Americans Against Hate Chairman, and Meir Kahane admirer, Joe Kaufman leading a protest against CAIR’s involvement in Broward County’s Adopt-A-Street program.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel is reporting that right-wing Jewish extremist, and one time vice-chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition of South Florida, Joe Kaufman is leading the charge against one of this country’s greatest security threats: the Adopt-A-Street program in Florida’s Broward County. Kaufman is incensed that the county had the short sightedness to allow the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to participate in its "adopt a street" program. And he’s not taking it lying down.
The Sun Sentinel explains:
A small group of demonstrators led by Americans Against Hate Chairman Joe Kaufman last Friday accused Broward County and the Town of Davie of supporting an organization with ties to Islamic terrorists.
A street sign in Davie sparked the anger of the demonstrators who protested in front of the Broward County Governmental Center in Fort Lauderdale on a rainy Friday afternoon.
The sign, at the southwest corner of College Avenue and Nova Drive, credits the Miami office of the Council on American Islamic Relations ( CAIR-FL) for its participation in a Broward County program to clear litter from an "adopted" street.
Kaufman said when he complained about the sign, a spokesman for the Town of Davie told him it would not be removed because CAIR had a Constitutional right to free speech.
"Freedom of speech is a poor excuse," Kaufman said to the demonstrators. "This is not about free speech. It’s about terrorism."
The Sun Sentinel says that Muhammad Malik, the civil rights director of CAIR’s South Florida branch, responded by explaining, "the organization wanted to bring out people to pick up litter from the street, like any other group."
If there was ever any doubt that segments of the Jewish community have totally lost touch with reality just check out this quote from Kaufman on the press release for the protest explaining why it was being held on Hanukkah:
“On Hanukkah, millions of people around the world celebrate the triumph of the Jewish people over those who wished to destroy them. We want Broward County to recognize the fact that those involved with Hamas, like the Greeks 2000 years before them, have a similar goal to destroy the Jews. And we want Broward County to know that it allowed a sign to be ‘adopted’ by a group connected to Hamas.”
And so Joe, you’re saying the Greeks also tried to destroy the Jews by cleaning their streets? That is almost as shocking as some of Americans Against Hate’s merchandise (and be sure to not miss this).
Very weird. Americans Against Hate are promotion a one piece “No Jihad in My Backyard” piece of clothing with the following description:
Hmm maybe they could distribute them in Brooklyn. :p
Those topless cyclists would love a thong when protesting the removal of their biking lane in the Hasidic neighborhood.
Brr! I don’t envy them
link to inquisitr.com
Some people have no sense of irony at all!
I hope he gets a LOT of publicity. Nationwide.
Prefereably wearing the thong.
Mr. Kaufman needs a history lesson. 2,000 years ago it was the Romans who ruled Palaestina, Palestine. They didn’t try to destroy the Jews, as Mr. Sand’s book could teach him. In fact ‘the Greeks’ in the strict sense were never in ancient Palestine. He is thinking in a garbled fashion of the Hellenistic successor kingdoms that were brought to power by the dissolution of Alexander’s empire, which is to say they were Macedonians who spoke Greek and who had lived in the area for some time. It’s true that one of the Antiochus kings of the Seleucid empire was nutty and did antagonize the Jews by placing a pagan idol in the temple in Jerusalem. But that’s because he was encouraged by Hellenized, i.e. secular, forward-thinking, non-mysticizing, Jews like Jason and Menelaus.
Feeling the love in South Florida this holiday season!
The pre-Constantine Romans exempted the Jewish people from paying homage to Roman gods, a
civil duty for all Romans and all other groups under Roman domination; this exemption was afforded no other people; in contrast, in those days Christians were viewed as a mere cult, a mere superstition, not a traditional religion, and so the Christians were dressed up as animals and thrown to devouring animals, and burned alive in the arena for entertainment. Something to think about on Christmas eve?
“This is not about free speech. It’s about terrorism.”
Free speech is not needed to speak the status quo POV.
The whole point of the USA constitutional guarantee of free speech is to be able to
speak against the status quo.
Apparently Kaufman thinks the USA is Israel, the usual cancerous AIPAC stance that the interests
of the two states are identical.
PS: I just came back from my usual strip mall mall barbershop ($11.00 for a male haircut; just upped from $10.00). Everybody there
was saying how things are so bad, watching our corrupt government in action,
the breaking point is fast coming–and our leaders don’t have a clue. Nobody
thought our government leaders on either side of the aisle had any real idea of what the average American
is concluding.
You’re right, Jews did have an exception to the rule. It’s really interesting. Their exception was legally based: they were brought into the Roman Empire from the Seleucids and under the laws of religious toleration were granted freedom from worshipping the state cult. It’s easy to forget that Judaism was the only such monotheism in the ancient world, meaning it was an exclusive monotheism (…no other god except for me…, etc.).
Christianity is totally different. It really is an offshoot of Judaism, one that postulates that a man came back from the dead. From a legal point of view the Romans had absolutely no basis nor imperative to grant it a special status. The fact that many Jews rejected it didn’t help its cause. Those who do not believe that human beings come back from the dead, raise others from the dead, walk on water, turn water into wine, etc. naturally considered Christianity an imposture, not so different from the way scientology or mormonism are viewed today, or the way the FBI viewed David Koresh’s antics in Waco a decade ago. Hence the Romans were perfectly within their rights, and some would argue quite correct, to try to suppress it. So they outlawed it. Constantine in the 300s made it legal, but only later did an emperor force the subjects of the Roman empire to convert to the religion.
I would be pretty circumspect about all those tales of Christians being thrown to lions. Most of them emerge from late marytrologies that have a vested interest in demonizing the Romans. Earlier “persecutions” are merely coaxing attempts to get Christians to see the light (from the Romans’ point of view), e.g. Pliny the elder’s attempt — for which he was scolded as being too harsh by Trajan, by the way — to get Romans to stop believing this stuff.
Indeed, much to think about about Christmas time!
The thing is, it wasn’t only the Christians thrown to the lions. Beast shows were as much a mainstay of the Roman games as gladiators.
Constantine had a vision (a cross appeared to him in the middle of his roman sun god sun image), and subsequently had his soldiers paint a cross on their
shields. “In this sign you shall conquer.”
Your’re right that the Roman leaders determined that old religions at the time
were to be given recognition, and upstart ones were treated as mere superstition.
Same as now. The scientologists were finally given church tax exempt status after a long haul; they were smart enough to gather all kinds of dirty IRS laundry to bribe the IRS.
But were there other groups thrown to the lions solely because of their religion? I don’t know of any. School me.
I am loath to agree with anything such an obvious fruitstand says, but there is some truth in his assertion about the Greeks. There was substantial conflict rooted in competition for land, power, and physical security. His leap to attributing pre-medieval Greek behavior to modern Arabs is of course completely unsupported. Greeks were the colonists then, European Ashkenazi Jews are the colonists now.
The courts and aristocracies of pretty much every little Roman client king were Hellenized. Culturally, the Jewish aristocracy strove to be seen as Hellenized because it was considered ‘civilized’ by Roman and Greeks. They wanted to fit in with the rest of the ruling class of the Empire. The Romans and Hellenized Jewish aristocracy certainly didn’t want to destroy Jewish peasants because they wanted them to pay taxes to support their privileged lifestyles. Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt Against Rome AD 66-73 contains an excellent account. I have not read it, but The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt against Rome, A.D. 66-70 looks interesting.
There were many small Greek colonies in the Levant, and Greek colonists, on the other hand, harbored no small amount of racist sentiment against Jews, and actively moved to kill many during the various Jewish revolts, especially in Egypt and Cyprus. Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/17 Ce: Ancient Sources and Modern Insights contains a lot of first-hand accounts, i.e. translations of primary source material, of Greek hatred and violence.
@Citizen December 24, 2009 at 11:40 am
<i…. this exemption was afforded no other people …
Roman occupation of Palestine, both via client king statelets and later directly, was motivated by geo-strategic concerns: defense of the staggeringly wealthy and profitable province of Egypt. Palestine itself was dirt poor and I suspect Rome may not have even broke even with tax collection offsetting cost of occupation. That’s why Romans preferred the rule of client kings in economically marginal areas.
The exemption from violent Jewish peasant opposition to physical symbols of Roman divinity, and enforcing that standard technique of Romanization simply wasn’t worth the substantial monetary cost of suppressing the inevitable revolt that would have resulted, and the decreased tax base that would have resulted from inevitable massacres of peasantry. Of course it happened anyway, but the 66 revolt was instigated by local incompetence and arrogance pushing a Jewish peasantry made desperate by poverty resulting from Roman fiscal policy, not Imperial cultural assimilatory policy.
a quick edit of last sentence in first paragraph:
Greeks were the colonists then, European and American Ashkenazi Jews are the colonists now.
I think Joe Kaufman has a point. Should the county allow any and every group to sign on for its Adopt-a-Street Program? Would it be OK for al-Qaeda to sign up? What about the KKK? Just because the program is for cleaning streets does not mean it should open to anyone. The question is whether CAIR deserves to be on the persona non grata list. This is just a small part of the nationwide villification campaign against CAIR. I haven’t found anything remotely convincing in this smear.
On the other hand, to be even-handed and consistent, Joe should challenge the participation of any temple or other organization that supports Israel in any way. The Goldstone report detailed how Israel intentionally targeted civilians with indiscriminate lethal force (a reasonable definition of terrorism), and Israel fully admits to severely restricting a captive civilian population’s access to food, water, fuel and medicine (illegal collective punishment). Even before Goldstone, Israel’s attacks on civilians have been a constant feature of its policy since its founding (and before). So, to use Joe’s logic, any organization that supports an entity that commits such actions should be banned from adopting streets. If the streets of Fort Lauderdale suffer as a result, its residents at least will be constantly reminded of the sacrifice they are making in the global fight against terror.
Mr. Samel, good food for thought. Why shouldn’t the KKK be allowed to clean up roads? We let prisoners do it all the time. I would be happy to let Al Quaeda clean up my road, provided that’s all the do. As long as they’re improving the community with concrete steps like this, I welcome all sorts of volunteer labor. Your point is spot-on: I don’t like a lot of the groups that clean up my roads voluntarily anyway; most of the fraternities and sororities who do it are of course exclusionary, some of them even covertly racist. But I don’t see any way of banning any of those groups, while I do like clean streets.
I wouldn’t want Al Qaeda cleaning my streets, but his comparison of CAIR to extremists is disgusting bigotry and mind-boggling hypocrisy. They are certainly at least as acceptable as any Zionist Israel-first/America-second pro-ethnic cleansing and colonization group, e.g. AIPAC.
I’m not sure if you were talking about me, but if you were, you misunderstood me. I said that CAIR has been unfairly and unconvincingly smeared, but that the principle that every organization should allowed to clean streets is not necessarily true. I also said that Israel and organizations supporting it would be better candidates for exclusion from street-cleaning. If you were not accusing me of disgusting bigotry and mind-boggling hypocrisy, my apologies for this unnecessary explanation. I was using irony and sarcasm, perhaps not very skillfully.
I think what’s said about this, is doesn’t it open the door wide, wide open for Jewish groups to be targeted too? Does Mr. Kaufman know what sort of fire he’s playing with?
And exactly what point does Joe Kaufman have? And how does his point relate to
this point”
link to dailymail.co.uk
Does Joe know about the law here in the USA? Or is he still conflating this land (USA) with
his land (Israel)?
link to dailymail.co.uk
A quick addendum, for those who are interested. It was on February 27, 380 AD that the emperor Theodosius, the last ruler of the undivided Roman Empire, decreed Christianity as the sole religion that could be legally practiced in Rome. At that point paganism, i.e. simply the worship of the traditional Roman cult, was outlawed, and its adherents (perhaps) persecuted. Your choice: convert to the one true faith or be an outlaw.
Sound familiar?
And the entire iconography of Christmas and Easter in the Catholic Church was created in the 14th C by a calligrapher/scribe working in the Vatican Library: I saw the slides of the original draft drawings, taken by a professor of mine who, after two decades of summer work in the Library, was shown this and allowed to photograph as long as she didn’t write about it. The scribe used pagan festival lore that the Italian peasants were familiar with, and wove it into Catholic/ Christian lore.
Made up out of whole cloth.
And the entire iconography of Christmas and Easter in the Catholic Church was created in the 14th C by a calligrapher/scribe working in the Vatican Library: I saw the slides of the original draft drawings, taken by a professor of mine who, after two decades of summer work in the Library, was shown this and allowed to photograph as long as she didn’t write about it. The scribe used pagan festival lore that the Italian peasants were familiar with, and wove it into Catholic/ Christian lore.
Made up out of whole cloth.
And they rewrote the bible, about to be printed with the new Gutenberg press, to go along with the iconography.
Well, you make it sounds mysterious-creepy-secretive that the iconography was later. I’m not sure I share that view. I don’t think anyone believes that the iconography is ancient. Anyone can read or write about this stuff who wants to; you just want to make sure your sources are academic, i.e. not the kind that get plumped in your monthly church bulletin.
But your charge that they “rewrote the bible” is sheer fantasy. You can read the bible (I mean N.T.) in either the original Greek or in the vulgate Latin translation (4th) favored by Catholics and it’s the same text that we use today. Nothing is being concealed, nothing is being mistranslated. I hear that charge a lot and it’s totally crazy. We may not like what the bible says, but there’s no question about what it says.
What about the two Nicean councils? Didn’t they toss out several chapters?
Sure – but the first one was in the 4th c., the second in the 8th c. That’s a dispute over the canonicity of the bible, not a ‘rewrite’ just before gutenberg (late 15th c.) invented the printing press. Totally separate issues, I would think.
Share the view or not, I saw the slides of the work photographed on the Vatican Library flat files deep in the inner sanctum. My professor was the world expert in a 16th C Italian artist, who had worked with the Vatican LIbrarian for over 20 years every summer. She was positively breathless when she showed us what she was allowed to photograph. The drawings were beautiful, some half-finished roughs. I was surprised that they had kept all the draft work as well as the final design. I wrote a whole thing on it that night, and dont have access to that particular diary; it’s locked away in storage. But I wrote down the detail of what had been made up to make it palatable and gripping to the peasants as she showed the slides. I remember my jaw dropping, and saying to her “You mean they made it all up?” She said Yes.
As for the Bible staying the same, or being the same in the 4th C as it is now. Not true. John Boswell, who read ancient Greek and Latin and could read the originals — one of which was at the University of Leipzig — wrote about it in his book “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.” Check it out on Amazon, although his book is on a different subject than what we’re discussing here. It’s an amazing work of scholarship, and Boswell, who held three chairs at Yale, said that all the supposed lines to the glory of God and Jesus in the Bible were in fact sexually-charged love letters to the boy priest down the hall. In other words, stuff was being added to the Bible from the 3rd to the 12th Cs.
And the version I read back in the late eighties was so heavily footnoted with the sources of the versions he found certain text in that the footnotes took up half of each page.
You can also find the review of this book in Newsweek if you search their archives.
Made up WHAT out of whole cloth?
with respect, MRW, from “creating an entire iconography in the 14C to appeal to Italian peasants” it does not necessarily follow that the underlying concepts/doctrines were “made up out of whole cloth.” Expressed in a different way, of course. Aesthetic expression changes — even in an institution as staid as the Roman Catholic church. Compare current church architecture to the basilicas in Florence or Rome.
I’m never going to hold even one chair at Yale or anywhere but I think it’s clear that we have fourth century manuscripts which must have been immune to medieval corruptions. On the other hand it’s also clear that both the Old and New Testaments are texts very challenging to edit – Jeremiah has both a longer and a shorter form; the Western and Eastern texts of Acts differ by about 10% of their volume. Standard commentaries will confirm.
Your American conservatives have recently come up with a proposal to re-edit the Bible to remove liberal corruptions and interpolations. They particularly target the famous ‘Father forgive them’ passage in Luke’s Gospel – and actually they have an arguable case considering the conflicting manuscript evidence. I would suspect that if this passage is an interpolation it is not due to liberalism but is intended to minimise Gentile and maximise Jewish guilt for Jesus’ death. Can we never get away from the tensions of the ME?
Jews were subject to nasty civil disabilities in the Roman Empire and also subject to malevolent restrictions – which I suspect were rather like the zoning laws of today – on construction of buildings, though there were probably ways through the bureaucratic maze. I’m following Charles Freeman’s ‘AD 381′ and the relevant part of the Oxford History of the Biblical World. We find Theodosius declaring in 393 that there were no laws against Jewish worship. The Jewish Patriarch of Tiberias was a Vir Illustris, ie of very high secular rank.
The earlier occasion when ‘the Greeks tried to destroy the Jews’ was as much a Jewish civil war, resulting in the triumph of the Hasmonean dynasty, as an international conflict. King Alexander Jannaeus crucified (c.85 BC) about a thousand rebels, having made them watch the elimination of their wives and children first. He then ‘pursued a policy of territorial conquest and expansion’ (Oxford History again) and it seems that some significant conversions to Judaism took place . Little is known for certain about the nature or scale of these, but I dare say people over whom the power of such a drastic ruler ‘expanded’ might have chosen not to be on his wrong side on religious matters.
The usual lessons, I think. What we think of as ‘the same religion’ can take many very different forms over a short time. What begins as a defence of the true faith against violence can well end in angry, intolerant insistence on what the faithful say are their sacred rights. There are some patterns we keep seeing.
Relentless hate campaigns – they aren’t even good enough to clean our streets – are part of a bad pattern. Ah well, I got back to the subject somehow.
They aren’t even good enough to clean our streets or highways when they are the locals and we are not? What’s the difference between the USA and Israel again?
How did that double thing happen?
Speaking of making things up – there is the Talmud.
And it’s feeble counterpart, the egregious and fertile Scofield annotations to the bible?
What does Joe Kaufman and his hate mongers contribute to our society? These “Americans FOR Hate” seems to be only attacking CAIR as if they are a CAIReer doing it!
Joe, you shouldn’t talk about terrorism buddy, you’re a terrorist support yourself!
See Terror Joe’s track record of disinformation and blatant lies and deceptions here:
link to islamophobia.org
You know, I’ve become something of a net fogey, haven’t I? Never occured to me to type that in as web address to see what would come up. I can’t believe I’m taking web exploration for granted in my “old age.” :)
Anyway, while the cutesy sloganeering is kind of “meh,” the information you’re bringing forth looks pretty solid — I haven’t had the chance to pour over the whole site, but the information on Kaufman looks legitimate and I’m not saying anywhere yet where it goes off any rails.
This may be pot calling the kettle black for me to say it, but you may want to dial down the tenor of your rhetoric just a little bit. Trust me, the raw information you’re organizing will be far more persuasive than any sort of sound bite or witty retort you can come up with. Present it reverently and you’ll continue to the information out where it needs to be. Save the humor for reactive defense. ;)
You know there’s something pretty frightening about the imagery of Jewish politicians wanting to pin Yellow Crescents on Muslims.
Not really, its how it usually works. One of the most constant motives for abuse is…?
Damned if I know. My reaction to abuse was self defense, and my reaction to abuse of other people is to step in and defend them. Possible motivations for actually undertaking abuse are, perhaps fortunately, totally alien to me.
I think you’re confusing assault with abuse. Abuse is generally chronic and has long term psychological implications. You should speak to some Jewish kids and see how the horrors of the Holocaust are dinned into them. Then see how they react on their compulsory trips to Auschwitz. There is a lot of psychological child abuse going on right there.
I have always considered the Zionist diatribe against “Muslims – the Arabs” etc. to be the spitting image of the antisemitic canards leveled against us. They follow the same pattern, and use the same forms of vilification which is considered “hate” literature and in some countries punishable as a crime.
NO DIFFERENCE
The case of Julius Streicher presented at Nuremberg Trial could be made against these blatant Zionist racists. The racism is cultivated through almost all forms of media, and stands as a display of rabid hate speech that any prosecutor could use with no trouble in a current court of law.
IT MUST BE TRUE I SAW IT ON TV
Two can play the same game, and with the history of “findings” in law those who are the first to cast bogus stones might find themselves eventually buried under a pile of rocks.
That’s a good point, VR. Essentially, Streicher was tortured and then hung for engaging in free speech; funny, his rag had a very small circulation too. In his defense at Nuremberg, he quoted the Talmud incessantly.
Pingback: If this street gets cleaned then the terrorists win edu university
SUBMITTED TO “The South Florida Sun Sentinel”:
South Florida appears to be rife with bigotry. Mr Kaufman is a stellar example.
DICKERSON3870 (12/24/2009, 4:34 PM )