Primo Levi's testimony on Auschwitz. (Today is Holocaust Memorial Day in Europe - on the anniversary of the day that the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945).

Kennedy Plans to Back Obama Over Clinton

This is exciting - Ted Kennedy Plans to Back Obama Over Clinton.

Obama wins South Carolina

Barack Obama appears to have won the South Carolina primary by a sizable margin - 53% to Clinton's 27% and Edwards' 20%. I'm happy to see this because I'm seriously considering voting for him. Hillary Clinton is extremely knowledgeable on many issues - when the whole subprime mess was really beginning to affect the stock market a couple of weeks ago, I heard her speaking on the issues very fluently (and making a lot of sense). But I really like Obama's tone of hopefulness, and the fact that he doesn't bring the Bill Clinton baggage to the race that Hillary does. I haven't liked Bill's recent attacks on Obama at all - they seem quite slimy to me. (See Josh Marshall's discussion of this on Talking Points Memo - The Problem with Bill 2.0).

Oh, and Caroline Kennedy is endorsing Barack Obama (in tomorrow's New York Times). (Of course, she doesn't determine who I'm going to vote for, but I think it's interesting that she's doing so).

Bob Herbert (in today's NYT - Questions for the Clinton) discusses the dubious tactics used by Hillary Clinton's supporters, like Andrew Young and Bob Kerrey (who raised the "Obama is a Muslim" red herring at the same time as he denied doing it!). He ends his column by saying, "What kind of people are the Clintons? What role will Bill Clinton play in a new Clinton White House?" I have the same questions - does Bill Clinton now imagine that he'll be his wife's co-president? Do we want the continuation of another dynasty?

The "Obama is a Muslim" e-mail reached me via a Jewish friend - the text and a thorough rebuttal of all its claims are available at Snopes.com - Who is Barack Obama?. Shortly after I received the e-mail, nine major Jewish organizations issued a public statement denouncing these internet rumors - see 9 Jewish Leaders Say E-Mail Spread Lies About Obama.

The letter was signed by: "William Daroff, vice president of United Jewish Communities; Nathan J. Diament, director of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America; Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Richard S. Gordon, president of the American Jewish Congress; David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee; Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Phyllis Snyder, president of the National Council of Jewish Women; and Hadar Susskind, Washington director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs."

CNN on Ron Paul's racism

As I had hoped, the fact that the story about Ron Paul's racism was finally written about in a mainstream media outlet - the New Republic - means that other mainstream media will pick up the story. Today's CNN Politics report includes an article about Ron Paul 90s newsletters rant against blacks, gays. Let's see now what other major media will pick up the story.

(Mahatma) Gandhi and the Jews

Harry's Place has dredged up two of Gandhi's more notorious quotes about the Jews, nonviolence, and the Holocaust (Gandhi's article can be found here: Gandhi). In 1938 he recommended nonviolent resistance against Nazi persecution in Germany, and seemed convinced that if Jews willingly offered their lives, this would result in a moral reformation of the German people.

He was also opposed to Zionism, partially on the grounds that the Jews should prefer to be citizens of the countries where they lived (England, France, Germany) and should fight for their rights in those places. (Obviously at the time this would not have worked in Germany!) He also thought that Zionism was unjust to the Arabs of Palestine. One curious part of his position was that although he opposed the Jewish use of violence in Palestine against Arabs, he did not object to the Arab use of violence against Jews. He says: "I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds." It is very curious, in my opinion, that he would so fiercely condemn Jewish use of violence without at the same condemning Arab use of violence. He does not recommend that the Arabs use satyagraha against the British or Jews in Palestine. (The context for this article was the 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British rule and Jewish settlement in Palestine).

In 1939, Martin Buber wrote an open letter to Gandhi offering a rejoinder to his views on Zionism and the situation of the German Jews. (Partial text found at the Jewish Virtual Library - Buber to Gandhi). I found a precis of his letter on the National Review online site:

In a thoughtful personal response dated February 24, 1939, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber — who had himself emigrated to Israel from Germany a short time earlier and combined his Zionism with earnest efforts to peacefully reconcile Jewish and Arab claims in the Holy Land — chided Gandhi for offering advice to the Jews without any recognition of their real situation. The individual acts of persecution that Indians had suffered in South Africa in the 1890’s hardly compared, Buber noted, to the synagogue burnings and concentration camps instituted by Hitler’s regime. Nor was there any evidence that the many instances in which German Jews peacefully displayed strength of spirit in response to their persecutors had exercised any influence on the latter. While Gandhi exhorted them to bear “testimony” to the world by their conduct, the fate of the Jews in Germany was to experience only an “unobserved martyrdom” without effect.

Turning to Gandhi’s allegation that to claim a homeland in Palestine was inconsistent with the Jews’ claims to equal citizenship in the other countries of their birth, Buber recalled to him that the Indians of South Africa whose cause Gandhi had championed themselves drew sustenance from the existence of India as their “living center.” It was only the existence of such a home that made Diaspora tolerable, respectively (Buber added) for both Jews and Indians.

As for Gandhi’s denial that the Jews had any place in Palestine, since it “belonged” to the resident Arab population, Buber reminded him that the Arabs themselves had previously acquired the land by virtue of a “conquest of settlement” — in contrast to the peaceful methods of the Jews in purchasing land there. Why, indeed, in view of the “primitive” state of Arab agriculture, should Palestinian land be held to belong exclusively to the Arabs, when Jewish settlers had done far more to develop that land’s fertility in the past 50 years than the Arabs in the preceding 1,300? With proper development, there was no reason that the land of Palestine might not support millions of Jewish refugees along with resident Arabs at a far higher standard of living than the latter had heretofore enjoyed. Finally, Buber reminded Gandhi that when the subject was the rights of Indians, as opposed to those of the Jews, Gandhi himself had remarked (in 1922) that he had “repeatedly said that I would have India become free even by violence rather than that she should remain in bondage.”

Arun Gandhi seems to have taken his grandfather's position on Palestine and added to it his own frisson of anti-semitism. I thoroughly disagree with Mahatma Gandhi's pacifism, in the wake of the Holocaust, but at least he did not insult the victims of mass death. However, both Gandhis fall into the same pitfall of excusing the violence of the Palestinians while condemning the Jews or Israelis for using violence to gain their ends. It seems to me that for nonviolence really to have the moral force that is claimed for it, the same demand should be made to both sides - as, for example, Martin Luther King did in the United States.

Note (12-03-12): I will publish further comments on this post, but only if they refrain from excusing Nazism and the Holocaust, or from repeating the witless statement that most Jews in the world today are descendants of the Khazars. This blog does not give a platform to Nazis and antisemites.

Sullivan hearts Ron Paul

Well, it seems that Andrew Sullivan really has drunk the Kool-Aid when he says that he just doesn't believe Ron Paul "wrote those repulsive sentences himself." So then why did he allow them to be published year after year under his name? Why did he sign some of those newsletters? Why does he associate with Christian Reconstructionists? I think that Sullivan is allowing his misguided love for Ron Paul to get in the way of accepting the impressive evidence that Paul held (and still holds) repulsively racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic beliefs and hangs around those who also believe those things.

(Arun) Gandhi and the Jews

Apparently Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, doesn't understand Jews and the Jewish situation in the contemporary world any more than his grandfather did. Although in the case of Arun Gandhi, he's added a fair dose of anti-semitism. This is my fisking of Gandhi, in an "On Faith" posting on the Washington Post website - Jewish identity in the past.

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.

Unfortunately, it's a German burden that they placed upon the Jews - it's hard to get away from the murder of six million of your people. I don't believe in shaping Jewish identity around the Holocaust, because it means centering one's identity on death - but there's no way to avoid considering it in thinking about the modern Jewish experience. Here, he seems to be blaming the victim for focusing too much on what the victim has suffered. I'm sorry if that makes people uncomfortable who claim to be "friends" of Jews, but that's too bad for him.

The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful.

This is a misconception that I often find among my students - the idea that the Holocaust was the result of the pathologies of Adolf Hitler, as if one man could kill so many millions of people without help from others! It shows a profound ignorance of the historical causation of the Holocaust and how it actually occurred.

But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.

Why should Jews forgive those who murdered their relatives and ancestors? That doesn't mean holding the post-war generation of Germans guilty of the sins of their parents and grandparents. One of the striking things about modern Germany is the degree to which the country has taken responsibility for the deeds of the Nazi regime and has attempted to make amends. The Israeli government is certainly cognizant of this, as are Jews who have come into contact with new generations of Germans.

Again, Gandhi here seems to be blaming the victim for the anger that "the world" feels because Jews have refused to forgive Germans. I don't think at all that contemporary anti-semitism is due to anger at Jews for refusing to forgive Germans - I think he should be looking instead at the survival of right-wing tendencies in many western nations, and the growth of Nazi-style anti-semitism in the Muslim world in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel. And I say Nazi-style because the Nazis are the source of this anti-semitism. Traditional Muslim anti-Jewish feeling has nothing to do (and has none of the deadly quality) of the anti-semitic ideas that have swept through the Muslim world.

The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. In Tel Aviv in 2004 I had the opportunity to speak to some Members of Parliament and Peace activists all of whom argued that the wall and the military build-up was necessary to protect the nation and the people. In other words, I asked, you believe that you can create a snake pit -- with many deadly snakes in it -- and expect to live in the pit secure and alive? What do you mean? they countered. Well, with your superior weapons and armaments and your attitude towards your neighbors would it not be right to say that you are creating a snake pit? How can anyone live peacefully in such an atmosphere? Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you? Can you not reach out and share your technological advancement with your neighbors and build a relationship?

Well, Gandhi is an heir to his grandfather's concepts of peace and nonviolent struggle, so it's not a surprise that he would be arguing against an Israeli military build-up. I agree that Israel should be trying much more to get along with its neighbors - opening up negotiations with the Syrians, for example, and engaging in honest negotation with the Palestinians that includes the willingness to dismantle most of the settlements in the West Bank - but that doesn't mean the Israeli government should refrain from military measures to protect its population as well.

Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (and Israel and the Jews are the prime instigators) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.

This is the really anti-semitic part of his essay - the idea that "Israel and the Jews" are the prime instigators of the "culture of violence" in the world. Keeping close to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, how about the gunmen of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the Al-Aksa Brigades who have blown up Israeli civilians - are they not contributors to the "culture of violence"? Or moving to South Asia - how about those in India and Pakistan who developed nuclear weapons for their countries, and the governments that have paid for those weapons and threaten each other with them? I can give many other examples, as I am sure anyone else is to - his obsession with "the Jews" is truly bizarre, and it is this obsession that has turned this struggler for nonviolence into an anti-semite.

Sderot Qassams

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times has finally reported on the Qassam rocket attacks on Sderot. (I usually disagree with those who criticize the NYTimes for being "pro-Palestinian," but I make an exception for Erlanger, who I think does generally favor the Palestinians over the Israelis). His report is quite good, although he does have the obligatory line about the "wretched" life of Palestinians in Gaza. He makes clear how much impact the fear of Qassams has had on those living in Sderot - especially on children. His story highlights why Israelis are so nervous about making concessions to the Palestinians (a point that seems to elude him, however).

Ron Paul takedown

James Kirchick of the New Republic has finally done the research in Ron Paul's newsletters to prove the point that his bigoted associations with neo-Nazis and racists reflect his own views - and have done so for many years. Read the whole article - this is one paragraph I paid particular attention to (on Jews):

The rhetoric when it came to Jews was little better. The newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul's Investment Letter called Israel "an aggressive, national socialist state," and a 1990 newsletter discussed the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise." Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."

Kirchick has put onto the New Republic website the text of the Ron Paul newsletters that he quotes from, so it's possible for the reader to judge for herself whether Kirchick has read him correctly.