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May 9, 2010 | 4:40 pm
Michael Lerner’s Night of Broken Glass
Posted by Avi Davis
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Pity Michael Lerner. The oft quoted far left rabbi from Berkeley, the famous avatar of the Clintonian Politics of Meaning, has been the victim lately of a vicious blow-back against his political positions - most particularly his embrace of South African jurist Richard Goldstone as well as his support for the U.S. imposition of a peace treaty upon Israel.
It has gotten so bad for the outspoken rabbi that vandals last week , according to a press release issued by Lerner’s organization, affixed posters to his door, attacking the man personally, and pillioring liberals and progressives as being supporters of terrorism and “Islamo-fascism.” They glued to his door a printed bumper sticker which sported the logo “fight terror—support Israel” next to a caricature of Judge Richard Goldstone, whose UN report on Israel’s human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror.
Lerner’s supporters around the world have declared the house’s defacement an act of fascist vandalism and evidence of a brooding hatred in the Jewish world. In particular, they have fingered the prolific pen of Alan Desrhsowitz, who in an opinion piece on April 28 in the Jerusalem Post called both Lerner and Goldstone to task for their anti-Israel stances.
Labeling Goldstone’s rabbinic supporters as ” Rabbis for Hamas”, Dershowitz explained:
“Not surprisingly, the worst of these rabbis (and that’s saying a lot), Michael Lerner, has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with Tikkun Magazine’s “Ethics Award.” I guess all it takes to be honored by Tikkun is to pass Lerner’s litmus test of lying about Israel. That’s Lerner’s definition of “ethics.” There are some good people on the advisory board of Tikkun Magazine. They now have an obligation to reconsider their membership unless they wish to be associated with a rabbi who is prepared to accuse Israel, in the absence of any evidence, of deliberately setting out to murder Palestinian civilians without any military purpose. “
Lerner supporters, in reflecting on the vandalism and provocations of Dershowitz and others, have also invoked the imagery of Night of Broken Glass in Germany - or Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) when thousands of Jewish shop windows , synagogues and homes were destroyed in state sanctioned violence after a Jewish student shot to death a German diplomat in Paris.
Such a comparison, is, of course, absurd. Neither Dershowitz nor any other of the Lerner/ Goldstone critics are calling for the death of either man nor for the looting and sacking of their homes and injuring others. But the far left’s accusation is couched in language that they - and Michael Lerner and Richard Goldstone in particular - understand very well.
In the early 1970s, Lerner created an organization called the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), which participated in numerous anti-war protests and at least one riot. During this period , SLF, the Black Student Union (BSU), and the violent terrorist group Weathermen (led by such luminaries as Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn) collaborated to carry out a number of direct actions on university campuses. One day, SLF and BSU members—bearing pipes and clubs while shouting “Power to the people!” and “Smash the state!” - rampaged through several university buildings and, in some cases, roughed up innocent onlookers. Washington state attorney Slade Gorton, who later went on to become a U.S. Senator, described the tactics of Lerner’s SLF as “totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism.”
SLF’s most famous action was a February 17, 1970 demonstration at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Seattle, which escalated into a riot in which twenty individuals were injured. Lerner himself was one of the so-called “Seattle Seven,” charged in a federal trial with “conspiracy to incite a riot.” He spent several months in prison before the main charges against him eventually were dropped and he was released.
Richard Goldstone, on the other hand, has had his own brush with fascist tendencies. In the 1980s and 90s, before the collapse of Apartheid, Goldstone took an active part in the racist policies of the South African regime. During his tenure as sitting judge in the appellate court, he sentenced dozens of blacks mercilessly to their deaths. The Richard Goldstone of that day and age was a great enthusiast for capital punishment, torture and miscegenationist policies. He imposed and affirmed death sentences for more than two dozen blacks under circumstances where whites would almost certainly have been dealt with more leniently. He gave sentences of physical torture—euphemistically called “flogging”—for other blacks. He also facilitated miscegenation and other racist laws with no recorded word of criticism nor dissent. He therefore fulfilled an important role in the state apparatus that enforced racial subjugation in Apartheid South Africa.
Even today Goldstone expresses few regrets. ” It was the law of the land,” he says, without seeming to understand in the slightest that statement’s irony. After all, antisemitism was the law of land on the night of November 9, 1938, as well.
Fascistic outbursts, as Jonah Goldberg has brilliantly illustrated in his book Liberal Fascism, is not only a phenomenon of the right. Lerner, Goldberg and their supporters would therefore do well to investigate their own fascistic legacy before choosing to slap that label on to anyone else.
Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles. His blog entries and writings can be found at
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israel seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy,...Goodbye Gabi Avital
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Recipe:
1. Someone attacks a Jew.
2. Someone inevitably compares it to something Hitler/Nazi/Holocaust related.
3. The defenders of the attacker attack the victim because someone did #2
Rinse repeat.
Do you think there’s at least as much irony in your “blame the victim” polemic here as there is in Goldstone’s Nüremburg defense?
In Berkeley, attacking people’s homes has become a local pastime. Boalt professor John Yoo’s home has been stalked by Code Pink Sunday afternoons for months now.
israel seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the niizost right appears to be very intentionally pushing this narrative along, and some profitting off of the predictability ( isolation is the key, and they have grown arrogant in their regional hegemony, with a lock on the US congress. so they can use disproportionate force, spike global anti-semitism with their brutality, and even help the gathering in. the fringe thinks they can win any fight, and many think they can repeat 1948 in time. they have g-d, right? utter dispossession and ethnic policies are now g-d’s work, wrapped in self defense , so there is no shame; just talk to the israeli and settler fringe, and some in my family.if judaism becomes a religion alone (for more jews), the tribalism recedes, the truth about israel is more widely known (past and present), we treat israel as a normal state, and it comes to seek justice, there is *no* need for a *jewish* state or refuge. but we all have zealots in our families, and we all know the bias in the media, AIPAC, warmongers, and both christian and jewish niizost ideologues (with wayyyyy too much influence). we know the power balance is not tipped towards justice, at ALL. we can fight them with words, but what might happen should wars, economic upheavals, and the clash of civilizations continue to play out? this other option is what i fear might play out, in a worst case scenario, in the decades to come . we live in a new age of communication and ever more humane philosophies, but humanity is also on an edge with massive rising internal and international inequalities, resources crises to come, etc. how ugly might the US and some european powers become? how ugly are we *currently*? the slide of israel towards the extreme neofascist right might be a bit of a model for the US (it is for the republican party already). we may hate muslims for a long time under this paradigm, but people will ask where the fall began. they will find a mix a characters, but it will be easier for many to generalize, and note the disproportionate representation of the jews , and pro-israel bias, in word and deed. they can just read the congressional record and they will surely be confused. how did it all go so wrong? why did the world go nuts, after reasonable stability for so long? the secular will truly be scratching their heads about US gov policy and words, post 9/11 . was it the right wing christians fault? the jews? the MIC? the bankers and corporations? other nefarious groups? there will be no easy scapegoat as so many played roles, but it is clear when forced to pick, the jews will stand right out. AIPAC bought them that spot. there will likely not be a switch when people turn on the jews . it won’t come from the gov either which will be busy killing muslims and medling in oil rich regions for a good while, jockeying with other global powers like china. it won’t come from the bulk of the public even, at all. but it will come from american fringe groups who decide to move to violence . be they christian, muslim or secular (i expect bits of each; perhaps some tiny fringe christian cells will turn on the jews and help them go home [why did they invest so much in “securing” that “homeland” anyways? men do have to play out god’s prophecies in the end, and 40% of the jews live here, in the “wrong” place], secular groups will just be patriots with a small minded view of history and the present, and fringe muslims who are increasingly persecuted here and see the bloody insanity in the ME will commit sporadic acts). so do the jews need the jewish state?if we fail to change US bias, in time, some will feel they do, in the face of synagogue bombings or whatnot. but i can guarantee this, it will not be a nice place to run to, and most will simply carry on, or pick various other nations where grassroots anti-semitism is not as much of an issue. and we also have to realize this . if jews ever *really* need to run to israel, it will truly be the end of israel. israel depends on the diaspora for monetary and political support. israel’s economy depends on trade with the rest of the world, in a resource poor strip of land. if the word purged itself of jews, israel would be a warsaw ghetto, and any smart jew would play goy and go live in the woods. no trade. no cash flow. no support from the nations which got taken over by antisemitism. hell, it would be the end of days and all that prophecy BS the christian niizosts wanted. i’m rambling, and this is all apocalyptic hyperbole. but i think we must be honest. unless things change, worse things are coming, if not for jews specifically, other groups and nations and peoples. occupied palestinians top of the list, short term (and currently, and late september). israel top of the list, mid term. US top of the list, long term.