July 25, 2007 | 1:30 pm

End of the line for ‘Little Eichmanns’ professor

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ward Churchill met his maker—I’m sorry, salary payer—yesterday, and he was told to take a hike.

Churchill, if you don’t remember, was the University of Colorado professor who put some of the blame for 9/11 on ... the victims. Selfish capitalists he referred to in an essay as “Little Eichmanns.”

His case, which later included allegations of plagiarism and falsification of facts, became a cause celebre for the freedom of speech and the lunacy of faculty tenure. Churchill now plans to sue to university for breach of contract.

“We’re out of kangaroo court and going into real court,” his attorney told the Associated Press.

Heeb magazine’s blog was additionally cheery because Tuesday was the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’Av, the day when the First and Second Temples were destroyed.

First of all, the Wards Churchill of the world think that anything which is offensive is automatically valuable, original and thought provoking. If Churchill’s idea was to convey the message that US policy engenders anger, there were innumerable innumerably more effective ways to do it. His way wasn’t clever, or thought provoking, or interesting. It was simply mean-spirited, thoughtless, hyperbolic and ultimately hypocritical.

Which brings me to the the second of all. If working for a financial firm in the WTC makes you a “little Eichmann,” what about working for the University of Colorada? Not only does the university host ROTC, but it is run by the state, which also runs the National Guard. It seems to me that, according to Churchill’s logic, he is, if anything , just as much as much a cog in the wheels of American imperialism as anyone who died on 9/11.

Churchill is a fraud who rather pathetically (and falsely) claims to be an Indian and to have served as a combat veteran in an elite unit in Vietnam. There’s no question that Churchill is a mean-spirited schmuck, hypocrite, and liar; but given our own propensity for self-righteous egomania (albeit with a much sweeter disposition), we at Jewdar will be the last to say that that alone is grounds for dismissal.

But Churchill is also an academic fraud who made false claims, lied about the evidence to support those claims and, in general, behaved in a manner unbecoming of a tenured professor. What makes his dismissal so sweet is that, while he wasn’t fired for being a schmuck, had he not been one, nobody would have noticed the academic misconduct.

Sometimes, even on Tisha b’Av, justice triumphs.

(Photo: AP)

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July 25, 2007 | 9:53 am

Is The End near?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I don’t know, but it seems I could create an argument one way or the other, write a book about it, and make some OK cash. That’s because apocalyptic literature—fiction and non—are a popular genre for publishers. We are obsessed with the coming apocalypse.

But Jeff Sharlet, the magazine religion writer and editor of The Revealer, says in book review for the New Statesman that “we” refers not to the small portion of humans (in fact, a small portion of Christians) who have a literal reading of the last book of the Bible and the Armageddon it reveals, “but those of us who find apocalyptic believers - especially American apocalyptic believers - to be a source of sufficient anxiety that publishers churn out explanatory volumes such as Nicholas Guyatt’s Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World.”

Guyatt’s breezy investigation is only the latest response to the success of books that skip the “why” and go directly to The End, most famously the fundamentalist Left Behind novels that have sold more than 60 million copies around the world. The secular apocalypse business isn’t as lucrative, but bestsellers such as Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy and Chris Hedges’s American Fascists, and a spate of lesser accounts of apocalypse-minded Christians, have found a sizeable niche for themselves as well. These range from the deliberately comical - Alex Heard’s Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America - to the densely theoretical - Catherine Keller’s Apocalypse Now and Then: a Feminist Guide to the End of the World, a genuine tussle with the questions concerning apocalypse believers that rivals the original Revelation in its feverish imagination.Such books are designed to frighten or to reassure ...

Christians have been trying for centuries to pinpoint when the end will come. But, as I noted last month, even the great Sir Isaac Newton couldn’t calculate such a date. Fortunately, Sharlet says, most people who read apocalyptic literature don’t agree with apocalyptic theology. But that is only most people.

In five years of travels in fundamentalist America, I’ve met hundreds of Christian conservative Left Behind fans. Almost all drew careful distinctions between the mysteries of scripture and the black and whites of LaHaye’s imagination. No more than a handful took his books literally and even fewer took any steps to adjust for the coming rapture.

Unfortunately, that handful includes some of the most powerful fundamentalists in the US. Guyatt’s strongest chapters deal with Hagee, who “looks like a tubby Donald Rumsfeld” and “sounds a lot like a macaw”. That’s funny, but Hagee isn’t: US politicians court his approval and the huge amounts of money that his Christians United for Israel can channel their way. In return, they parrot his prophecies, cleansed of the references that would reveal them as such - Hagee’s conviction that the US may have to attack Iran as part of a scheme foretold in the Book of Ezekiel is sanitised as ostensibly sober-minded policy advice based on the needs of the nation rather than the scripture.

Fundamentalists who have a literal understanding of the book Jonathan Kirsch says “has significantly altered the course of history” certainly can speed up the process of Armageddon. Some would say a preemptive nuclear attack would be a good start, others that letting Iran get too far with its nuclear program would begin the end.

But if man brings about the end of the world, will he like the result?

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July 24, 2007 | 10:38 pm

Polygamy, that’s more a Mid East Islam thing

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I met Andrea Useem two years ago at the Religion Newswriters Association conference in Miami. (Disclosure: She is an official God Blog groupie). A Muslim living outside Washington, Useem has a Master’s in theology from Harvard Divinity and is an insightful freelance religion writer.

She has a good piece today on Slate.com about why American Muslims aren’t pushing to legalize polygamy—a practice that even in the States is more common than I would have expected.

So, you’re happily married to the Muslim man of your dreams when, suddenly, he drops the p-bomb: polygamy. For Aneesa Azeez, a 23-year-old Muslim convert and college graduate, her husband’s announcement of his intention to marry a second wife devastated her. “I am shocked, hurt, angry and confused, all in one,” she wrote in a letter to him.

Seems like a recipe for divorce, right? Polygamy is illegal, after all. But Azeez didn’t play that card with her husband, 15 years her senior. Under the law that mattered to her—classical Islamic law—she accepted her husband’s right to take up to four wives, as allowed by the Quran, as long as he could treat them equally. ...

Azeez, who works from her home in upstate New York as a newspaper copy editor, could be a poster child in the movement to legalize polygamy—the Muslim equivalent of the poignantly normal gay and lesbian couples lining up outside San Francisco’s City Hall in 2004. But she won’t be marching in the streets, calling for the legalization of polygamy, as some Protestant and ex-Mormon polygamists have been doing. For the tiny minority of American Muslims who engage in polygamy, its illegality is close to irrelevant. And for mainstream American Muslims, who are dealing with enough negative publicity as it is, let alone the fact that polygamy gives many of them the heebie-jeebies, the legal status quo suits them just fine.

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July 24, 2007 | 12:48 pm

Why are terrorists so dumb?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Tim Harford, Slate.com‘s “undercover economist,” tries to answer that question (and doesn’t do very well) in a weekend article dubbed “Dumb Bomb.”

He focuses on the recent botched bomb-plot in London and Glasgow, which was allegedly planned by a bunch of doctors and medical professionals. This shouldn’t be a surprise, he says, because Osama bin Laden is an engineer from a wealthy family and his lieutenant is a physician; scholars have found terrorists tend to be well educated (this too is not explained).

If there is a link between poverty, education, and terrorism, it is the opposite of the one popularly assumed. We should not be surprised to find that terrorists can add up, read, and even write prescriptions.

What is more surprising is that the attackers in London and Glasgow were so incompetent. Claude Berrebi and Harvard economist Efraim Benmelech studied—there’s no nice way to put this—the human-resources policy of Palestinian terrorist groups. They found that older, better-educated terrorists secured more important suicide missions and killed more people. Having more than a high-school education doubles the chance of escaping capture, for example.

If the terrorists in this case do turn out to be the doctors and other professionals who are, as I write, suspected of the crime, it would demonstrate that even years of education and experience do not guarantee a successful attack. Blowing up innocent people is obviously harder than it looks, and for that we can all be grateful.

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July 24, 2007 | 11:20 am

Muslim meatpackers fired for praying

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Somali Muslims in Omaha claim they were harassed and fired for taking a 5- to 10-minute break each evening to say the maghrib. Jama Mohamed, 28, is among the workers who say they were fired or forced to quit.

‘‘Some of them took the [prayer] mat from me; they started shouting, they started telling me to stop it, and one of them grabbed me by the collar of my shirt,’’ Mohamed said.

A lawsuit has not been filed. Civil-rights laws protect the religious observance of employees, so long as it is not burdensome to the company. The meatpacking company says the employees stopped working without permission.

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July 24, 2007 | 12:49 am

House church, like the early Christians

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The story in today’s LA Times about the movement of people forgoing church buildings and meeting in homes inspired me to pull from the archive an article I wrote last January about the house-church phenomenon. Here’s the link and a sampling:

“You walk into church and people are like, `Hey, how are you? God bless, man.’ Really, inside, you could be completely dead, dying, rotting inside. But you are never going to share that because there is no authenticity about doing life with people in mainstream church,” said Mike Dickran, 25, of Camarillo.

“What is so exciting about doing small-group house church is just the chance to be real.”

At a time when megachurches are blooming, when the yardstick for success seems to be the fullness of pews and the weight of offering plates, a growing number of Christians are casting aside institution for intimacy and gathering weekly in homes, apartments, parks or wherever the Spirit moves them.

“It’s not about where we meet or how big the sound system is or even how many seats we fill,” said Chris Burton, a former college pastor at Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village who left seven years ago to begin a Simi Valley house church that has grown into five separate gatherings, including the one Dickran attends.

“Those things are not indications of success for us - rather, personal commitment to the Lord and life transformation.”

House churchers view themselves as throwback Christians. They express a nostalgia for pre-Nicean Christianity, before the canons and creeds and clergy.

There are—as there always are—people who think this is a dangerous way to encourage spiritual commitment. I can’t say I agree. What do you think?

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July 23, 2007 | 5:23 pm

Mourning and planning for the Third Temple

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

You probably thought Yom Kippur was the saddest day on the Jewish calendar—the atoning for sins, the fasting. But, in fact, that date is Tisha B’Av, which begins at sundown tonight. It commemorates the tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, particularly the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

With this backdrop, a group of Jewish priests and Levites gathered at the Western Wall last week, bringing together the sons of Aaron for the first time in 2,000 years, and discussed what their duties would be upon the construction of the Third Temple.

“With the help of God, we are hoping that the Beit HaMikdash”—the Holy Temple—“will be rebuilt, and I would like my sons to know what that’s all about, what their role as Levi’im will be in the time of the Beit HaMikdash when things are really relevant,” Levi, a mother of five and an immigrant from South Africa, said between conference sessions Monday.

“We believe, and every day we have to believe, that it is imminent—that it can happen today. Until then there should be an awareness of their heritage and responsibility for the future.”

Considering the Holy Mount is currently the home of the Dome of the Rock  and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, these priests likely will need to live longer than Methuselah if they are going to enter the Third Temple.

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