Putin files: Anti-Semitism never dies in Russia

MOSCOW - The Jewish community of Russia is worried over a rumor campaign by nationalist parties claiming that Dmitri Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor, is Jewish.

Russian Jewish leaders declined to comment on the rumors officially, fearing to lend them credibility. Off the record, however, one said: "I pray it isn't true, because it would only make trouble, for him and for us."

Medvedev, who recently told a Russian weekly that he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church at age 23, has not commented on these rumors. But Russian Internet sites are full of reports about his alleged Jewish roots.

The rumors are based in part on the fact that his maternal grandfather's first name was Veniamin - similar to the Hebrew Binyamin (Benjamin) - while his family name, Shaposhnikov, is sometimes a Jewish name. But beyond that, accusing an electoral rival of being Jewish is a tactic that nationalist parties have employed in the past, both in Russia and in other former communist countries.

The concern here is that such "accusations" will arouse centuries-old anti-Semitism in the former czarist state. Russia is, after all, the birthplace of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

The easy answer: The Jews did it

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, The Jewish Journal ran a cover story that superimposed these words over silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers: "THE JEWS DIDN'T DO IT, YOU IDIOTS!"

I mentioned this in September as one of many immortal fallacies, and was just reminded of it while reading a remembrance of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister who was assassinated last week.

Bhutto told me she knew that if she returned to Pakistan, she’d probably be killed. She was, on December 27, shot after a rally in Rawalpindi, the military garrison town abutting Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. No one who knew her — or understood what she was — was surprised.

Least of all Hamid Gul, the former director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service, famously aligned with Islamist extremists, and still known as the man at the ISI’s controls. Days after my first conversation with Bhutto, I met with Gul in his home in Rawalpindi, a few hundred yards from where Benazir was to die. First, Gul told me he knew for a fact that the Mossad was behind the 9/11 attacks, and that Monica Lewinsky was an Israeli agent sent by Tel Aviv to undo the Clinton presidency. Then he said, matter-of-factly, “Being prime minister again is a job Benazir will not do.” He paused and cocked his head. “But she can try it if she likes.”

Tucked in there, right in the middle, are two less-than-flattering-but-oft-mentioned maligns of Jews. These are, in essence, the descendant lies of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." And not only in the Muslim world.

Season 10 of "South Park" saw Cartman finger Kyle, the fourth grade's only Jew, as the mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks. Here in Los Angeles, the head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council pondered on the radio whether Israel was behind the attacks "because, I think, this diverts attention from what's happening in the Palestinian territories, so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies." He later apologized for the remark.

Dawkins: Jews 'monopolize American foreign policy'

Daniel Finkelstein at The Times of London has a problem with what uber-atheist Richard Dawkins has to say about Jews:

I have just come across the most extraordinary statement by Richard Dawkins. It is right there on the Guardian website without a sentence even questioning it. Here it is:

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.

So Dawkins, a liberal hero, believes, er, that Jews control world power. And, judging from the Guardian, it is now a part of mainstream debate to say so. Perhaps you think I am over-reacting, but I am a little bit frightened.

Chris Dillow manages some elegant reflections on social proof.

All I can manage is Oh My God.

It's no mystery that atheists want a louder voice in Western politics. They should, and I don't see any reason why they wouldn't want to follow the Jewish model for success. But, based on Dawkins' use of the word "monopolize," I'd guess the two books in his nightstand -- the place you'd find a Gideon's Bible in American hotels -- are "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Sweet dreams.

Lamenting Jewish 'exceptionalism'

I like prodding my wife, who is not of Jewish descent, with claims of a special Jewish intelligence. I bring home issues of The Jewish Journal like this one and e-mail her essays like Charles Murray's "Jewish Genius."

But in this week's New Jersey Jewish News (hat tip: Bintel Blog), Editor-in-Chief Andrew Silow-Carroll laments Jewish exceptionalism.

Of course, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the inordinate amount of attention we attract. We learned a lot of things in the desert but never quite got the hang of camouflage. When fate was handing out professions we picked finance, law, medicine, and movie-making. When God was handing out land, we said sure, we'll take that one, the one sitting in the middle of about a gazillion Muslims. Maybe they won't notice.

And we make our own claims for exceptionalism, proudly but not always wisely. We're happy to be included among the world's "Three Great Religions," and then we're shocked by "God's Warriors," a six-hour series on CNN that devotes as much time to our crazies as it does to the Muslims' and Christians'. I'd be happy to be demoted to the list of the world's Not-So-Great Religions if it meant never having to suffer through another Christiane Amanpour interview with a Jewish extremist who is best known for failing to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

But that's the price of exceptionalism: Specious comparisons between a tiny people's relatively marginal record of terrorism, versus state-sponsored mass murderers who have destroyed untold numbers of mosques and shrines in Iraq and Hindu temples in India and Pakistan, not to mention the occasional synagogue.

The problem I have with this statement begins with "When God was handing out land." I don't recall God saying to Moses, "Where do you want to build my kingdom?" It was: "That occupied land over there -- yeah, the one with the giants living in it. That's where I want you to live. Go take it."

Secondly, there were no Muslims then, and there wouldn't be until 500-plus years after the destruction of the Second Temple.

Nonetheless, Silow-Carroll's point is an important one: Jews seems to suffer more as a group and are held to a higher standard than others. Like Silow-Carroll, a lot of Jews have been bemoaning the attention dedicated to the Jewish extremists in "God's Jewish Warriors." Here was what Robert J. Avrech, a Orthodox screenwriter, had to say at his blog, Seraphic Secret:

The whole two hours of this Al Jazeera program is such typical, and poisonous Arab propaganda that Karen and I are kind of fascinated. This huge lady [Christiane Amanpour] with the really bad hair interviews guess who as experts on Israel?

Jimmy Carter. Karen Armstrong. John Mearsheimer. There's the obligatory angry loser from Peace Now — dude, clean your office, it looks like cat litter. And a couple of Israeli lefties who are so far gone they might as well be living in Damascus.

Gee-willikers, Al Jazeera lady forgot to interview Hizbullah/Iranian-proxy strongman Hassan Nasrallah; his views on Israel are pretty much the same as the usual suspects above. He's always ranting about the evils of the Israeli occupation. And he vehemently denies that he's a Jew-hater. Like Carter, Armstrong and Mearsheimer he insists that he's merely anti-Zionist.Yup, Nasrallah gets positively indignant when he's accused of being an anti-Semite. Sheesh, can't anyone criticize and bomb Israel without being accused of being a Jew-hater?

There's this long segment on the — horror musical sting here — Israel lobby. Obligatory shots of well-dressed, um Jews, tables of food, which I suppose is proof of evil, people chatting and looking, y'know, conspiratorial.

I'm waiting for Al Jazeera lady to start quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because that's really what this segment is all about, but I suppose she's too cool for that. This is after all Al Jazeera. They are , allegedly, civilized.

Then fullback lady pulls out the big guns: Actual Jewish terrorists. She comes up with Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir, and a group who rigged explosives to the car of an Arab Mayor they suspected of aiding terrorists and who planned on blowing up an Arab girl's school, Disgusting and wrong, but they were caught and arrested, by Jewish cops, thank G-d.

That's it for Jewish terror.

Personally, I think the Jewish people have shown remarkable restraint in the face of a genocidal enemy.

Back to Silow-Carroll, who notes that Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse "thinks the world insists on Jewish exceptionalism as part of a 'culture of blame' — as a way for countries and cultures to distract their followers from their real problems." He then concludes with this:

I'm proud of the Jews. I really am. But sometimes I'm with Tevye. "I know, I know. We are Your chosen people," says the hero of Fiddler on the Roof. "But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?"

A Passover celebration with Jews and Rev. Lee

Last month, at the invitation of the American Jewish Committee and the request of my editors, I agreed to attend a seder tonight that I would have a difficult time writing about. It was an interesting enough event -- black Christians and Jews sitting together to remember our delivery from slavery -- but it was one of innumerable seders happening all over town for 10 days.

The whole context of the Passover meal changed, of course, when an email from Jewish philanthropist Daphna Ziman began circulating a little less than two weeks ago.

You're probably familiar with the story now: Ziman, who had been attending the annual banquet for a historically black fraternity, where she was honored for her charitableness toward foster kids, wrote that the keynote speaker delivered an anti-Semitic diatribe worthy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." That speaker, the Rev. Eric P. Lee, local head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, vehemently denied Ziman's account of his speech and "unequivocally" denounced anti-Semitism.

"My entire reputation has been damaged," the Rev. Eric P. Lee told me Monday. "This has really taken its toll on me. I've taken the brunt, and it seems there is no question about whether Ms. Ziman inaccurately heard, and I was misinterpreted. It has just been really rough to me and my family."

In today's paper I have a 2,000-word follow up that doesn't answer the question of what Lee did or didn't say -- organizers say no recording was made and few people claim to have been paying attention -- but explains the email's seismic shocks and the cautious nature of community-leaders' reactions.

Ziman's e-mail soon moved across the globe, aided by dissemination on April 9 on StandWithUs' 50,000-member listserv. Jewish organizations in Los Angeles heard from folks in Chicago and New York and the South, from Israelis and Europeans. It got additional attention when the Los Angeles Times reported the "rift" a week after it began. Many who shared the e-mail added their own commentary.

"It's no secret: the black community is riddled with Jew-hatred," Robert J. Avrech, a screenwriter who is Orthodox, wrote when posting the e-mail to his well-trafficked blog, Seraphic Secret. "And with so many apologists for Jeremiah Wright on the left and in the Jewish community, well, Jew-hatred has found a comfortable home not just in the black community but in the Democratic party."

Larry Greenfield, California director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, added a similar sentiment in bolded letters when he forwarded Ziman's missive: "Anti Americanism, Anti Zionism, Anti Semitism mark today's left."

In responding to the incident, many community leaders have had to traverse a minefield.

The mayor, Councilman Bernard Parks and state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas had been present at the gala, but all left before Lee's address. In response to the controversy, Villaraigosa broadly condemned racism in any form and at any time. The AJCommittee and the ADL looked for a way to move forward regardless of what Lee had said.

"Unapologetic anti-Semitism has a much different feeling than this thing," said Amanda Susskind, the ADL's regional director, who has acted as a liaison between Ziman and Lee. "It doesn't mean that either side is right or wrong, or what he said or she said -- I wasn't there.... But I would say there is always room for more discussion, dialogue and sensitivity."

Also this week, Rob Eshman's column focuses on Four Questions raised by Lee's speech and its aftermath.

Gay former governor entering seminary

Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who came out of the closet while in office and resigned because of an alleged affair, has converted into the Episcopal Church and will enter its General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. (The ordination of gay priests has become, to put it mildly, a contentious issue in the U.S. branch of King Henry's church.)

Here's the word from the Newark Star-Ledger, which broke the story online today:

"This is something he's been thinking about for years," said David France, who last year co-authored McGreevey's best-selling memoir, The Confession. "His spiritual life has always been central to who he is. From the time he was a kid, he thought about going into Catholic seminary a number of times. The idea of going into the Episcopal seminary has been in his mind for at least a couple of years."

McGreevey, 49, resigned in August 2004 after announcing he was gay and had an affair with a male staffer, who has denied it.

News of McGreevey's plans come a day after his estranged wife, former first lady Dina Matos McGreevey, released her own tell-all memoir, called Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage. The McGreeveys are embroiled in a nasty divorce and custody battle, which has boiled over in recent weeks and led a Superior Court judge in Elizabeth to instruct the couple to use common sense and remember that their daughter will one day read everything they're saying about each other.

While in office, McGreevey's pro-choice political stance put him at odds with the Catholic church. And soon after his resignation, McGreevey began attending Episcopal services. A central point of contention between the McGreeveys in their divorce is whether their 5-year-old daughter, being raised Catholic by Matos McGreevey, should be allowed to accept communion while at services with her father.

Of the Episcopal discernment protocols, Bean said: "There's a whole process that takes place within his parish here at St. Bart's, of discernment. That is followed by a process of further discernment at the diocesan level, involving the bishop and all. The decison to go to seminary is part of a more thorough process of discernment to ordination. It's not just going to seminary that gets you ordained ... It's a pretty extensive."

The deadliest books ever published

A Croatian Web site offers its list of books that have "changed the world and because of which the bloodiest wars were waged." The Bible comes in second, right behind Mein Kampf and just ahead of the Communist Manifesto. Here's the analysis:

The book that founded three great world religions and on which, whether they would like to admit so or not, all societies of the West were founded. The book took milleniums to write. It originates from ancient Jewish texts that, at least as far as Christians are concerned, make up the foundation of the Old Testament. The book speaks of the salvation of the Jewish people and their arrival to the Promised Land, while the New Testament speaks about Jesus and his sacrifice for the sins of the world. Despite its relatively benign content, the text became one of the chief incentives for some of the biggest massacres mankind has seen.

Controversial idea: Jesus is not a common prophet, but the son of God.

Death toll: If we stick only to the Crusades which lasted a good 200 years, the death toll according to some estimates, is a respectable five million.

Not quite accurate because the "Bible" is not the same book for Muslims and Christians and Jews. But it's hard to argue that belief in a monotheistic God that began with Abraham has caused a lot of bloodshed.

The Communist Manifesto also seems to be given a free pass in the political killings of Joseph Stalin, whose victims range from 3 million to 60 million. I also wonder if "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and Luther's "On the Jew and Their Lies" deserve a place for influencing Hitler.

(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

The mystery of Jewish-controlled media and its anti-Israel bias

No single element of American Jewish power is more tangled in myth and mystery than the relationship between Jews and the media. Nowhere is the gulf wider between the way Jews see themselves and the way their neighbors see them.

Put more starkly, the gap in perception is this: non-Jews commonly see the mass media as a key stronghold of Jewish power, a major source of whatever influence Jews wield in American society. Jews, by contrast -- especially affiliated, activist Jews -- commonly describe the media as a major source of anti-Israel bias.

The two views seem like polar opposites, either-or propositions, thesis and antithesis. They cannot both be true. And yet, to a great degree, they are.

This is how J.J. Goldberg begins the 11th chapter of his phenomenal book, "Jewish Power." He notes that in 1989, at the start of the Intifada, 79 percent of American Jews felt the news media applied a double standard in judging Israel more harshly than its Arab neighbors.

Today, many still believe mainstream magazines and newspapers and radio stations are anti-Israel. They point to the "Protocols of Christiane Amanpour" on CNN, the phony footage of a murdered Palestinian boy from France 2, and, my favorite, the reportage of "National Palestinian Radio."

I have agreed on specific occasions, though in hindsight I'm not convinced the bias is deliberate. Neither is Jeff Jacoby, an op-ed writer for the Boston Globe, who speaking last night at Syracuse University said the phenomenon has more to do with ignorance than malevolence.

Jacoby read excerpts from two New York Times editorials about the deaths of terrorists. He showed a picture that's caption described an Israeli police officer standing over a beaten Palestinian youth. In reality, the youth was a Jewish boy from Chicago who had just been mugged. He was running to the police officer for protection.

"Nobody in news media questioned the storyline of Israeli brutality and a Palestinian victim," Jacoby said.

Jacoby said one factor that contributes to this bias is ignorance. A good journalist is expected to be able to cover a story with no prior knowledge of the situation, Jacoby said. Too often, these inexperienced reporters "get bamboozled."

"If they go in with ignorance, very often they will get the story wrong," he said.

An over-emphasis on Israel in the news is another factor in coverage bias, he said. Many reporters are based in Jerusalem because Israel defends the right to a free press. Thus, more investigative stories about Israel are produced because there is no fear of the government harming reporters.

"Where journalists are concentrated, coverage tends to be negative," he said.

State: Global anti-Semitism rising

Rising global anti-Semitism has been an ongoing issue. Seriously. I could link to much more. Yesterday the State Department gave Congress a report on the matter.

It says that although Nazism and fascism are rejected by the West "and beyond," blatant forms of anti-Semitism are "embraced and employed by the extreme fringe."

"Traditional forms of anti-Semitism persist and can be found across the globe. Classic anti-Semitic screeds, such as 'The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' and 'Mein Kampf' remain commonplace.

"Jews continue to be accused of blood libel, dual loyalty, and undue influence on government policy and the media, and the symbols and images associated with age-old forms of anti-Semitism endure."

New forms of anti-Semitism are reflected in rhetoric that compares Israel to the Nazis and attributes "Israel's perceived faults to its Jewish character."

This kind of anti-Semitism, the report says, "is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations."

In fact, such vitriolic rhetoric can be found at UC Irvine, on LA college campuses and even outside the Israeli consulate.

Times blogger: MacDonald 'blends creepiness, crackpottery and a surprising forthrightness'

Tim Cavanaugh, the administrator of the Times' Opinion L.A. blog who I mentioned in my profile of Luke Ford, complimented the tone of my article about Kevin MacDonald ("perfectly dry") and from it made a familiar observation of Cal State Long Beach's infamous academic:

MacDonald himself, who blends creepiness, crackpottery and a surprising forthrightness into a weird form of amiability that I can sort of respect. I hate to use such a hoary cliché, but he's a quintessentially American type of oddball, the kind you don't want to listen to because he occasionally makes you say "Hm, he's got a point."

In case you don't recall, MacDonald's point is that Jews are too smart and far too well organized for his people's good.

I agree with Cavanaugh to a point; as I wrote in the article, MacDonald's "affable" and "seems every bit a slice of Midwest Americana." And some of his arguments are uncontroversial

Yes, Jews have been encouraged to marry within the faith, to promote their own culture and to support Jewish causes and charities. There's probably some value in his theory that Judaism serves a "group evolutionary" purpose.

But the Nazis were a mirror image of Jewry that punished the Other for their success in science and the arts and business? And the Talmud was not for religious purposes but instead to weed out the dim witted? Hmm ... I don't think he has a point.

Martin Fiebert -- a fellow psych professor at The Beach who warned MacDonald in 1993 that his first book may find a "treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Protocols of Zion'" -- told me that he at first found MacDonald's writings on Jews to be an "intellectual excercise." He disagreed with MacDonald's argument but not so much with his desire to make it.

That changed for Fiebert when MacDonald decided to serve as an expert witness for Holocaust denier David Irving in a lawsuit against Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt.

Why Christians should love Israel

Is it mere coincidence the same week two American academic elites' book criticizing the power of "The Israel Lobby" hit bookshelves that "Christianity Today, the "magazine of evangelical conviction" that I write for often, published an editorial explaining why Christians should love not only Israel but Jews, too?

The key complaint offered against dispensationalists is that they talk as though God had separate plans for saving Israel and the church. And contemporary Reformed Christians are accused of having a "replacement theology" in which the church takes the place of Israel, inheriting all of God's promises with no remainder for the Jewish people. The one view tends to find no fault with Israeli government decisions as long as they do not compromise dispensational theology. The other view tends to consider the continued existence of the Jewish people a historical anomaly with little theological significance.

But we cannot read the New Testament without seeing that the Jews continue to have a place in God's economy. Gentile Christians do not replace the Jews, but are joint heirs and wild branches grafted onto the Jewish olive tree. God's ultimate purpose in saving Gentile Christians is to save the Jews (Rom. 11).

The evangelical mainstream needs to do some rigorous theological work on its relationship to Judaism, to the Jewish people, and to the state of Israel. The concerns we must address include:

The list continues here.

For more: Check out David Remnick's commentary on Walt and Mearsheimer's book, which StandWithUs likens to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Jews too powerful, talk too much about Holocaust

That's according to 2,700 European adults surveyed by the ADL.

The survey found that a majority of those in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than the country they live in; that Jews have too much power in business (39 percent of those polled) and financial markets (44 percent); talk too much about the Holocaust (47 percent); and are responsible for killing Jesus (20 percent).

In other news: Europeans have discovered a Jewish conspiracy for world domination, informally dubbed The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.