---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 11:22:26 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Rabbi Moonbeam [Michael Lerner]
Rabbi Moonbeam
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 24, 2002
THE PROPHET ISAIAH WARNED THE JEWS that those seeking their destruction
would emerge out of their own midst (Chapter 49, verse 17). The prophecy
has come home in spades in recent years, in a wave of anti-Semitism among
Jewish Leftists that has accompanied assaults against Israel. For many
years, assimilationist, Jewish leftists have served as fig leafs for
anti-Jewish bellicosity and anti-Israel aggression as collaborators with
anti-Semites. These are folks who essentially hate their own people and so
support anti-Semitic bigotry and belligerence throughout the world, all in
the name of promoting "peace and justice." While they are better seen as a
psychiatric phenomenon than a political one, they nevertheless do enormous
harm and play a destructive role in the current Middle East crisis that
must be properly understood.
One of the more amusing pastimes is watching how the myriad instruments of
the Israel-bashing media keep discovering the novelty of Jewish leftists
who justify anti-Semitism and even Arab terrorism. Their serendipity knows
no boundaries when discovering Jews who justify PLO atrocities and insist
that Israel is to blame for everything wrong with the world. In reality,
self-hating Jews promoting a "Blame the Jews" ideology have been around for
thousands of years and go back at least to the Hellenistic Age, and
probably even earlier. Anti-Semites have always utilized them voraciously.
After all, if even these "Jews" are convinced that the Jews are a greedy
and evil people, surely it must be so. Jewish anti-Semites, like gentile
anti-Semites, generally do not concede that they are bigots. They insist
that they are 'only" anti-Zionist and really want only the best for the
Jews, which just happens to include the total capitulation of Israel to
Arab fascism.
Of the countless such Jewish Uncle Toms, "Tomming" it up for the
Jew-bashers of the world, perhaps the best known in the United States is
Michael Lerner. Lerner made the evening news early in the first Clinton
Administration, when Hillary Clinton briefly considered promoting Lerner's
New Age "politics of meaning," a sort of generic liberation theology, whose
deity is the Idol of political correctness. The "politics of meaning" was
nothing more nor less than the advocacy of the left's political agenda
mixed with a shtikele of Hillarycare, superficially dressed up in religious
slogans and symbols. Under the "politics of meaning," all prayer is
replaced with self-indulgent endless repetitions of the mantra "loving and
caring" and assertions that all those who disagree with the Left are greedy
and selfish.
Within the Jewish world, Lerner is better known for serving as editor of
the flaky Far-Left Tikkun magazine, a sort of a mix between a
nominally-Jewish Rolling Stone and Z Magazine. "Tikkun" means "repair" and
refers presumably to the concept in Judaism of "repairing the world." The
only problem is that, characteristically, "Tikkun" is completely
misrepresented by Lerner and his people. It has nothing to do with
politically correct "social justice," as they insist, but rather with the
battle against paganism and the submission of the world to God's will. In
other words, the pursuit of PC paganism a la Tikkun is the exact opposite
of the traditional Judaic concept of "Tikkun."
Tikkun Magazine presents its readers every month with a roll call of
shallow leftism, mixed with New Age touchy-feely recreational "compassion"
and peace posturing. It uses the word "healing" the way most people use
commas, usually in the sense of "spiritual healing" (whatever that is), but
is not averse to offering pop medical tips without a license.
Tikkun seeks to serve as a nostalgic fossilization of Sixties
counter-culture and New Left radicalism. Last fall Tikkun Magazine insisted
that the US respond to the September 11 attacks (which it calls the
September 11 "disturbances") by feeling Osama bin Laden's pain. It has
repeatedly advocated psychedelic drugs use and proposes transcendental
meditation as the solution to Middle East strife.
The magazine serves as the flagship for Lerner's pseudo-Judaic cult
movement, calling itself the Tikkun Community, which has a handful of
"synagogues," the largest located in San Francisco. Since Lerner can be
counted on to support the Arab position on the Middle East with perfect
consistency, he has become the darling of much of the anti-Israel liberal
media. He regularly writes Israel-bashing Op-Eds for the Los Angeles Times
and for other outlets and has appeared in the New York Times, where he
complained about being victimized by a witch-hunting anti-progressive
conformist Jewish community. Naturally, Lerner sticks to the line that he
is only opposed to Israel's current policies, not to its existence, and if
he happens to "understand" and rationalize the mass massacres of Israeli
civilians by Arab terrorists, this has nothing to do with him wishing Jews
harm. The campus protesters who took to the streets to support bin Laden
also claimed that they possessed not a smidgen of anti-Americanism.
Lerner's op-ed piece claiming he had been subjected to threats of violence
appeared in the Los Angeles Times (May 18, 2001), and was widely cited and
reported. But Lerner's word on the existence of such threats is not exactly
ironclad or inscribed in stone tablets. The Philadelphia Inquirer a few
years back reported that letters to the editor, in Tikkun, agreeing with
Lerner's articles, were in fact being written under false names by Lerner
himself!
Lerner routinely is introduced in his columns and at events as a Rabbi, and
he signs his columns and his electronic postings as "Rabbi Lerner." In
fact, it should be emphasized up front that Lerner is not and never has
been a Rabbi, and virtually no one outside the Tikkun cult acknowledges him
as being any sort of clergyman. He did briefly take some courses in the
1960s to prepare him to be a Jewish Sunday School teacher. But he has no
Rabbinic training and was never ordained as a Rabbi by any Rabbinic
training seminary or institution. He claims that he was "ordained" when
three mysterious unnamed "Rabbis" placed their hands upon his head, while
perhaps wishing for The Force to be with him, but no Rabbi and no one
outside the Tikkun movement would recognize this "ordination" as kosher.
Lerner began his political career back in Berkeley in the 1960s, where he
was active in several leftist groups and in the "movement." In one of the
finest reminiscences of the day, David Horowitz describes Lerner's wedding,
which he attended, in his book "Radical Son":
"The cake at his wedding was inscribed with a Weatherman slogan: Smash
Monogamy. Soon he and his wife had a child, and the young family went east.
When the couple separated shortly thereafter, mother and son went to live
in Boston. Lerner, however, returned to Berkeley. "Michael," I said, "how
can you leave your son in the east to come to Berkeley? He needs you."
Without hesitation, Lerner answered: "David, you don't understand. I have
to be here. Berkeley is the center of the world-historical spirit." Lerner
also made me understand that drugs were central to the consciousness of the
Movement. On discovering that I had never taken LSD, he was incredulous:
"You have to take LSD. Until you've dropped acid, you don't know what
socialism is."
>From Berkeley Lerner migrated to Seattle, where he served as commissar of
the thuggish Far-Leftist Seattle Liberation Front (SLF). In a February 22,
1970 interview in the Seattle Times, Lerner predicted that he would be
fired from his academic post (as visiting assistant professor) at the
University of Washington because "I dig Marx," and that "three years from
now I don't expect to be alive. I'm too public a person." At least one of
these predictions came true when, in March, the philosophy department voted
against renewing Lerner's appointment due to his lack of serious
credentials, and so the university joined a long list of bogeymen whom
Lerner claims have persecuted him because of his politics. Earlier,
Lerner's Seattle Liberation Front joined with the Black Student Union to
invade six university buildings and brutally beat at least fourteen
instructors and students who did not heed their "strike order." (Lerner, if
we can judge from newspaper photos, remained at a safe distance, bullhorn
in hand.) State Senator James Andersen, (later a state supreme court
justice) described the firing of Lerner as being based on the fact that the
taxpayers were "fed up to their ears with paying Lerner to teach violence."
It was at that time that Lerner began his lifelong habit of threatening to
sue anyone and everyone who criticizes him or disagrees with him (and
FrontPage expects to receive such a threat momentarily); all this from a
person whose claim to fame began with membership in the Berkeley Free
Speech movement. When Slade Gorton (then state attorney and later Senator
from Washington) described Lerner's Seattle Liberation Front as "totally
indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism," Lerner threatened suit. When
the New Republic revealed that Lerner's sister had been placing personal
ads in magazines to try to get her brother dates, Lerner and sister
threatened to sue. (Lerner seems to have a long history of dating problems;
in a letter widely circulated on the Internet, Lerner writes an appeal to
friends to find him dates, but only with Ashkenazi or European women, a bit
of racism he has yet to explain.
When Professor Edward Alexander from the University of Washington wrote an
expose of Lerner, the latter sent threatening letters to numerous Jewish
newspapers and magazines, warning they would be sued by him if they printed
the piece. (The classic and authoritative analysis of the Lerner career is
still the book written by the same Alexander (The Jewish Wars: Reflections
by One of the Belligerents, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1996, especially pp. 141-51). Professor Alexander has described Lerner as
"a kipah (skullcap)-wearing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely 'rabbinic'
appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel and not the Arabs
for the absence of peace, and to liken Israeli defense against Palestinian
Arab violence to medieval Christian mobs . . . organizing pogroms against
the whole Jewish community."
While insisting that all he wants is peace and justice in the Middle East,
Lerner's prescription for achieving such is essentially the same as Yasser
Arafat's. He demands that Israel return to its 1949 borders and forego all
forms of self-defense. Even though the bulk of Palestinians have not lived
under Israeli "occupation" for many years, such occupation is still the
justification in his eyes of Palestinians perpetrating atrocities. The only
permissible response by Israelis to being butchered by Palestinian
terrorists is to offer them endless appeasements and make sure that Israeli
soldiers refuse to serve their country. Lerner has never seen an act of
Arab terrorism that he does not rationalize, nor an act of Jewish
self-defense he is willing to justify.
In short, despite his protests that he just wants a secure Israel in a
peaceful Middle East, when it comes to specifics Lerner's views on Israel
are indistinguishable from those of Edward Said. (Said is more outspoken
about his desire to see Israel destroyed.) Indeed, Said himself has been a
featured speaker at some Tikkun events. When Commentary Magazine printed an
expose of Said's having fabricated his own autobiography, Lerner wrote,
[Revealing Said's background] "is as obscene as the attempts by various
Holocaust revisionists to argue that many of the Jewish refugees were not
really victims of the Holocaust but merely self-interestedly escaping a war
zone."
As in all forms of anti-Semitism, Arab hatred of Jews is all the Jews'
fault according to Lerner, just as hatred of the US is all America's fault.
Lerner has suggested that all Jews spend Yom Kippur atoning for their
mistreatment and oppression of Arabs. When the PLO lynched and mutilated
two Israeli reservists, Lerner rationalized the Palestinian atrocity. He
believes that the Jews "earned anti-Semitism" of the Arabs by "oppressing
them."
When the US invaded Iraq, Lerner at first waffled, but eventually came out
solidly against the US military campaign against Saddam and also opposed
economic sanctions. Instead, he suggested resolving the Persian Gulf
problems by forcing Israel to withdraw from all of its "occupied
territories." He blamed the 2001 attacks on the US by bin Laden on American
attempts to hoard the world's resources and promote globalization. When the
anti-globalization hooligans tore up Seattle, Lerner compared them with the
Maccabee heroes of Hanukka.
He sees himself and his Tikkun cultsters as full-fledged participants in
the anti-globalization, pro-communism, anti-WTO movement that regularly
trashes Western cities. Lerner writes:
"The contemporary form of domination does not require colonial armies or
imperialist interventions. The free market allows for the concentration of
wealth and power in the hands of the few, and those few are in turn are
able to dominate elections and dictate government policies around the
world. Their allies in government created the World Trade Organization to
extend their power further in countries whose democratic processes have put
environmental, labor, and human rights constraints on the reckless pursuit
of profits uber alles."
The Marxist Pacifica Foundation distributes tapes of his talks.
Lerner has organized support for and raised money for Israeli Marxists and
fellow travelers organizing mutiny, insubordination and refusal to serve
within the Israeli military, and has regularly granted them space in his
magazine. As it turns out, his efforts failed. When Israel invaded the
Palestinian terror strongholds in April 2002, Israeli reserve units had
rates of soldiers reporting for duty of MORE than 100% (meaning people not
even called up were showing for duty).
Lerner demanded this past Passover that all Jews devote their traditional
Seder meal to bemoaning the oppression of the Palestinians by the Zionist
"Pharaoh" (his term). The same Palestinians used the occasion to murder 28
people at a Seder in Israel.
>From the comfort of his sofa in the yuppie bourgeois Berkeley Hills, he
preaches to Israelis under attack that terror cannot be fought militarily,
but rather only with Gandhian non-violence and the politics of meaning. He
has long supported sanctions and boycotts against Israel to force it to
capitulate to the Arabs. He considers Arab terrorists to be the "New
Maccabis," and his writings are routinely carried by the publications and
distribution lists of Islamic fundamentalists; the sorts of people who
support bin Laden's attacks on the US.
Lerner has long cultivated a special close relationship with Cornell West,
who was until recently professor of Black Studies at Harvard before
tangling with the current administration there. Together they co-authored
several books and articles, including "Blacks and Jews: Let the Healing
Begin," and long ago agreed that anti-Semitism among black Americans was
obviously all the fault of the Jews, and that most Jews are racists. In his
view, "The Jewish community is racist, internally corrupt, and an apologist
for the worst aspects of American capitalism and imperialism."
Lerner has written, "Black anti-Semitism is a tremendous disgrace to Jews;
for this is not an anti-Semitism rooted in hatred of the Christ-killers but
rather one rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks in
the ghetto^Å. An earned anti-Semitism." Who says there are no Jews that
Louis Farrakhan likes? Lerner and West have in recent days been marching
shoulder-to-shoulder in rallies in support of Palestinian terrorism, and if
David Montgomery of the Washington Post (April 12, 2002) is to be believed,
they even seem to make a habit of accompanying one another into the men's
room.
Since the 1960s Lerner has denounced the leaders of the American Jewish
community as "fat cats and conformists." He originally launched his Tikkun
magazine in an attempt to create a counter-cultural anti-Commentary Magazine.
In the 1960s, he participated in a symposium entitled "In All their
Habitations" printed in Judaism Magazine (Fall of 1969), in which he said,
"Shut down the synagogues so that Judaism may have a chance." In the same
article, he denounced Zionists for being too friendly to the United States
and not friendly enough towards the Soviet Union. He also compared Huey
Newton to Moses, since "both justifiably killed an oppressor."
Lerner's views on the Middle East conflict differ little from those of the
Hizbollah. His opinions of America resemble those of Noam Chomsky, another
anti-Semitic leftist of Jewish ancestry. "Rabbi" Lerner's attitude towards
American Judaism may be summed up by his statement, "the synagogue as
currently established will have to be smashed."
I guess a bit like monogamy.
----------------------------------------------------------
Steven Plaut is professor of business administration at the University of
Haifa in Israel. He also teaches in Greece, California, and Hungary, and
has a Ph.D. from Princeton in Economics. A Native-born Philadelphian, he
has lived in Israel since 1981. A collection of his writings may be found
at www.opinionet.com.
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