RUTHFULLY YOURS

Claimed ‘best antidote’ to anti-Semitism was for Jews to pressure Israel

Rev. Bruce Shipman, the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, has resigned in the wake of controversy over a New York Times letter he wrote suggesting Jews were collectively culpable for Israel’s actions and for subsequent rises in global anti-Semitism. “The Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, on his own initiative, has resigned as Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, effective immediately,” said a statement released by the Episcopal Church at Yale. “It is our belief that the dynamics between the Board of Governors and the Priest-in-Charge occasioned the resignation of the Rev. Shipman.”

In his letter to the Times, written in response to Deborah Lipstadt’s op-ed about rising European anti-Semitism, Shipman claimed that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” Many readers expressed outrage at what they deemed Shipman’s exercise in victim-blaming, and an attempt to hold all Jews across the globe responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. As Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead put it,

No, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be a realization among cretins that “the Jews” are a group of people with very different opinions and desires, that they do not act in concert, and that individual Yale students, for example, of Jewish descent who are American citizens have zero responsibility for any policies of the government of Israel. Anti-Semitism is like racism: most racists don’t think of themselves as racists and most anti-Semites similarly don’t recognize their own twisted prejudice. Perhaps the chaplain at Yale should reflect on the passage in which a well known first century Jewish rabbi urged his followers to take the log out of their own eye before trying to take the splinter out of someone else’s.

Our own editor Mark Oppenheimer also questioned Shipman’s moral calculus:

By your reasoning, why wouldn’t one write, “The best antidote to stop-and-frisk policing would be for black men everywhere to press other black men to stop shooting each other”? Why wouldn’t one write—perhaps after a Muslim was beaten up by white-supremacist thugs—“The best antidote to Islamophobia would be for radical Islam’s patrons abroad to press ISIS and Al Qaeda to just cut it out”?

It is fine to discuss a philosophy of freedom. But discussing it also requires a good, hard look at the political realities that negate any chance of freedom in the near future.

Frightened Turtles

I would like to remind readers that we live in a country that is barely free. If we lived in ideal political conditions in which the only flaw might be a border closed to some or all immigration, the “open borders” argument might hold water. But we live in a growing authoritarian or police state.

This is an issue which many intellectuals – including some I should logically regard as moral and intellectual allies – shy away from like frightened turtles.

This country for too long has been the plaything of statists and “social engineers” of every stripe – Republicans, Democrats, environmentalists, welfare statists, special interests or lobbyists, and so on. President Barack Obama is the apex and end heir of every statist law and notion ever proposed or legislated, ever since ratification of the Constitution, even as the ink on it was barely dry – and Obama is the logical end of all those unopposed laws and policies. He loots without care or thought of whatever might replace the looted wealth and nullified rights – except for stage-managed anarchy and beating into submission the American spirit.

Obama practices Islamic taqiyya, which is saying one thing in his woozy, folksy style English, but meaning something else. Most readers here, instead of conceding that Obama is a nihilist, buy the official line that he is merely a rudderless, arrogantly insouciant pragmatist. Actually, his predecessor, George W. Bush, was a card-carrying pragmatist, formulating his policies on the premise that he could preserve that status quo – whatever that might have been – by denying the deadly peril of Islam. However, Obama, who administration has been top-heavy with Muslims from his first term, is a rotten-to-the-bone nihilist steeped in “community organizing” and a subscriber to the agenda of the “socialist transformation” of the country into a super-size European Union. Some intellectuals of my acquaintance deny that he is a nihilist, and instead call him a rudderless pragmatist or assign him some other non-condemnatory appellation.

This is not observing his behavior and actions with any kind of objectivity. It is an evasion of the evidence of one’s senses. Waiting for Obamacare to collapse? Waiting for Obama to okay the Keystone Pipeline? Waiting for him to put together a “Coalition of the Reluctant” to combat ISIS? Waiting for him to rein in our lawless Attorney General, Eric Holder, or to order any number of federal agencies to stop spying and threatening private citizens and organizations that question federal power? Take a number.

In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

“I write with serious concerns stemming from a telephone call my staff received late on Friday afternoon from the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) about the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants,” Issa states.

A senior OPA official—under the apparent mistaken belief he had called the staff of Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings—asked if the Committee would release Committee documents to the media so that the Department could publicly comment on the material. I am extremely troubled by this attempt to improperly coordinate the release of Committee documents with the Minority staff. This effort to preemptively release incomplete and selectively chosen information undermines the Department’s claims that it is responding in good faith.

The senior OPA official to whom Issa refers is Brian Fallon, a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Although his name was not mentioned in the letter, he confirmed that he made the call, which took place last Friday at 5:01 p.m. EST. As Issa indicates, he believes Fallon thought he was talking to members of Rep. Elijah Cummings staff.

(Fallon) then asked the Committee employee if the Committee would agree to release the material to selected reporters and thereby allow the Department an opportunity to publicly comment on it.

The subject of the conversation was attorney Andrew Strelka, who is defending IRS commissioner John Koskinen in litigation initiated by the pro-Israel group Z Street. Prior to his job in the DOJ’s civil trial section, Strelka worked for Lois Lerner in the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organizations Division—where Z Street’s alleged mistreatment occurred. Documents indicate Strelka was kept in the loop about the IRS’s targeting practices.

The Committee wants to talk to Strelka about this apparent conflict of interest, but the DOJ has refused the request, prompting a Sept. 3 letter to Holder from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) accusing the DOJ of “conspiring with Mr. Strelka to prevent the American people from learning the truth.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-islamic-state-is-not-islamic-on-the-glazov-gang/

In his recent speech about his ISIS “policy,” President Obama emphasized one of his favorite themes: that ISIS is not Islamic. “No religion,” he assured the world, “condones the killing of innocents… ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.”

In response to the president’s statement on the supposed un-Islamic nature of the terrorist Islamic State, Frontpage is re-running The Glazov Gang’s feature interviews with two of the world’s leading scholars on Islam: JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer and Shillman Journalism Fellow Raymond Ibrahim.

Both discussions unveil the true roots of Jihadi terrorist groups such as ISIS and reveal the lie behind the statements such as those recently made by Obama denying the Islamic role in Islamic terror. Spencer and Ibrahim both issue a dire warning about the hazardous danger our society faces by deceiving itself about the real enemy we face.

See both interview below:

Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.

You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.

If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.

Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.

This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.

Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.

Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.

To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.

In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.

On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.