RUTHFULLY YOURS

Howard Jacobson is the winner of this year’s Booker Prize for his satirical novel about British Jews who are ASHamed (Jacobson’s version) of Israel’s sins against humanity and form a group to protest, demonstrate, remonstrate, boycott and do whatever possible to undermine Israel and Zionists (alias Jews).  Finkler is the Jewish character who founds and heads the group and the non-Jewish narrator’s friend, and by extension, the synonym for all Jews. Of course the word fink is aptly in there. It comes to mind in connection with the Rabbis for Human Rights who met last week to agonize over the insufficiency of the Jewish response to the protesters of the Ground Zero Mosque.

Rabbi Joy Levitt, executive director of the upper west side’s JCC was distraught over the ADL’s objection to the site of the proposed mosque. “This was not our finest moment….Jewish leaders made this a more complicated issue….they made it very difficult for the rest of the community to speak out.”   Rabbi Ellen Lippman, co-chair of the North American branch of Rabbis for Human Rights compared the complaint about the location of the mosque to the Jewish experience of having its own religion singled out for discrimination.  The rabbis heard voices of ignorant xenophobia in the objectors’ reservations about placing a mosque close by the killing field where thousands of Americans were murdered in the name of jihad.  There is no mention of anyone at the conference objecting to the strident anti-humanist voices of jihad, nor to the willful refusal of the Mosque’s Imam to condemn Muslim terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Among the awards conferred by the Rabbis for Human Rights was one to Aryeh Neier, president of George Soros’ Open Society Institute.  George Finkler,  oops, Soros is the man who contributed 100 million dollars to Human Rights Watch, an organization that gentler anti-semites acknowledge is as obsessed with pursuing Israel’s wrong-doing as if it were a Jewish whale called Moby Kike.  In a part of the world where stoning, amputation, clitorectomy and decapitation are state laws instead of crimes, the democratic state of Israel is singled out reflexively by the ever vigilant guardians of that organization.  Soros, a Finkler himself, has never disguised his comprehensive disdain for the tiny country that has assimilated immigrants from every inhabited continent and given them the dignity of sustenance and education that are implicit in our understanding of human rights.

Rabbi Levitt has been a long-term advisor to the Ground Zero Mosque Project headed by Imam Rauf and his wife, the former decorator Daisy Khan. Miss Daisy appeared at last week’s event to thank the activist rabbis for their assistance. “We could not have done this without your support,” she said.  How proud the Finklers must have been to hear those words and how abashed the rest of us should be as Jews once again perversely embrace the seedlings of their own self-destruction.