RUTHFULLY YOURS

Baylor University’s president is Kenneth Starr, best remembered from his investigations of another sexual predator, Bill Clinton.  The current campaign to rid Baylor of Ellis is because Ellis reportedly sexually harassed a female faculty member, who got herself a lawyer and filed a complaint.  Evidently all sorts of Baylor faculty knew about it.  In response to this, Starr and Baylor have suspended Ellis from all teaching and administrative duties indefinitely.  Baylor offered to “buy Ellis out” to get him to leave.  Last July the Faculty Dismissal Committee notified Ellis that the administration was seeking his dismissal.

As this world’s largest Baptist University, Baylor officials do not take kindly to professors manhandling the prairie womenfolk.  Ellis seems to be defending himself by claiming his suspension is “discriminatory” because others at Baylor have been involved in hanky-panky and have not been similarly punished.   In his words, his are “alleged offenses reportedly routine at Baylor.”  In other words, if other gropers were coddled, so should he be.  Ellis is also claiming there is a dark conspiracy by the tiny local Waco Jewish community to pay Baylor to get him fired.

The radical Left has long adored and celebrated Ellis because he is a radical Jewish anti-Semite in the tradition of Hezbollah agent Norman Finkelstein.  The anti-Israel Middle East Studies Association issued a statement defending and endorsing Ellis, as did the American Association of University Professors.  How ridiculous these groups appear now that it is known that Ellis is under fire not because of his anti-Semitism but because of his inability to control his lascivious behavior.

A pro-Ellis petition has been organized by Cornell West and is being promoted by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky. (What a comedown for Chomsky, the one-time apologist for the Khmer Rouge, now merely an apologist for Ellis.) It charges that Ellis is a victim of “persecution.” The very first endorsement of the petition is by the discredited pseudo-academic fraud Ilan Pappe.  In a speech at the American Academy of Religion in November, Cornell West, who just does not like Jews very much, described Ellis as a “prophetic figure.”

Ellis is a professor of “Jewish Studies” who knows nothing at all about Judaism or Jewish Studies.   He has built a career as a Bash-Israel propagandist and supporter of Islamofascism and as a leader in the movement to exterminate Israel and Israelis.  Indeed, that is the real reason the radical Left is defending him.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright loves him.  Academic terrorist Edward Said adored him while Said was still alive.  George McGovern likes him.  Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein is the close soul-brother of Ellis, who endorsed Finkelstein’s “book” and who likes to mimic Finkelstein’s smear terminology about the “Holocaust Industry.”

Ellis has no degrees and no academic training at all in Jewish theology, Jewish history, Jewish anything.  He holds a PhD degree from a Jesuit University (Marquette), where people may know their Catholic catechism but no one would consider it a serious place to learn about Judaism.  Ellis later was employed at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Maryknoll, New York (a liberation theology school that closed in 1994 and was not even accredited).  Ellis woke up one fine morning and decided he was an expert in “Jewish Studies.”  He peddled himself as such to Baylor, which evidently did not check out his credentials very thoroughly.  There he set up the university’s Center for Jewish Studies as his one-man fiefdom.  While Baylor should be saluted for wanting to have a Jewish Studies department operating in this Baptist University, hiring Ellis was hardly the way to go about it.

Ellis replaces the traditional Jewish Biblical Patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with Marx, Lenin and Arafat.  In Ellis’s writings as a purported “theologian,” there is nothing to indicate he has any familiarity at all with Jewish religious sources or concepts.  Indeed, there is no evidence that he has ever read the Bible, let alone studied the Talmud or other classical Jewish texts.  Ellis’s “theology” is the same as that of the wacky pro-LSD hippie magazine “Tikkun,” on whose board of editors he sits. Tikkun is published by Michael Lerner, promoter of psychedelic drugs and one-time SDS leader. While Lerner pretends to be a rabbi, he is not and never has been ordained by any rabbinic school. Both Lerner and Ellis like to cite obsessively the “Ethics of the Books of the Prophets in the Bible” as artillery support for their politics, but neither has ever provided any evidence that he has ever read those books or has the slightest idea what they contain.

Marc Ellis’s curriculum vita is not published anywhere on the Baylor University web site, nor anywhere else in the Internet for that matter.  And there is a good reason for this.  His CV is an embarrassment and reveals the pathetic quality level of his “work.” Ellis has virtually no academic publications, in spite of his having served as a tenured full professor at a large university.  I could find no publications by Ellis in any international refereed academic journals, the usual yardstick to evaluate an academic.  Most of his journal articles are in the “Journal of Palestine Studies,” a propaganda magazine controlled by the PLO.  He also has a few things in Christian liberation theology magazines, none of which could be considered academic publications, and almost all of these articles are bashings of Israel.  He has published a few screeds in Marxist magazines and other bash-Israel magazines.  The closest thing to an Ellis academic publication I could find was something he has in an obscure Turkish journal about how insensitive Americans were about Muslims after 9-11.

Ellis’s entire “academic” record consists of Bash-Israel propaganda books purporting to be concerned with theology, mostly published with either Marxist publishers, like the Pluto Press (which used to have Trotskyite connections and likes to publish anti-Semitic screeds), or with obscure publishers specializing in Christian liberation theology.

Ellis serving as a professor of Jewish Studies at a university makes about as much sense as Shirley MacLaine working as a distinguished professor of physics.  Ellis has essentially never published anything about Judaism, but instead only about the shallow Marxism he expects Jews to embrace as a replacement for Judaism. Jewish theologians who have heard of him at all consider him a quack.

Ellis’s main academic achievements seem to be the invention of nonsense terms and the utilization of the Holocaust as a bludgeon to demonize Israel.  Ellis is openly contemptuous of any talk about Jews being in need of any national empowerment.  Such things constitute “Constantinian Judaism,” to use Ellis’s favorite terminology, a malapropism picked up – one suspects – after spending too much time misrepresenting Judaism at Christian theological institutions. Constantinian Judaism, in Ellis’s view, is conscripting religion to serve the agenda of the militarist state. Ellis uses the term to describe Jews who support either Israel or the United States. Jews can only fulfill their proper ethical role in history, which – Ellis is persuaded – is to promote socialism and leftist fads, if they are stateless and suffering. Ellis never finds time in all his discussions of the theological implications of the Holocaust to consider the mass murder of Jewish children by his beloved Palestinians. Uniformed Jewish youths certainly have no right to prevent such things. No Anna Franks in Israel are entitled to defense.

Ellis pretends to be some sort of expert on “Holocaust Studies” but the only “Holocaust lesson” Ellis derives is the need to have a second Holocaust to rid the world of Israel and Israelis.  Ellis has publicly endorsed not only Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, but also Finkelstein’s scurrilous attacks on Nobel Prize winning-writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel.  Ellis sometimes writes for the pro-jihad “Counterpunch” web magazine of the Cockburns, where he appears alongside some of the worst Holocaust Deniers on the planet.

The theological lesson that Marc H. Ellis draws from the Holocaust and preaches wherever he goes is that Jews must stop trying to defend themselves against violent anti-Semites and that “progressive Jews” such as himself should see to it that Israel is destroyed.  He will be conveying this “lesson” at the upcoming Harvard Nuremberg Rally. (Harvard, hide thy womenfolk.)  It remains to be seen whether participants will march from the rally along Harvard Street to Brookline to burn down any synagogues.

It would be preferable if Baylor fired Ellis for being a fraud, a pseudo-academic, an imposter with no knowledge of “Jewish Studies,” someone unqualified to serve as a professor of anything.  But the United States got rid of Al Capone by convicting him of income tax evasion.  So I suppose Baylor could do worse than firing Marc H. Ellis because of sexual misconduct.

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