February 18, 2008 | 12:25 pm

The religious impetus for a sovereign Kosovo

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I’ve been looking for some discussion of the religious motivations behind the new nation of Kosovo but have been disappointed to see it left out of most media coverage. In fact, the headline for today’s frontpager in the LA Times was “Kosovo takes a big leap of faith,” but only offered this reference to religion:

Most of Kosovo’s nearly 2 million people are Muslim but are largely secular and pro-Western. Serbia is an Orthodox Christian nation with historical cultural ties to the Kosovo region, part of the reason it is so valued by Belgrade.

As I imagined, GetReligion has gotten around to a pretty good run down of the the centuries-old conflict. See, the Balkans are viciously, well, balkanized among Albanian Muslims, Croat Catholics and Orthodox Christian Serbs.

(Coincidentally, I spent a bit of time writing about this yesterday for an article for this week’s Jewish Journal about a Muslim from Macedonia who was the first to speak at the Orthodox seminary and helped diffuse a near civil war six years ago. I’m also reading “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” a Pulitzer Prize winner that began with Samantha Power’s years reporting on the Serbian massacres of Muslims in Sarajevo.)

Here, Terry Mattingly of GetReligion quotes from a 1999 column he wrote trying to give context to the Balkans problem and the thugocracy of the late Communist ruler Slobodan Milosevic.

The roots of this crisis are astonishingly complex, ancient and bloody. . . . In 1389, Serbian armies fought — virtually to the death — while losing the Battle of Kosovo, but managed to stop the Ottoman Empire from reaching into Europe. The Kosovo Plain became holy ground.

Leap ahead to World War II, when Nazi Germany tried to use Albanian Muslims and Catholic Croats to crush the Serbs. Then Communists — such as Milosevic — took over. In the mid-1990s, the United States all but encouraged Croat efforts to purge Serbs from Krajina, where they had lived for 500 years. The West has been silent as Turkey expelled waves of Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Since morphing from Communist to nationalist, Milosevic has skillfully used Serbia’s array of fears, hatreds and resentments to justify terror in Kosovo and elsewhere by his paramilitary and police units. The Serbian strongman knows that Kosovo contains 1,300 churches and monasteries, many of them irreplaceable historic sites.

Retired New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, who once won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Eastern Europe, put it this way: “I do not get emotional about the history of Kosovo. I am not a Serb. Serbs do. . . . Serbs are as likely to give up Kosovo willingly because the Albanians want it as Israelis are to give up Jerusalem because the Arabs want it.”

(Map and image)

February 18, 2008 | 10:10 am

‘Dictator’s cut’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Translated from Farsi in the February issue of Harper’s, an Iranian journalist’s reaction to director Oliver Stone’s interest in shooting a documentary of President/nut job Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In light of the history of measures by Western media against Iran’s Islamic system and the dominant influence of global Zionism on that media empire, being optimistic about Oliver Stone’s request or hoping that he refrains from deliberate manipulations would be an irreparable mistake.

Oliver Stone is the director of the film Alexander, about Alexander of Macedon. Because of Alexander’s overthrow of the Achaemenid dynasty and the savage mass killings carried out by his army, he is hated by Iranians. Throughout his film World Trade Center, Stone tried to show 9/11 as an attack by the world of Islam against the West. The Doors commemorated one of America’s most perverted, half-mad singers, who enjoyed urinating on the heads of his fans during concerts. ]FK drew a picture of John F. Kennedy as a political saint, as ordered by America’s Democratic Party. The film played an undeniable role in Bill Clinton’s successful run for the White House. In Nixon, an overthrown and warmongering president who initiated several conflicts is shown as an innocent and blameless individual. All these facts leave no room for doubt concerning Oliver Stone’s allegiance to America’s key policies, even if some groups, out of ignorance, call him an independent filmmaker.

How can we voluntarily go under this filmmaker’s knife? The outcome of such a venture will not be a realistic portrayal of Ahmadinejad the intellectual and peacemaker but a portrait of Ahmadinejad according to Stone, Hollywood, and global Zionism.

Yeah, if Ahmadinejad looks bad, it’s the Jews fault. That lovable old dictator is really a pretty decent guy ...

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February 17, 2008 | 10:39 pm

Reclaiming the Hitler mustache

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I get Vanity Fair, but I guess I missed this article in November. Like this post last month, it revolves around Rich Cohen. But also like this piece, it adds a spice of Hitler.

The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement. Actually wearing a Hitler mustache, as I planned to do—well, that is like yelling racial epithets in a crowded subway. Wasn’t Hitler amazing? Whatever he touched turned to ice. His life ended the long and fabled career of the name Adolf, which had included the stories of Adolph Zukor, Adolphe Menjou, Adolph Ochs, and Adolph Coors. Never again will a pregnant mother innocently consider the name for her son, or imagine shouting it across a teeming playground. As for the Toothbrush mustache, it did not only die with the Führer—it was embalmed with him. It was his essence, and so it has been relegated to the black book of history.

This is the part where I am supposed to explain just why I decided to write this story now. I might talk about the re-emergence of facial hair on the world stage, or the rise of the “new anti-Semitism,” or Holocaust denial in Iran, but, the fact is, my interest in the Hitler mustache never started and never ends. It is always. If you’re a Jew, the Hitler mustache exists in the eternal present. I grew it for the same reason Richard Pryor said the word “n——-.” I wanted to defuse it. I wanted to own it. I wanted to reclaim it for America and for the Jews. My name is Rich Cohen, and I wear a Hitler mustache.

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February 16, 2008 | 4:53 pm

Gunmen bomb Gaza YMCA library

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Stories like this reminds me that militant Islamist groups—not to be confused with righteous Muslims—don’t just hate Jews and Israel, but all who disagree with their vision for world supremacy. (Remember what Hamas did to its Fatah brothers in June?)

A band of 14 masked gunmen forced its way into YMCA offices in the Gaza Strip and exploded a library there, Israel Radio reported Friday.

Thousands of books were reportedly burnt in the ensuing fire. The YMCA in Gaza also operates a gym and a wedding hall.

The gunmen laid a second explosive device near a computer in the library but it failed to detonate. Two security guards on the scene were not able to block the intruders; they were taken by them from the YMCA and later released in the northern Gaza Strip.

The latest incident is another link in an ongoing chain of attacks against Palestinian Christians which has worsened since Hamas took power of the Gaza Strip last June.

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February 16, 2008 | 2:43 pm

Pastor prays for foes demise

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Sometimes Americans United for Separation of Church and State is misguided in its zeal. But, in this case, the one lacking wisdom was Pastor Wiley S. Drake, who last week used First Baptist Church of Buena Park letterhead and an affiliated radio program to endorse Mike Huckabee for president. That’s a violation of tax laws for nonprofits, and Americans United filed a complaint. Drake response was a bit vengeful.

In an e-mail Thursday, Drake urged action against Americans United and the American Civil Liberties Union.

As he had in August, Drake quoted Psalm 109, which speaks of wicked and deceitful people and asks God to let such a person’s days be few and let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

“In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God, I ask the children of God to go into action with imprecatory prayer,” he wrote.

Imprecatory prayers have been defined as praying for someone’s misfortune or as appeals to God for justice.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, called Drake’s appeal to his supporters “reckless and repugnant.”

“Introducing this kind of religious extremism into American life is reprehensible,” he said.

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February 16, 2008 | 12:51 pm

Olmert to declare Regev, Goldwasser dead?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is planning on declaring the two soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah in the summer of 2006 dead, the German weekly magazine, Der Spiegel reported on Saturday.

According to the report, no date has yet been set for an official announcement on the subject, but unnamed sources told the magazine that they expect it to be made soon.

Although the Prime Minister’s Office did not immediately respond to the report, a government official told Israel Radio that there was still no new, definitive information about kidnapped IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

The official added that Israel still believes that the two reservists are alive, and continues in negotiations with Hizbullah through mediators.

This report’s veracity seems questionable. But then, sadly, so does hope at this point.

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February 16, 2008 | 5:07 am

French dislike president’s Holocaust curriculum

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that ...

The list of detractors in this New York Times story goes on and on. Frankly, I think Sarko’s plan is a good one. I wonder what the French would say if he suggested Holocaust comic books.

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February 15, 2008 | 3:40 pm

Godtalk gone wild

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I spoke last month with Jacques Berlinerblau, author of “Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics.” Jewcy recently caught up with the Georgetown professor and has this Q&A:

In light of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain’s virtually nonexistant “Scripture game” and his past skirmishes with prominent evangelical figures, do you think 2008 offers an opening for the Democrats to close the gap with religious voters?

Absolutely. You know, it’s strange: on many issues of great concern to conservative Christians (abortion, national security, showing the love to Intelligent Design curricula) McCain delivers the goods. But as I noted in Thumpin’ It, he has this longstanding history of personal enmity with their leadership. I once suggested in my blog for The Washington Post that McCain and conservative Evangelicals would benefit from couples counseling. When the senator from Arizona says ours is a “Christian nation” (as he did this past fall) what Evangelicals should hear him saying is: “please don’t accuse me of having fathered an illegitimate child” (as some unidentified Bush operatives famously did in 2000 in South Carolina).

That being said, a candidate like Obama would steal Evangelical votes from McCain and even McCain-Huckabee in large Kansas-sized chunks.

Speaking of which, you discuss a growing rift in the evangelical movement due to the rise of progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis and the evangelical environmentalists. What is the state of progressive evangelicalism and how will it affect the 2008 election?

This is the big question: to what degree will Evangelicals behave the way they did in 2004. Nearly 80% of them voted for George W. Bush. That’s 80% of a quarter of the electorate! But I don’t think that will happen again in 2008. For starters, progressive Evangelicals are finding their voice. And a new generation of younger evangelicals is rising that doesn’t seem eager to focus solely (and obsessively) on abortion and gays. This is a great opportunity for Democrats. Remember: they don’t have to win Evangelicals—they just have to stanch the Kerry-like hemorrhaging they endured in 2004. That is eminently doable.

The book focuses primarily on how the “Scripture game” plays to Christian Americans. How does it play to Jewish Americans? Are the rules any different?

With the possible exception of certain Orthodox groups, my sense is that most Jews would prefer that Bible-thumping politicians put a cork in it. Public, state-sponsored displays of religion tend not, historically, to be good for a minority group once aptly described by Max Weber as a “pariah people.” Even when Christian politicians invoke the Old Testament they are usually citing prophetic texts and Psalms that they read in a deeply Christological manner. So Jews aren’t about to respond to that with cries of “yesher koach!”

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February 15, 2008 | 12:41 pm

McCain loses conservative Christian vote, according to GodTube’s unscientific, but possibly accurate

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Via the DMN religion blog:

GodTube is a Dallas-based online service aimed at Christians. It’s hosted a presidential poll that is no more scientific that me sticking my finger in the air. Self-selecting, non-random, it’s own population. But that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. GodTubers (which sounds like a sacred potato, no?) clearly do not (heart) McCain. Specific results after the jump.

From my e-box:

  DALLAS, Texas (Feb. 14, 2008) - GodTube.com has announced that despite the recent sweeping victory for John McCain, a stunning new GodTube.com poll reveals that if McCain wins his party’s nomination, Christian Conservative participants would rather vote for one of the two Democratic candidates.

  With a slim 9.1% support for McCain, Obama has become a viable choice for many Christian Conservatives with 26.3% of the Christian vote, up 8% from last week.

  Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton showed no increase in the GodTube.com poll this week maintaining her 19.6% of the Christian vote while Republican candidate Mike Huckabee increased his lead 30% last week, leading the GodTube.com poll by 45% of the overall Christian vote.

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February 15, 2008 | 7:35 am

How Jewish hawks won the advocacy war

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The seminal moment in the transformation of pro-Israel advocacy occurred in the summer of 1993, when the Oslo accords were finalized, and then signed, on the White House lawn.

“The Jewish community essentially had trained itself in one direction and was being asked to turn around immediately,” said Michael Berenbaum, an adjunct professor of theology at American Jewish University. “It had advocated that the enemy was the PLO, and the question was, if all of the sudden [the PLO] are friends, they felt betrayed.”

It was at this moment that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) broke a decades-old code and criticized the Israeli government. While most Jewish American organizations got behind the landmark peace agreement, ZOA President Morton A. Klein predicted the accords would not only fail, but that they would empower Yasser Arafat and endanger Israelis.

“They were completely wrong and we were completely right,” Klein said last week. “Peace is impossible.”

Seven years and 300 murdered Jews after Oslo, the Second Intifada broke out, rupturing the ground beneath American Jewry. Within one more year, 19 Muslim terrorists would hijack four American planes and inflict the worst domestic attack in U.S. history; Jews and the West found a common enemy in the Muslim world, and the crack in the Jewish community severed into two pieces—hawks and doves, hardliners and peaceniks, right and left.

In Los Angeles, the American Jewish Congress had dissolved its local office in 1998 and reformed the following year as the PJA, a liberal organization concerned mostly with domestic issues related to social justice. But the AJCongress reopened here in 2000, bearing little resemblance to its former self.

“People who believed that we could have peace with the Palestinians were shaken out of their misguided view and realized they had no desire for peace,” said Gary P. Ratner, the group’s western region executive director. “Their goal was what they stated openly: The destruction of Israel, whether through the violence of groups like Hamas or through negotiations, that will weaken Israel. I think some of us woke up to the fact that Oslo was a disaster and the peace process would only lead to the destruction of Israel.”

The Jewish state was under attack with no partner for peace; the old model of resolving conflict through compromise had failed. With climbing anti-Israel rhetoric on American campuses and the perception that international media had joined liberal Christians in taking up the Palestinian cause, the hardliners quickly captured the upper hand among Jewish groups in the debate on what it meant to be pro-Israel.

“It’s a painful moment in Jewish life, because there isn’t a place for honest and open discourse,” Gerald Bubis, founding director of the Irwin Daniels School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, told this paper in a 2002 article titled “The Silencing of the Left?” “People can have very strong differences of opinion about where to go and how to resolve things, but that discourse does not have a place right now. Rather, there is a vituperative argumentation and excoriation.”

Amid this climate, major Jewish organizations slid into the shadows, abdicating their leadership.

“Whatever they said would upset somebody,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said. “As a result, Jews who were frustrated, who wanted to defend Israel and didn’t really know how or didn’t have the ability, they gravitated toward The David Project and its sort of counterpart in StandWithUs.”

That is a portion of my cover story for this week’s paper, mentioned here and here and here, about the ascendacy of organizations that have redefined what it means to be “pro-Israel,” of which I focus on StandWithUs. In seven years, a gathering of 50 L.A. Jews has grown into an international organization with a major presence on college campuses, where they claim pro-Palestinian professors and student groups intimidate and harass Jewish students. The rest of the story is here.

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February 14, 2008 | 5:19 pm

Mazel tov, us!

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jewcy has awarded this week’s Jewish Journal with the honor of “ugliest cover of all time.” Wait ‘til Izzy Grinspan reads the stories inside ...

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February 14, 2008 | 3:51 pm

Beloved rabbi says unbelievably regrettable things

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Julie Fax’s story this week is going to be a talker. It’s about the Chai Center’s beloved rabbi, Shlomo “Schwartzie” Schwartz, who has a habit of writing really inappropriate things—in an odd texty language—when responding to the e-mails of sort-of shiksas who come to his services. (I can only imagine what he would say to this shiksa.) Here’s what he thinks of non-Jewish women who by dating Jewish men are diluting the Jewish people:

“You are a f—-ing Nazi. You are killing a Jew and I hate you for that and I’ll piss on your grave. You are not going to kill my Jews.”

That should get your attention. But it’s the e-mails he sent to three women that Julie found that really shocked me. He told one woman who had come to the Chai Center seeking support after her mother, whose dying wish was that she marry a Jew, passed. Schwartzie told her that because her mother’s conversion wasn’t legit:

“She might have been agrt mother, but as a ‘Jewish’ mother she was a miserable failure! In truth she really was not a FAILURE as a Jew; since, in the eyes of G-d (where it COUNTS) she wasn’t!”

Here is the interchange with another woman:

Jackie Campbell (not her real name), who is not Jewish, was invited by her Jewish neighbor to attend Schwartzie’s Rosh Hashanah services last fall at the Writers Guild Theater.

A graduate of Berkeley who has published research on breast cancer and Eastern medicine and now produces children’s health and exercise videos, Campbell wrote to Schwartzie to follow up on a comment he had made about Jewish astrology. In her e-mail, she told Schwartzie that her father’s father was Jewish, and she also asked the rabbi for “words of wisdom” about her Jewish ex-boyfriend, whom she had recently broken up with when she realized he wouldn’t marry a non-Jew.

Schwartzie wrote back:

“A paternal grandpapy does not make U a Jew. Get used 2 it & get used 2 the program; its called the Reality of truth, even if it disturbs yr comfort zone. It is really low space morally & ethically of you 2 cast aspersions on Jews & their religion bcz they tell the truth. U R not a Jew even if tht means tht U lose yr boy toy,” read part of his long tirade to her.

Campbell said the e-mails deeply disturbed her and embarrassed her Jewish friends, who assured her he did not represent Judaism. She wrote that to Schwartzie in answer to his e-mail.

Schwartzie responded:

“How dare U B so nervy as 2 criticize me when U r the brazen hussy slut chasing after Jewish men (even when they R Orthodox & you KNOW tht it is against their G-d & religion). Shame on U 4 yr disgusting unpaid whoring ways 2 try & take Jewish men away from Jewish women. Hitler murdered Jews & U R also trying 2 exterminate Jews.”

Julie is ridiculously judicious with the handling of this story. It’s a long, well-researched, thoughtful, relevant piece, and the sensational nature of Schwartzie’s e-mails are handled with, I feel, total sensitivity for the fact that this is a man with a serious following in the LA Jewish community. Schwartzie’s son, Mendel, said his father’s e-mails were inappropriate but that they were an unfair blemish on an otherwise wholesome rabbinate.

*Update: Luke Ford read this article and had this to say:

If you believe that God gave the Torah, you can argue with the way Schwartzie expressed himself, but the gist of what he said and did is totally congruent with Torah. Orthodox Judaism has standards that are more important for Orthodox Jews than being nice to goyim.

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