Two leaders of daytime television, Dr. Phil and Shalom in the Home‘s Rabbi Boteach, a Republican congressional candidate who is backed by billionaire pro-Israel advocate Sheldon Adelson.
Sheldon Adelson and wife Dr. Miriam Adelson have made their second $500,000 pledge to back Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, host of The Learning Channel’s Shalom in the Home, in his New Jersey standoff with Democrat incumbent Bill Pascrell.
Author of 23 books including the New York Times bestselling The Kosher Sutra and a frequent guest on the daytime programming circuit, Rabbi Boteach is best known for counseling relationships, often focusing on marriage life inside of the bedroom. Appearing on Dr. Phil in 2009 Rabbi Boteach recommends couples, “probe the erotic mind of their spouse. I wish that husbands would give their wives erotic interrogations. Ask them about their fantasies.”
Rabbi Shmuley with family in Hebron, in 2010. (Photo: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach)
About a month ago when Adelson dropped his first $500,000 payment into Rabbi Boteach’s SuperPAC, Phil Weiss caught onto the noticeable absence of Israel in the news coverage on the two political figures. But Rabbi Boteach is a staunch supporter of Israel’s settler movement, and Boteach himself has participated in Jewish festivities in the occupied Palestinian territories. In 2010 Rabbi Boteach attended in a settler Sukkot celebration in the West Bank city of Hebron. Recounting his experience in the Huffington Post, the religious leader and erotic advisor endorsed the unbridled expansion of Israel’s West Bank outposts and even used Nazi terminology in making his political point:
Abraham, at whose tomb I prayed with my children tonight, is the father of all peoples, Jew and Arab alike. The Arabs are my brothers, equal children of G-d in every respect. And Arabs and Jews must learn to live peacefully together in the land. Neither group should be asked to abide by a moratorium that stifles the natural expansion of either population. It is not the spiritual-seeking settlers who threaten the peace, but rather the murderous groups of Hezbollah and Hamas, who wish to make all of Israel judenrein.
The subtext of Rabbi Boteach one “spiritual night in Hebron” article is that the Republican candidate supports a “greater Israel,” or full Israeli sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. His extremist position barks of ethnic cleansing because, in practice, the expansion of Jewish localities in occupied Palestinian land has always accompanied and expulsion of the Palestinian population. Take Hebron where the Rabbi celebrated the Jewish festival of the harvest. The streets where he danced with his children and “felt alive and utterly free of fear,” are effectively Palestinian-rein, with large portions of the city closed off to its non-Jewish inhabitants.
However last week Israel jumped from a dim backroom issue to the spotlight in a debate between Rabbi Boteach and Pascrell, New Jersey’s 9th district congressman. Boteach lambasted Pascrell for condemning Israel’s 2009 blockade of Gaza, which has pushed the coastal strip into a precious state of near humanitarian disaster. From New Jersey Online:
Boteach criticized Pascrell for signing a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to call for Israel to end a blockade on the Gaza Strip.
The letter said the blockade had prevented humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinians, which Boteach called ‘slander.’
‘Israel is a nation of the highest humanitarian principles,’ Boteach said.
Pascrell said his record on Israel was ‘very clear. In fact, some have called it perfect.’
During the debate Boteach also brought up the mid-Atlantic state’s partisan litmus test on Islamophobia, advocating to deport the Imam of New Jersey’s largest mosque based on dubious evidence that he was a member of Hamas, a case which is now being appealed in the state’s immigration court. Imam Mohammad Qatanani was arrested without charge in 1993 by Israeli authorities and placed under administrative detention for three months. However Israeli officials now contend Qatanani was charged with recruiting students into Jordanian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Additionally, immigration officials also penalized Qatanani for being related through marraige to a member of Hamas who was killed by Israeli forces in 2001.
According to the New York Times Qatanani was active in the student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a legal political party in Jordan and was never a member of Hamas. But the immigration judge who granted Qatanani his initial green card status contends the Israeli evidence is “too unreliable to prove that Mr. Qatanani has engaged in terrorist activities,” reported North Jersey in 2009.
Pascrell closed the debate on Imam Qatanani, stating “You don’t have any proof that what you say is correct.” He continued, “And I am not going to renounce anyone on hearsay.”
There are also over a dozen clips and videos of R.Boteach debating Dr. Michael Brown on Christianity:
https://www.youtube.com/results?q=boteach%20michael%20brown&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=w1
He’s going to lose, all the polls point in that direction.
Also, on a sidenote:
http://www.people-press.org/2012/10/18/on-eve-of-foreign-debate-growing-pessimism-about-arab-spring-aftermath/
See the section on Israel. More than 2.5 democratic voters think the U.S. supports Israel too much rather than too little.
We’re increasingly seeing a story which is held up by Republican fervor(the wannabe crusaders).
“probe the erotic mind of their spouse. I wish that husbands would give their wives erotic interrogations. Ask them about their fantasies.”
After which, of course, you scourge them for the uncontrolled salaciousness peculiar to their sex, and harbor suspicions of harlotry and infidelity.
If you want to see just about the most obvious, blatant lying and misdirection you’ve ever seen in your life from a person go look up Rabbi Shmuley’s recent appearance on Dr. Phil about a month or two ago only where Phil’s main guest was a young woman (mid-20’s or so) who had grown up in one of those very orthodox communities in New York or New Jersey (like Kiryas Joel or etc., though they didn’t name it specifically here), and then tried divorcing the husband she had been set up to marry. His other guest then, confirming this young lady’s story was a young man who had also fled one of same. Of course Phil and his audience were very naive about these communities, so much of what they were aghast at was the most banal and well-known even: That (gasp!) there are some arranged marriages going on in these communities! But even here watch and listen to Boteach: A guy who is from and very active in the jewish world in that very area, far more familiar than any of us possible with the every such community, at the very outset trying to derail the rest of the show by first suggesting it was “the most antisemitic thing” he’d ever heard on television, and then just outright claiming that arranged marriages within same are rare rare rare and etc. and so forth. And then, as to all the other stuff these ex-orthodox said, when Boteach wasn’t just obviously trying to deprive them of air-time by going on extended Kumbaya speeches it was just the absolute height of obvious covering up for even the most well-known kind of stuff that goes on in those communities. Just as blatant as can be, all under the guise of trying to “help” this young woman and as if her experience was just a freakish rare thing he’d never heard of before.
Even though this woman had never heard of Boteach before and was so innocent you could see she couldn’t have imagined anyone at all trying to play such games with what she was saying you could see even just a few minutes in to the program that she was catching on to him trying to monopolize the time so she couldn’t speak, or otherwise trying to simply deny the reality she was revealing. And poor stupid Dr. Phil even started to get what was going on after awhile with this interference with his guests.
It’s probably on Youtube or something, and it’s really a spectacle. Like I said, I at least don’t know that I’ve ever seen more a more blatant display than Boteach put on. I just sat there shaking my head thinking “and this guy’s a *rabbi*?”
Well, of course Boteach had to prevent airing of much (more) of detail about this orthodox stuff. what do you suppose would be his reaction if someone described the orthodox settlers’ terroristic behavior in West Bank? There are secrets to be kept from the gentiles, and a lot of orthodox belief about Jewish duties toward non-Jews would naturally be kept quiet. (Not disowned, just kept quiet.) (Clean linen that might appear dirty if shown in public.)