Shmuley Boteach is Samantha Power’s advocate on Israel. The religious fundamentalist Republican rabbi from New Jersey who regards the West Bank as the Jewish nation’s gift from God is vouching for Power to be ambassador to the U.N., even in the pages of the liberal Forward.
Well, here is Boteach explaining that Palestinians are defeated and deserve everything that has befallen them:
But for those interested in facts, the unfortunate suffering of the Palestinians is akin to the suffering of the Japanese or Germans during the Second World War. When you continually resort to violence, inflicting terror on your neighbors, you’re probably going to end up suffering yourself.
You’d think such disgraceful attitudes would merit distancing or even denunciation by the White House. You’d be wrong. During the last election season, a couple of days after Boteach wrote this piece criticizing Power and calling Jimmy Carter “one of those well-meaning ignoramuses whose view of morality is that whichever is the party without tanks and an air force must be the party who is just” and saying that Hamas was a “terrorist organization hell-bent on exterminating Israel,” Power called Boteach and gave him an audience in the White House:
Ms. Power got in touch with me and invited me to meet her in her White House office this past Thursday. The meeting was substantive and directly addressed the comments I quoted. She was personable, accessible, and exhibited a humility uncommon to those in positions of high authority and power. She seemed genuinely and deeply pained by the perception that she was not a friend of Israel.
In turn, Boteach introduced her to other experts on the conflict, with whom she deployed her considerable rhetorical powers:
About a month later Samantha arrived to address a closed-door meeting of about 40 American Jewish leaders who represented a wide spectrum of our communities most important organizations…. [S]he directly addressed the accusations that she harbored animus toward Israel. And in the presence of the leaders of our community, she suddenly became deeply emotional and struggled to complete her presentation as she expressed how deeply such accusations had affected her. Tears streamed down her cheeks and I think it fair to say that there was noone in the room who wasn’t deeply moved by this incredible display of pain and emotion…
Later that day I took Samantha to meet my friend and hero Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, only to discover they already had a long friendship and that Professor Wiesel was a strong admirer of Samantha’s work.
This is not about Samantha Power– Cory Booker loves Boteach too. It’s about the lobby. Power has no choice but to cozy up to this intolerant religious figure because the Israel lobby is so influential over policymaking in this realm. Imagine Obama’s nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services having to gain support from a Republican evangelical minister who opposes abortion. That would never happen, the media would be all over it.
The Democratic Party has made a clean break between religion and state on such matters. It has utterly failed to make that division in the Israel situation because of religious influence.
Thanks to Scott Roth.
Meanwhile Foxman gives Alice Walker 2 barrels of the usual lobby slurs
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/169106
“Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism,” Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said in a statement. “She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree that we have not witnessed before.
Does Power buy the bot notion that the Jewish presence in Palestine ended in Ad 70 ?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/apr/05/apocalypse-then-elaine-pagels-revelations/?page=2
“The separation is less prominent in the Jewish rabbinic tradition, but polemic against the New Testament’s account of Jesus appears overtly in the Babylonian Talmud, written between the third and fifth centuries. This seems to have provided the background for a viciously anti-Christian narrative in the medieval biography of Jesus known as Toledot Yeshu. Peter Schäfer, the author of Jesus in the Talmud, has asked why the Babylonian Talmud, which is a product of Sassanian Persia, should have included strongly negative comments on Jesus—particularly his virgin birth and his resurrection, both of which are mocked and satirized, whereas there is nothing comparable in the Palestinian Talmud.4 The relatively peaceful coexistence of the rabbis in Galilee and the neighboring Christian communities in late antiquity seems to provide the answer.
By contrast, the conditions in Zoroastrian Persia were considerably more unstable for Jews and Christians alike and, Schäfer suggests, may have led to a greater hostility between them:
Jews and Christians are, together with the other heresies, on an equal footing as far as the chief magian’s wrath [i.e., the wrath of the chief Zoroastrian priest or magus] is concerned, with no difference whatsoever.
But, Schäfer continues, “the Christians were much worse off than the Jews” because Persia’s great rival, the Byzantine Empire, was a Christian state, and this put all Sassanian Christians at risk. Outside Persia the Sassanians often supported Jews as a means of countering Byzantine influence, and that is why the Jews welcomed them when they captured Jerusalem in 614.”
jeezuss, this is revolting.
Why do I get the impression that politically influential Jews are paranoid that politicians aren’t really as big supporters of Israel as they say? Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean you are wrong.
Umm, file this under the Total Lack Of Self-Awareness file:
“When you continually resort to violence, inflicting terror on your neighbors, you’re probably going to end up suffering yourself.”
Oh, you don’t say, do you Shmuley?
I don’t konow if Rabbi avi weiss is still alive, but Rabbi boteach bids fair to be the next uber-obnoxious iteration of Rabbi Weiss.