Pentagon classifies Evangelical Christians, and Catholics, as "domestic
hate
groups"
Newsletters published on 29 December 2013
(1) Jews have gone undercover as Christians, to drum up hatred of
Moslems - Paul Sheldon Foote
(2) Crypto-Jews duping Christians to Hate
Muslims, by Paul Sheldon Foote
(3) Pentagon classifies Evangelical
Christians, and Catholics, as
"domestic hate groups"
(4) Trashing
Christmas, by Thomas Clough
(1) Jews have gone undercover as Christians,
to drum up hatred of
Moslems - Paul Sheldon Foote
http://jhate.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/press-tv-anti-semitic-commentator-paul-sheldon-foote/
Press
TV anti-Semitic commentator: Paul Sheldon Foote
by Aryeh
Tuchman
Jhate, Posted on October 9, 2010
Paul Sheldon Foote is
another regular commentator on Press TV, having
done eight interviews since
June of 2010. His interviews pertain to
financial issues, which makes sense
because he is an Accounting
professor at the University of California
Fullerton. (His faculty
webpage is here and his complete CV is
here.)
Foote is also clearly an anti-Semite.
For a while Foote
wrote his own anti-Semitic blog. In a post entitled
“Crypto-Jews Duping
Christians to Hate Muslims,” Foote claims that Jews
have gone undercover as
Christians in order to obscure their efforts to
drum up hatred between
Christians and other groups. Foote writes:
There is a very long history
of the successful use of the Crypto-Jew
technique. Jews have pretended to
convert from Judaism to Christianity
and to Islam…Currently, Crypto-Jews,
Jews, Christian Zionists, Zionists,
neo-conservatives (neo-Trotskyites), and
others are attempting to
convince Christians to hate Muslims. How many
Christian soldiers have
died in Iraq and in Afghanistan to advance the sick,
totalitarian dreams
of the admirers of Trotsky?
The title of another
section of his essay speaks for itself:
“Crypto-Jews Murdering Christians
and Muslims to Steal Palestine.” In
that section, Foote claims that Jews are
responsible for the Armenian
Genocide (!), and links out to the wild
anti-Semitic theories of
Christopher John Bjerknes. Foote also links out to
the website of
Holocaust denier and anti-Semitic ideologue named Michael A.
Hoffman II,
and says that Hoffman’s book, Judaism Discovered, “should be
studied by
all Christians.” The full title of Hoffman’s book, by the way, is
“Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism,
Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit.” Foote elaborates on his love
for Hoffman’s book in another blog post, where he describes it as “The
Intelligent Christian’s Guide to Judaism;” he also reviews the book
positively in a review on Amazon.com (scroll down). Foote also links out
to two other astoundingly anti-Semitic websites which attack the Talmud
and Judaism as a religion (one and two), and which are perfect examples
of anti-Judaism, as I discussed in a previous post.
Like many other
anti-Semites these days, Foote also has a facebook
profile, where you can
find many delightful goodies. He seems to be
friendly with another
anti-Semite named Mark Dankof; he took note when
David Duke’s YouTube
account was suspended and he links out to a Duke
video which claims that
Jews control the media; he links out to attacks
on the Talmud and Kol Nidre;
he links out several times to posts on the
anti-Semitic website
truthtellers.org, including:
Kol Nidre: Judaism’s License to
Lie
The Jewish Kabbalah: Root of Mideast Violence
The
Talmud: Scalpel that Bleeds the Middle East
(Kind of sounds like Foote is
reading my blog….)
I’m not even going into Foote’s visceral hatred for
Israel, which is
obvious from the links and “Likes” he has on his Facebook
profile. And
I’m also not going to document his bias in favor of Iran and
Ahmadinejad. But it’s all there, on the Facebook profile and other
sources scattered about the Web. Check it out. It can’t be that Press TV
doesn’t know this. Either Press TV doesn’t care that they are repeatedly
interviewing an anti-Semite, or that’s actually part of their
agenda.
(2) Crypto-Jews duping Christians to Hate Muslims, by Paul
Sheldon Foote
http://paulsheldonfoote.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/crypto-jews-duping-christians-to-hate-muslims/
Crypto-Jews
Duping Christians to Hate Muslims
“I was a Jew but now I’m a Christian
and think the Muslims and Arabs are
curry-smelling Sand monkeys”
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/jeffrey-roth-secret-shin-bet-agent-strikes-again/
Mark
Glenn, at “The Ugly Truth” and at “Crescent & Cross”, has been
doing an
excellent job exposing techniques used to dupe Christians into
hating
Muslims.
http://crescentandcross.com/
Regardless
of whether those who post such hateful comments are
Crypto-Jews, Christian
Zionists, Zionists, neo-conservatives
(neo-Trotskyites), communists, or are
from other dishonest groups, the
use of this technique has been very
successful. Unfortunately, there are
large numbers of persons who call
themselves Christians, Muslims,
Republicans, Conservatives, or members of
other groups who are capable
of being duped.
Useful Idiots
A
supporter of Lenin has noted that even the neo-conservatives
(neo-Trotskyites) are using the term useful idiots to describe the
technique of communists duping Western useful idiots who call themselves
liberals or progressives.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/02/note-on-useful-idiots.html
Crypto-Jews
There
is a very long history of the successful use of the Crypto-Jew
technique.
Jews have pretended to convert from Judaism to Christianity
and to Islam.
There is even an association of Crypto-Jews.
http://www.cryptojew.org/main_page.html
Jewish
Hatred of Christians
Currently, Crypto-Jews, Jews, Christian Zionists,
Zionists,
neo-conservatives (neo-Trotskyites), and others are attempting to
convince Christians to hate Muslims. How many Christian soldiers have
died in Iraq and in Afghanistan to advance the sick, totalitarian dreams
of the admirers of Trotsky?
Patrick Buchanan’s “Whose War?” should be
required reading before any
Christian enlists in the American
military.
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/mar/24/00007/
Michael
Hoffman’s 1,102-page book, Judaism Discovered, should be studied
by all
Christians.
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/
Some
examples of Jewish sacred teachings of hatred for Christians have
been
posted at:
http://www.talmudblasphemy.com/
http://www.talmudunmasked.com/
Crypto-Jews
Murdering Christians and Muslims to Steal Palestine
The history of Turkey
provides an excellent case study of the success of
Crypto-Jews. The Ottoman
Empire accumulated large debts before it
collapsed. For a history of who
financed the debts and of the Young
Turks who pretended to become Muslims
(including going on the Haj!),
read How Jews snatched Palestine?
http://tazeen-howjewssnatchedpalestine.blogspot.com/
Then,
read about the Armenian genocide in the free book online:
THE JEWISH GENOCIDE
OF ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS
By Christopher Jon Bjerknes
Enlarged Second
Edition
Complete 575 page book is available
by clicking here for the free
PDF file (3.8 MB)
http://www.jewishracism.com/JewishGenocide.htm
(3)
Pentagon classifies Evangelical Christians, and Catholics, as
"domestic hate
groups"
From: Peter Grafström <petergrafstrom@tele2.se>
To:
<peter@mailstar.net>
Subject:
Pentagon Lumps Evangelical Christians, Catholics With 'Extremists'
Date: Tue,
19 Nov 2013 00:54:18 +0100
Pentagon Lumps Evangelical Christians,
Catholics With 'Extremists'
Wednesday, 28 Aug 2013 12:20 PM By Alexandra
Ward
http://www.newsmax.com/thewire/pentagon-evangelical-christians-catholics/2013/08/28/id/522677
Pentagon Lumps Evangelical Christians, Catholics With
'Extremists'
Wednesday, 28 Aug 2013 12:20 PM
By Alexandra
Ward
Evangelical Christians and Catholics are both classified by the
Pentagon
as "extremists," not unlike the Ku Klux Klan or al-Qaida, according
to
training documents from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management
Institute, a Department of Defense agency.
Obtained by the Chaplain
Alliance for Religious Liberty via a Freedom of
Information Act Request, the
training materials contain a 133-page
lesson on "Extremism."
"The
materials we obtained establish that the U.S. military violated its
appropriate apolitical stance and engaged in a dishonorable
mischaracterization of multiple faith groups," Ron Crews, executive
director of the Chaplain Alliance, told Fox News.
Among the other
groups considered "extremists" by the Pentagon are Sunni
Muslims,
ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Muslim Brotherhood are other
groups the
Pentagon considers extremists, besides Evangelical Christians
and Catholics,
according to the Christian Post.
"Many extremists will talk of individual
liberties, states' rights, and
how to make the world a better place," the
DoD reportedly says in the
study guide, warning that involvement with
"extremist" organizations is
"incompatible with military service and is,
therefore, prohibited."
The leaked DoD documents come on the heels of an
April incident in which
a U.S. Army training instructor sent an email to his
subordinates
warning them to be on the lookout for any soldiers who might be
members
of "domestic hate groups" such as the Family Research Council, a
Christian organization.
"It's disturbing insight into what's
happening inside Obama's Pentagon,"
Tom Fitton, president of the
conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch,
told Fox News. "The Obama
administration has a nasty habit of equating
basic conservative values with
terrorism."
The Pentagon also reportedly considers American founding
fathers like
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin
"extremists."
"In today's military, you can't say jihad but you can
pretend that the
founding fathers were extremists and, in the same breath,
tie them to
the KKK and al-Qaida," Fitton said on "The Steve Malzberg Show"
on
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
(4) Trashing Christmas, by Thomas
Clough
http://pauleisen.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/trashing-christmas-by-thomas-clough.html
Friday,
9 November 2012
Trashing Christmas
by Thomas Clough
The
last of the Halloween candy has been eaten. The harvest moon is a
radiant
memory. The family festival of Thanksgiving has drawn us closer
together.
All of these warm seasonal memories can mean only one thing:
It’s time for
the Christmas haters to shift into high gear.
Who are the Christmas
haters? Well, if we are to draw a conclusion from
the hundreds of heartfelt
and articulate commentaries currently on
display on the Internet, they fall
loosely into these self-identified
groups: Jews, atheists, secular humanists
and pagans. While many Jews,
atheists, humanists and pagans make an effort
to distinguish themselves
from members of the other unhappy groups, there is
a tremendous amount
of overlap between the groups. For example, the word Jew
can be used to
designate a devout adherent of Judaism or simply anyone who
has grown
comfortable with Jewish customs, sentiments, perspectives and
rhythms.
In short, there are religious Jews and there are ethnic Jews and
the
ethnic Jews might also be atheists or pantheists or Wiccans or heaven
knows what.
A 1998 poll of Los Angeles Jews commissioned by the
Jewish Federation of
Greater Los Angeles revealed that only 41 percent of
respondents were
firm in their belief in any sort of willful conscious
deity. The 1990
National Jewish Population Survey makes clear that only half
of American
Jews are affiliated with any Jewish congregation. Jews are most
likely
to join a synagogue when they have school-age children, often because
of
family pressure; they see the synagogue as a place where their children
can receive an education in Jewish heritage, an education the parents
themselves are ill-equipped to communicate because of their own meager
religious educations and because of a lifetime of holding Jewish
rituals, or any organized Jewish life, at arm’s length. After their sons
have had their Bar Mitzvah, most Jews dump their synagogue memberships.
The odd reality is that these parents sought out a synagogue to imbue
their children with religious beliefs that the parents themselves do not
hold dear. The American Jewish Yearbook estimated the total number of
American Jews of all descriptions to be 6,155,000 in 2001. That would
mean that Jews are about 2.1% of our total population. To put that in
perspective, there are more fundamentalist Christians living in the
southern states commonly called the Bible Belt than there are Jews of
any description on the entire planet.
In her handbook God-Optional
Judaism author Judith Seid quotes a rabbi
who says of his congregation,
“Probably more than half of them are
atheists or agnostics.” These Jews are,
it seems, unbelievers in search
of a culturally defined comfort zone; they
are the children and
grandchildren of the great wave of Jewish immigration
that broke on our
shores in the early Twentieth Century; their numbers swell
the great
mass of unaffiliated, unreligious Jews. These Jews maintain an
emotional
attachment to the mood and rhythms of Jewish life, but also cling
to
their parents’ and grandparents’ socialist utopian fantasies, including
socialism’s notorious hostility toward religion. It is these Jews who
form the hardened spear tip of annual jabs at expressions of Christian
spirituality at Christmas time. Now throw into the mix a bunch of
enthusiastic atheist zealots and a handful of showboating Wiccans eager
to share the stage with any recognized religion and you have the nucleus
of a nasty seasonal tradition of trashing Christmas.
Why Do the Jews
Hate Christmas? For many Jews, their grudge against
Christmas begins in
September, or thereabout, when their employers do
not allow them Yom Kippur
as a holiday from work, even though it is the
most important holy day of the
Jewish calendar. These Jews must take a
vacation day for their
observances.
In her essay Christmas, shmistmas! an unhappy Penelope Trunk
informs us
that “as workers, Jews have to observe Christmas. It’s a weird
day to
have off from work. No stores are open. There’s nothing on TV. Most
restaurants are closed. It’s a boring day, a good day to be at work . .
.But we are forced to take a holiday.” She goes on: “Given the
nothingness of Christmas to most Jews, it is absurd how much Christmas
cheer the Jews partake in just to fit in at the office. . . Jews are
having to be someone they are not in order to fit in...”
For many
Jews the Christmas season brings the December Dilemma, for it
is then that
those who do not celebrate the holiday must acknowledge
their marginality.
Resourceful Jews have responded with a host of
adaptive behaviors: going to
Chinese restaurants and to movie theaters
are the most popular. There is
also Klezcamp in the Catskills, Matzo
Balls for singles, gambling in
Atlantic City or time away in Florida.
Some go to comedy clubs such as Kung
Pao Kosher Comedy on Christmas Eve
in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The shows
are sold out. Experienced Jews
buy their tickets two months in
advance.
Kung Pao Kosher Comedy was begun a decade ago by Jewish comedian
Lisa
Geduldig as an antidote to “getting Merry Christmas’d to death” as she
put it. At Kung Pao, comic lines like “When the millionth person says
‘Merry Christmas’ to you, don’t you feel like replying, ‘Fuck You’?”
excite enthusiastic applause.
According to Rabbi Joshua Plaut such
angry material arises from an anger
toward Christmas, what the rabbi calls
“Claus-trophobia.” Last year
Geduldig took her show to Los Angeles and plans
to take it to New York
this year. The Jewish Forward announces “Noisy Night”
events on
Christmas Eve such as Jewsapalooza, which feature new-wave klezmer
and
songs such as “What I Like About Jew” and “It’s No Fun to Be a Jew at
Christmas.” Jewish museums nationwide remain open on Christmas and may
attract their largest crowds of the year.
That thunderclap moment
when a Jewish child first encounters the bounty
of a Christian child’s
Christmas gifts is now a staple of modern Jewish
comedians. Lewis Black,
performing on Comedy Central, recounts such a
moment and then recalls, with
barely contained anger, that for Hanukkah
his parents “gave me a top. They
said it was a dreidel, but I knew . .
.it was a top!”
The perpetually
cranky Ed Asner, who thinks President Bush is a war
criminal while
simultaneously proclaiming that Joseph Stalin has been
“misunderstood,”
tells us of his childhood Jewish trauma: “I learned
there was no Santa Claus
when I came home from temple one December day
and there weren’t any
presents.” Perhaps it was this early encounter
with the inequitable
distribution of Christmas presents that led to Ed’s
life-long infatuation
with socialist systems of wealth redistribution.
In his essay Beating the
Christmas Blues: One Jew’s Guide to a Merry
X-mas, author Seth Brown
declares that “we live in a Christmas-laden
society” and “Christmas is a
royal pain in the tuchus.” “By far, the
most painful aspect of Christmas has
always been the music,” he laments.
“You’re just out at the bookstore for
some enjoyable downtime and then
up come the strains of Christmas music. I
never expect it the first time
each year, but my beautiful classical music
has been tossed in favor of
some classic Christmas song that echoes in my
head as, ‘Jesus and Santa
and Rudolph and everyone else celebrates Christmas
except you.” As for
Christmas Day, Seth Brown says he looks forward to it
with great
anticipation every year. “Oh, I used to think of Christmas Day as
the
culmination of the entire depressing Christmas season. But you know that
on December 25th, when the rest of your town shuts down and puts up
blinking lights, the Chinese restaurants are going to be open. And in
those Chinese restaurants, there will be Jews. Lots of Jews.” He
rhapsodizes, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s
something wonderful about a restaurant filled with Jews eating Chinese
food on Christmas. It just feels right. I can’t explain it . . .it’s not
just a feeling of solidarity, but you look around at Goldberg,
Mandelbaum, Shapiro, Rosenblatt, Weinman . . .”
Clearly, Mr. Brown
has found his comfort zone and he expresses the
sentiments of countless
other Jews in search of a comfort zone. If
Chinese food isn’t kosher, they
don’t care. Only about 25% of Jews
observe any kosher guidelines, the rest
are happy to feast on pork rolls
and pork ribs and pork fried rice. At
Christmas time it’s a case of “any
pork in a storm”; they are contented to
eat treif, the scripturally
unclean food of the gentiles.
It’s easy
to imagine that a collective of such disgruntled Jews might
use a
sympathetic organization like the American Civil Liberties Union
to carve
out an even larger comfort zone for themselves by using
relentless
litigation to press visible expressions of Christian
spirituality into the
shadowed margins of our national life. As Seth
Brown says, “Jesus was just a
mediocre carpenter.” Steven Bayme,
director of Jewish Communal Affairs at
the American Jewish Committee
puts it more politely: “Christmas is a holiday
of another faith, rooted
in historical events in which Jews reject
theological significance. We
do have a real theological difficulty with
this; we disagree on whether
or not Jesus was the Messiah.”
The
Campaign Against Christian Culture Begins At the Jerusalem Center
for Public
Affairs website (www.jcpa.org) Steven Cohen
enlightens us to
the fact that “American Jews, in their struggle to win and
assure their
full acceptance in the larger society, have long placed
church-state
issues at the top of their political and community relations
agenda.”
Mr. Cohen does not explain how the rigorous Jewish campaign to
marginalize Christianity in a culture that is 86% Christian will “assure
[Jews] their full acceptance.”
Prior to the great wave of Jewish
immigration in the early part of the
Twentieth Century, Americans were
comfortable with a sense of themselves
as a Christian people. This didn’t
sit well with the newly arrived
Jewish foreigners. According to Mr. Cohen
the assertion of the native
Americans that they were a Christian people
“drove Jews into an alliance
with more secular, non-religious elements in
American society who were
long seeking a more thorough and clear
disengagement of church and
state.” By “non-religious elements” Mr. Cohen is
referring to atheists,
who comprise a mere 0.4% of our population and also
what was then a
rapidly expanding godless religion that went by the name of
Secular
Humanism.
At first blush, the expression “godless religion”
might appear a
contradiction of terms. Furthermore, our culture is now so
thoroughly
saturated with the values of Secular Humanism that almost no one
living
can remember when it was a young, upstart, insurgent philosophy being
promoted for the express purpose of marginalizing religious people and
Christian perspectives.
Secular Humanists have long promoted the
false notion that Secular
Humanism simply “emerged” from human history, that
it is the collective
gift of history’s most enlightened thinkers, that it is
the bright light
of modern intellects who shunned the superstitious nonsense
of a bygone
(Christian) era. No Secular Humanist today ever refers to his
comfortable collection of attitudes as a religion. But that was not
always so.
In fact, Secular Humanism did not simply “emerge,” it was
consciously
invented; it has founding documents; it has a manifesto; its
inventors
boldly declared their infant philosophy to be a new religion. It
is now
the de facto establishment religion that shapes the curricula and the
texts in every public school classroom in America.
In 1876, Felix
Adler, a former rabbi, toiled like a Trojan to create the
Society for
Ethical Culture in New York City. This society spawned
kindred societies
that were later combined into the American Ethical
Culture Union, which was
also an invention of the same Dr. Adler. It was
this American Ethical
Culture Union that promoted a vision of a godless
universe inhabited by
humans who imagined themselves to be the standard
for measuring all
things.
In 1929, a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter created the
First
Humanist Society of New York. A year later Mr. Potter penned Humanism:
A
New Religion in which he boldly declared, “education is thus a most
powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school
of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour
once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem
the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
The humanist
program got a big boost from the influential educator
Horace Mann. In 1933,
thirty-four prominent Americans signed the
Humanist Manifesto, among them
the educator John Dewey. The Humanist
Manifesto spurned Christian beliefs
and explicitly endorsed in their
stead the humanist values of materialism,
rationalism and socialism as
the new cultural foundation of America. The
Humanist Manifesto made
explicit the humanist objective “to elevate,
transform, control, and
direct all institutions and organizations by its own
value system.”
Their agenda was to tear down Christian values and elevate
godless
materialistic socialism; they have been wildly successful. Humanism
provided the organizing principles around which educators, steeped in
the writings of John Dewey, would sally forth and make Secular Humanism
the dominant philosophy of America’s public schools. Humanism, as a
stealth religion, has succeeded in becoming America’s de facto
state-sponsored religion. It was a brilliant end run around the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment; while feigning neutrality,
the new religion pushed Christian values into the shadows and replaced
them with a grab bag of different, secular values. John Dewey proclaimed
humanism our “common faith,” but it is a faith that seeks to obliterate
all other faiths; it is nakedly hostile to Christian values. Humanist
Manifesto III was released in 2003; it reiterates the humanist belief
system: its faith in the perfectibility of humans and the finality of
death.
Steven Cohen continues: “Protecting the religious neutrality
of the
schools and other public spaces emerged as a central doctrine of the
Jewish defense establishment. It enjoyed broad public support by
mid-century among second- and third-generation Jews.” By “protecting the
religious neutrality of the schools,” Cohen means the triumph of the
values of the new self-proclaimed religion of Secular Humanism over the
Christian values that had guided the nation since its birth. The Jews
and the Humanists joined forces to sweep Christian sensibility from
public life; it was a campaign brimming with bigotry. Secular does not
mean value-free; humanism is bursting with values, ideas, and
perspectives that are anything but neutral.
According to Steven
Cohen: “Separation of church and state is but a part
of a strategy on the
part of modernizing Jews to establish a religious
‘neutral zone’ where
religious and ethnic tolerance is a supreme value.”
By “neutral zone” he
means a comfort zone for Jews and atheists who are
less than three percent
of America’s population. This comfort zone has
been created at the expense
of almost four centuries of Christian
culture on this continent. The public
square has been artificially
transformed into a mere marketplace, a kind of
cultureless culture,
flavorless, merely commercial, and uninspiring. We know
that this
transformation was artificial because the majority of our people
are now
under the boot heel of relentless litigation and threat of court
order
to behave in ways that are unnatural for them. A public square that
was
the product of the spontaneous expressions of the people who live there
would naturally blossom with the symbols and rituals of their spiritual
life. But try getting such a natural and spontaneous and organic society
past the ACLU.
Cohen continues: “For many Jews, being a good Jew
meant being a good
liberal; and being a good Jew and a good liberal also
meant being a
vigilant separationist.” This agenda was some assurance that
young Jews
would not be exposed to Christian sentiments, but it also meant
that 86%
of the population was put on a strict diet of godless humanist
values.
Why Jews thought that promoting this alien agenda would increase
their
acceptance by the very same society that they were forcing to live
unauthentic lives is anyone’s guess.
Mr. Cohen tells us that “also
fueling Jews’ separationism is their
relative secularity, at least when
measured in terms of the frequency of
religious service attendance, with
probably the lowest attendance rate
of any major religious group in the
United States. . .Jews score lower
than other Americans on conventional
measures of pure religiosity.
Hence, they have less impetus to support
religious accomodationism.” In
other words, Jews as a group are not a very
spiritual people and they
would feel much more comfortable if everyone
around them would please
just shut up about their heartfelt beliefs; if you
have any religious
symbols, then keep them out of sight. These Jews are
determined to have
their comfort zone and they will defend it with
litigation.
Jews overwhelmingly oppose school vouchers. On the one hand,
they don’t
want Christians to be demonstratively Christian in the public
schools,
but they also don’t want Christians to get a Christian education in
a
non-public school funded by Christian taxpayers. Everyone must remain on
the Secular Humanist plantation.
How the Jews Trash
Christmas
In addition to the doleful seasonal chorus of Jews whining
about how
they are being victimized by Christian holiday cheer, there are
other
purposeful techniques used to trash Christmas. Here are several of
them.
Technique Number One: Delegitimization
According to the
Lubavitch-Chabad movement, headquartered in Bethesda,
Maryland, righteous
Jews are obligated to stamp out Christmas. Their
literature quotes Hebrew
text (Likkutei Sichos 37:198) to remind us that
“...according to the known
Jewish ruling...Christians are idol
worshippers.” The Lubavitcher handbills
go on to quote Rambam Mishne
Torah - Hilchos Melachim 10:9 to the effect
that “A gentile...is liable
for the death penalty...if he has invented a
religious holiday for
himself...The general principle is we do not allow
them to make new
religious rituals and to make ‘mitzvahs’ for themselves by
their own
devices...and if he does make some new ‘mitzvah’, we lash him, and
inform him that he is obligated with the death penalty for this...” It’s
pretty heady stuff. Who knew that the Jew up the block might believe
that you deserve death for having a merry Christmas or at the very least
a severe ass whipping. The Lubavitchers proudly carry on their
anti-Christmas campaign in cities around America. Their Noah’s Covenant
website at www.noahide.com/paganism.htm goes
on for pages spinning out
their conviction that Christianity is just a
cryptic revival of ancient
pagan cults that “were notorious for practicing
witchcraft, forced
prostitution, self-mutilation, human sacrifice to false
gods, and even
burning children alive.” Someone should take these Jews aside
and
explain to them that the Baptists gave up forced prostitution months ago
and the Methodists definitely do not sacrifice humans to false gods. As
for the Lutherans and that whole child-burning thing . . .it was only
little Jimmy.
But seriously folks, it’s strange to hear such
slanderous nonsense from
the same people who took offense at the totally
bogus Protocols of the
Elders of Zion hoax; some people are slow learners.
Under the heading
The“New Testament”: Pagan Revenge these Orthodox Jews make
their case
that Christianity is just a latter-day pagan cult. It’s worth a
read,
but it’s too long to include here, so you decide whether they are
clever
anti-Christian propagandists or just profoundly stupid. In any case
they
have illustrated the technique of delegitimization, a close companion
of
which is the next technique.
Technique Number Two:
Misinformation
The Christmas story is a simple story; millions of
children hear it for
the first time every year. They have no difficulty
understanding it.
Many centuries ago, the Christmas celebration had not
yet found a place
in the Christian calendar. It could have found a home
somewhere in the
spring. We know that Joseph and Mary were traveling to
their hometown to
pay a tax and these taxes were collected in the warmer
months. The
calendar decision was finally made by Pope Julius the First in
336 AD.
In an effort to strengthen the infant faith in an unconverted world,
Julius chose to celebrate the mass of Christ on December 25th, the day
of the winter solstice on the old Roman (Julian) calendar. The night of
the winter solstice is the longest night of the year; from that moment
onward the hours of daylight increase. It was the pope’s intention that
the celebration of the Nativity be associated with the natural emergence
of the world from the chilly darkness of winter toward the increasing
light and the new life of spring. The symbolism was charming.
The
symbolism of the solstice wasn’t lost on the pre-Christian pagans;
all sorts
of people created calendars and pegged celebrations to the
winter solstice.
It was the intention of the early Church to imbue these
pagan festivals with
Christian significance and to direct existing pagan
feelings of reverence
toward those things revealed in the New Testament.
It also protected
Christians from being wooed back to the old pagan
celebrations. Along the
way, Christmas, the festival of Christ,
incorporated a few artifacts, such
as a Yule log, a decorated evergreen
and lots of candles. They remain with
us like pieces of antique
furniture put to new purposes.
All of this
is understood by any fair-minded person, but the
Lubavitcher-Chabad
literature deliberately conflates the pagan and
Christian festivals. The
Lubavitchers send out their missionaries to
preach weird sermons about how
Christianity is a revival of ancient
cults seeking to lead the pious Jew
astray. Their website complains that
other rabbis have criticized them for
expressing their beliefs so
clearly and for being so forthright as to
actually call what they are
doing an “anti-Christmas campaign.”
Some
people need to be reminded what a cobbled-together thing Judaism
is. The
Jews began their moral evolution as a violent, xenophobic band
of
pork-eating polytheists. Yahweh was their god of war, the Hebrew
Mars. To
enforce a disciplined monotheism on them, a caste of priests
centered all
Jewish ritual life in the temple in Jerusalem. Kosher laws
evolved over
time. After the destruction of their temple and the
dispersion of the Jewish
people, the Jews reinvented a Jewish life
centered on Torah study and guided
by rabbis (teachers). The pagan
Egyptians and Babylonians, among whom the
Jews dwelled for so long,
gifted to the Jews some of their most cherished
traditions. For example,
the Egyptians were practicing circumcision for
religious purposes long
before the Jews; the Jews adopted this practice and
invested it with
their own meaning. No one calls the Jews neo-pagans for
doing this;
their adaptation of circumcision is thought to be inspired: the
Jews
captured a cultural form and made it their own.
Another example:
The story of Noah and the flood is a blow-by-blow
retelling of the
Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. In the Jewish retelling
of this tale it
becomes the threshold event of a new covenant between
God and his chosen
people. It’s an inspired reshaping of an ancient
story. No one calls the
Jews born-again Babylonians for doing this.
But Christmas is now the
annual high-water mark of a rising tide of
nonsense aimed at Christian
believers. It is at this time each year that
the voices of disgruntled Jews
are joined by the chorus of witches,
pagans and the aggressive advocates of
atheism.
Enter the Pagans
In her essay Reclaiming the Season:
Yule, Jehana Silverwing echoes so
many other non-Christians: “How do we deal
with Christmas when our
children ask about it? Should we, as Pagans and as
Witches, merely
content ourselves with removing the crèche, while leaving
the other
accoutrements alone?” It’s a tough question. Silverwing explains
that
“The situation which presents itself for current-day Pagans and Witches
at this season is multiple . . ., we share with the Jews the difficulty
of raising our children in a culture geared more to Christmas than to
our specific holiday.” She notes the unintended irony of a Supreme Court
decision: the law allows local governments to display Nativity scenes on
public property only when the emotional impact of such scenes is diluted
by the presence of objects and symbols deemed by the Court to be
non-religious, such as plastic reindeer, inflatable Santas, Kwanzaa
knickknacks, blow-molded snowmen and the ever-popular Christmas
tree.
Rather than clutter up a sacred symbol, many towns have chosen to
cease
mounting Nativity displays. The pagan Ms. Silverwing says, “The crèche
is not my religious symbol, but that tree standing there proudly
bedecked is. By removing all but the Pagan symbols, we are allowing
towns to declare that the Pagan symbols are NOT spiritual/religious, and
have no more than passing associations to the season.” For Silverwing
and her fellow pagans the tree and the Yule log are living religious
symbols invested with spiritual meaning. The American Religious
Identification Survey estimated that the community of Wiccans had shot
up to over 134,000 by 2001. That’s a seventeen-fold increase in a
decade. These witches and their witchcraft religion are here to stay, so
we are now stuck with the irony that the Supreme Court has bounced the
baby Jesus from the courthouse lawn but left in place the sacred symbols
of the Wiccans. Can you say, “Weird Republic?”
Yes, Virginia, There
Is an American Atheists, Incorporated Meanwhile,
American Atheists, Inc. is
exercising its First Amendment rights by
picketing Christmas displays on
public property. Christmas is their busy
season; it’s their best chance to
grab a little on-camera time in their
local television markets. On their
website they quote “local American
Atheist and state-church separation
activist” John Messina who has a
grudge against San Jose, California’s
annual “Christmas in the Park”
display. Mr. Messina complains that “It is
now blatantly obvious that
the winter festival is being used to promote
Christianity.” The
hyperventilating atheist declares that “the crèche must
be removed.”
This is how the American Atheists, Inc website describes the
offending
display: “There are elves, reindeer, lighted trees, even the Aztec
Quetzalcoatl . . .and the baby Jesus.” Well, that is offensive. It’s one
of those hodgepodge horrors that have been forced upon communities by
foolish court decisions. So now an effigy of the blood thirsty feathered
serpent deity Quetzalcoatl sits on public display at Christmas time, but
the atheists are getting cranked about the little pink baby Jesus. They
planned a protest at the Christmas-in-the-Park crèche; they urged
members to attend: “Picket signs and other material will be provided,
and there will be an informal lunch after the demonstration.” Gee, it
sounds like a church social.
Technique Number Three: Invent an
Anti-Christmas
In New York City the Christmas season begins with the
Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade which winds its way down Broadway to the
throbbing heart of Manhattan’s sprawling marketplace. Santa Claus, the
living embodiment of abundant gift giving, beckons the crowd to follow
him and spend generously in Herald Square.
The day before the parade,
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the third and
reigning Sulzberger to hold the
position of publisher of the New York
Times, gave the gay actor, Harvey
Fierstein, a spot on the op-ed page of
America’s leading liberal newspaper.
Mr. Fierstein had been chosen by
Macy’s to portray Mrs. Claus in their
parade, or so Mr. Fierstein claimed.
Mr. Fierstein began: “According to
legend, New York lore and two major
Hollywood flicks, Macy’s Santa is the
real deal. And tomorrow, to the
delight of millions of children, (not to
mention the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court), the Santa in New York’s
great parade will be
half of a same-sex couple.” Exactly why Harvey imagines
that millions of
children will be delighted to learn that Mrs. Claus is
being portrayed
by an aging male anal erotic in a red dress, only he could
say. Perhaps
this is one of his fondest fantasies.
Fierstein goes on
about his favorite subject: himself. Yes, he will be
Mrs. Claus, “Me! Harvey
Fierstein, nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst,
dressed in holiday finery
portraying the one and only Mrs. Claus. Won’t
America get a kick out of
that?”
Well, yes . . .a kick in the face. But what does it matter to a
not-so-nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst that he is making a mockery of a
cherished tradition? Fierstein spends the remainder of his op-ed piece
making a pitch for homosexual marriage; it reads like something from the
Barbra Streisand website. He concludes: “Happy holiday and remember to
wave to me on my float. I’ll be the man in the big red dress.”
With
that grotesquery over with, it was time for the city to deck itself
out in
holiday decorations. In Manhattan, which I called home for
seventeen years,
the decorations included evergreen displays on the lamp
posts. Every other
display commemorated Hanukkah, even though Hanukkah
may have come and gone
in November. My most outstanding memory from
those years was walking around
Columbus Circle after dark and witnessing
a crew of Parks Department
employees struggling to attach the largest
menorah I had ever seen to the
base of the column atop which stood a
bronze statue of Christopher Columbus.
It was a moment fraught with
symbolism: the year that Columbus claimed
America for King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella was also the year that these
monarchs expelled all the
Jews from Spain. The giant menorah planted at the
base of the monument
smacked of reverse triumphalism.
Given the
considerable amount of cash and effort expended on these
Hanukkah displays
and to making sure that they are displayed every bit
as prominently as the
Christmas displays, any visitor from another
planet would assume that
Hanukkah was every bit as important to the Jews
as Christmas is to the
Christians. Would they be wrong?
Christmas is the second most holy
observance of the Christian calendar,
second only to Easter. Hanukkah, by
contrast, has little, if any,
religious significance for the Jews. Hanukkah
was not given by God in
the Scriptures; it has no source in a direct command
in Scripture. The
Festival of Lights itself commemorates a nasty culture-war
confrontation
between Judah Maccabee and his followers and a Syrian military
force.
The Maccabees prevailed in 165 BC, thereby reclaiming the Temple
Mount
in Jerusalem and casting off Hellenist culture in the bargain. The
Jews
felt obliged to rededicate their temple, but they only had enough lamp
oil for a single day. According to Jewish legend, the oil burned for
eight days and nights. This was interpreted as a miracle and a sign of
God’s love for the Jews.
In places where Jews live far from large
Christian populations, such as
Israel, Hanukkah is observed with little more
than perfunctory candle
lighting. In her essay, I’m dreaming of a
disillusioned Jewish
Christmas, author Elana Eisen-Markovitz writes of
Hanukkah: “Now, this
little holiday has turned into a nationwide Jewish
frenzy to beat
non-Jews to the best toys. Arbor Day is practically of
greater religious
significance to Jews than Hanukkah. Even the most
religious Jews, who go
to temple every chance they get, don’t consider
Hanukkah a worthy
holiday to spend in synagogue.” She goes on to poke fun at
Jews who
guiltlessly adorn trees in their homes and who “are so confused
that
they feel it is only appropriate to adorn this blatantly Christian
tradition with a bit of Jewish flair, such as a shocking Star of David
plopped on the top of the tree.”
Ms. Eisen-Markovitz laments: ”You
may wonder what there is to sing about
on Hanukkah. Trust me, I wonder as
well, but I’ve found that content
doesn’t matter. What really matters is
that all holidays get equal
representation, right? So, thanks in part to
Adam Sandler, we sing about
dreidels, celebrities, lights, potatoes and
dreidels...well, mainly just
about dreidels. But that’s okay, as long as we
have songs just like
Christmas. Maybe this year there will even be Hanukkah
carolers roaming
the snow-laden streets in yarmulkes and Star of David
earmuffs.”
She is saying that Hanukkah has been enormously inflated so
that Jewish
children won’t feel deprived at Christmas time. It’s an
understandable
and a very human thing to do, even though it makes its
practitioners
look silly. It’s not so charming when Hanukkah inflation is
used as a
bludgeon to batter down the Christian holiday.
In America,
the tale of Judah Maccabee has been refurbished. He is
presented to Jewish
children as a culture hero, a man who resisted the
attractions of Hellenist
culture as they must now resist the
blandishments of the phony messiah
Jesus. This instruction takes place
in private. In America it is part of a
larger public assault on a
culture rooted in another faith and it has done
considerable damage to
the host culture.
Of course, Jews are quick to
defend every dimension of Hanukkah
inflation. It’s their festival, after
all; they can do with it what they
wish. But imagine how the Jews would feel
if the Christian community
were to dust off the memory of some
better-forgotten monk or hermit who
was once a fountain of vile anti-Semitic
drivel, and then made a really
big deal about him every year during Yom
Kippur? Wouldn’t the old guy’s
“Watch out for the Jews” message seem hostile
and creepy? Well, watching
Jews turn little Hanukkah into a parody of
Christmas is creepy, and the
“Watch out for Jesus” message is wearing a bit
thin. If almost half of
the Jews in America weren’t atheists or agnostics,
then the Jewish
community would be impervious to the glitter of Christmas.
But they want
to have it both ways: they reject Christianity while
simultaneously
embracing its secular rituals. That’s not a sign of robust
mental health.
Writing in The Menorah in 1890, Rabbi Kaufman Kohler
observed: “How can
a Jew, without losing self-respect, partake in the joy
and festive mirth
of Christmas? Can he without self-surrender, without
entailing insult
and disgrace upon his faith and race, plant the Christmas
tree in his
household?”
Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz pulls no punches; he’s
a proud Jew and he wishes
that Christmas would just go away. In his missive
“December Event,” the
rabbi tells us that “It will come as no surprise to
many that Chanukah,
traditionally a relatively minor holiday, has assumed
much greater
importance for many Jews as a counterweight to the onslaught of
Christmas, with its music and decorations, sales and Santas barraging us
from every angle.” (emphasis added)
Onslaught of Christmas? Barraging
us from every angle? The rabbi goes on
to tell us that “The Christmas season
in North America is a harsh
reminder that Jews are a religious minority in
the world.” He instructs
us that “Chanukah celebrates successful Jewish
resistance to
assimilation and the influence of non-Jewish cultures.” By
“non-Jewish
cultures” he means America.
In his sermon What We Can
Learn from Christmas, Rabbi Barry H. Block
tells us that “At the Christmas
season...we find ourselves isolated. We
are assaulted by violations of
separations of church and state.” He
hastens to add: “Of course, most public
manifestations of Christmas
don’t break the law. And yet, many of us feel
uncomfortable, and more
than a little out of place.” The rabbi continues,
“The Christmas season
is the most blatant reminder that we are a religious
minority in America.”
This common Jewish sentiment turns to paranoia in
Andrew K. Mandel’s
commentary “Shalom Santa.” First Mr. Mandel tells us that
the Christmas
story “as related to generations of children through cartoon
specials
and annual retellings, is actually multifaceted: Santa Claus, the
North
Pole-dwelling, sleigh-riding bearer of gifts for the world’s children;
the Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol featuring the miserly and bitter
Ebenezer Scrooge; the wholly evil Dr. Seuss’s Grinch Who Stole
Christmas. All these tales demand respect for the Christmas celebration
and consequently denounce non-celebrants, including Jews.”
In other
words, the vast 86% majority of America’s population who are
Christians are
doing something bad to the Jews by fostering a spirit of
generosity at
Christmas time because it reflects badly on those Jews who
don’t give a
rat’s rump about Christmas. This is amazingly narcissistic;
does Mr.Mandel
also believe that Yom Kippur makes Christians look like
heartless brutes
because they don’t get into the spirit of atonement
when that holiday rolls
around?
Mr.Mandel’s paranoia deepens: “. . .the Grinch and Scrooge tales
clearly
rebuff people who don’t appreciate Christmas . . .Although these
characters may not have been intended to be Jewish, the stereotypes
depicting Jews as greedy and selfish, and the correlations between these
images and those of the nasty and self-centered Grinch and Scrooge, help
foster the ‘Jew as evil outsider’ connotations.”
Amazing. Mr.Mandel
blew buckets of money on a Harvard education and this
is what his cultivated
mind produced.
The Separation-of-Church-&-State Pretense
As we
have seen, there are many people in American society who do not
wish to be
reminded that their perspectives and sensibilities are those
of a small
minority. They feel uncomfortable when the vast majority of
citizens
celebrate customs that are not their customs, they feel that
the larger
society is intruding on their inner peace. They wish for
themselves a vastly
enlarged and inviolable comfort zone.
But asking most of society to shut
up and keep their customs and symbols
out of sight will only bring these
minorities the avuncular advice to
behave like adults and let other people
be themselves. So the campaign
to diminish the scope of Christian religious
expression in American
public life, which is the real motivation for the
assault on so many
American traditions, must be disguised as some other
high-minded
motivation, such as the preservation of some constitutionally
mandated
barrier between all matters governmental and all matters religious.
The
United States Constitution contains no such mandate.
What the
Constitution has to say on the matter of religion is summed up
in a single
sentence of the First Amendment. Here it is: “Congress shall
make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise
thereof...” That’s it. The first clause is commonly called
“The
Establishment Clause”; the second clause is called the “Free
Exercise
Clause.” The framers included this sentence in the very first
amendment
because they understood that the free exercise of religion was
central to
American life and was the engine propelling early emigration
to America. The
Establishment Clause was intended to restrain Congress
from ever favoring
one Christian sect over another as the official,
state-sanctioned, religion
of all America, as the English crown had
declared Anglicanism the
state-favored religion of England. Both clauses
were intended to promote
religious freedom.
At the time the Constitution was created, the first
purpose of education
in America was Christian religious instruction. The
early settlers
believed illiteracy to be harmful because it kept from people
the wisdom
of the Bible. This instruction was mostly private.
Publicly-funded
schools did not appear until the mid-Nineteenth Century. The
Bible was
commonly used for reading instruction; ministers commonly doubled
as
schoolteachers. “True religion,” said George Washington “affords
government its surest support. The future of this nation depends on the
Christian training of our youth. It is impossible to govern without the
Bible.”
A half century after the Constitution became the law of the
land,
Christian values permeated the schools. School children read from
McGuffey’s Readers, authored by minister William Holmes McGuffey. These
books were very Christian in tone. About ninety million of them were
sold over their lifespan.
The Constitution has nothing to say about
education, which was left to
the states under the Tenth Amendment. Congress
did express an interest
in education in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and
1787. Article III
of the Ordinance makes the position of Congress clear:
“Religion,
morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the
happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever
be encouraged.” Private schools with religious affiliations remained the
norm until the Nineteenth Century. Boston became the first city in
America with an entirely publicly-funded school system in 1818.
Government-dominated schools, as we know them today, date from as
recently as the 1850s. These new schools did not increase student
enrollment, but they did succeed in destroying a magnificently diverse
array of private schools because their sponsors could not afford to
support the private schools while also bearing the increased burden of
taxation needed to fund the one-school-fits-all government
academies.
The lesson to be learned from this history is this: Even after
more than
two centuries of unrestrained religious instruction in America’s
schools, there never emerged in America an “established” religion as the
framers understood that term. Most Americans were Christians, to be
sure, but they clung to their sectarian differences and they left their
neighbors in peace. American society was composed of religious
minorities; it was not in the organic nature of American society to
produce a dominant religion. Since Congress was barred from establishing
an official American church, and because American society couldn’t
naturally produce a dominant religion, it follows logically that there
was never any danger that one religious sect would come to hold sway
over all the other sects.
So, when some people fret that a pink
plastic blow-molded baby Jesus on
the courthouse lawn is tantamount to
Congress establishing an official
state-sanctioned religion, well . . .those
people sound more than a
little bit nuts. In truth, they don’t care how
dopey their arguments
sound, because their real purpose is to sweep the baby
Jesus out of
sight. These people want to create a bigger comfort zone for
themselves.
To achieve their goal, all they need to do is shop their silly
arguments
around until they find a sympathetic judge who shares their
sensibility.
The Menorah Shuffle, or Duping the Dopey Goyim
The
Christmas haters are an odd lot. The Jews among them want all
manifestations
of Christian faith to vanish from the public sphere, or
else they demand
equal representation for Jewish symbols at Christmas
time, even as they
acknowledge that Hanukkah has little more meaning for
Jews than Arbor Day,
except as a convenient bludgeon with which to beat
back Christian symbolism
during this Christian high-holy season. The
atheists, many of them nominal
Jews, want everyone’s symbolism to be
swept into the trash bin of history.
Everyone wants his own comfort zone.
The campaign to ridiculously inflate
Hanukkah as a kind of
anti-Christmas is especially tough for these
latter-day Judah Maccabees
when Hanukkah, which is determined by a lunar
calendar, lands way early
in November. November’s left-over Hanukkah menorah
looks a bit desperate
jammed in there among December’s festive ornaments. In
public parks, on
courthouse lawns and in classrooms across America, menorahs
hold a
spotlight position even as crèches are denied an appearance during
the
Christmas season. Here’s an example:
The Painted Rock Elementary
School, in Poway, California was
anticipating an exciting holiday season;
the students had rehearsed
their performances for the enactment of the
Hanukkah story. Another
play, telling the Christmas story, was scheduled for
a later date. After
the Hanukkah play had been performed and enjoyed by
everyone, it was
abruptly announced that the Christmas play had been
cancelled. When
asked why the Christmas story had been dumped, the school
district
bureaucrats said lamely that it was “too central” to the Christian
faith.
In truth, the two stories are similar; both the Hanukkah and the
Christmas stories are “miracle” stories. In the Hanukkah story a single
day’s supply of lamp oil burns for eight days so that the Jews can
rededicate their temple; in the Christmas story a virgin birth brings a
holy messenger into the world. Both stories are about God’s love: The
Hanukkah story is about God’s love for the Jews; the Christmas story is
about God’s love for all humanity.
One mother, who had grown sick of
the double standard, called the
Pacific Justice Institute for assistance.
Attorney Brad Dacus explained
to the bureaucrats that the mere mention of
religion is not a promotion
of religion and therefore does not violate the
First Amendment; an
acknowledgement is not an endorsement; teaching about
cultures and
beliefs is not indoctrination. “All the school district is
doing is
informing the children of the story,” said Mr. Dacus. “Therefore,
the
school is enriching the children’s education and giving them an
understanding of other people.”
So what was the real reason that the
school slammed the door on the
Christmas story after the completion of the
Hanukkah story? “It happened
because they wanted to play it safe,” explained
Brad Dacus. By “playing
it safe” he meant avoiding unwanted litigation by
the American Civil
Liberties Union, whose lawyers are understood to be the
self-appointed
guardians of the ever-expanding Jewish and Secular Humanist
comfort
zones. The real problem with the Painted Rock drama program was that
one
of the plays was Jewish and the other one felt uncomfortably
un-Jewish.
So every child in the Painted Rock Elementary School got a rich
lesson
in the symbolism of the menorah, and that was it. There was “no room
at
the inn” for anything Christian.
Here’s another example: The New
York City schools have a written policy
which permits the display of the
Jewish menorah in its public schools,
but excludes nativity scenes. A while
ago, when Harold Levy was the
chancellor of New York City public schools,
the Catholic League got
their hands on a copy of a memo on holiday displays
issued by Mr. Levy’s
general counsel. The memo stated that “The display of
secular holiday
symbol decorations is permitted. Such symbols include, but
are not
limited to, Christmas trees, menorahs, and the star and
crescent.”
The Catholic League protested this policy because it would
place the
Jewish menorah and the Muslim star and crescent on display, but
not the
Christian nativity. “They are discriminating against Christians;
we’re
contemplating a lawsuit,” said League spokesman Patrick Scully at the
time.
Things heated up when the Catholic League received another memo
that
Principal Fran Levy had issued to the teachers of the Thomas Jefferson
Magnet School of Humanities in Flushing, New York. In her memo Ms. Levy
urges teachers to “bring in Muslim, Kwanzaa and Jewish secular symbols.”
She added, “I would like to display these religious symbols equally.”
Ms.Levy seemed oblivious of the fact that Kwanzaa is a black nationalist
observance, not a religious holiday. A young Reverend Al Sharpton had
praised this blacks-only ritual, which begins the day following
Christmas, as an excellent way to “de-white-ize” Christmas. Ms.Levy’s
memo made no mention of any Christian symbols. A Christmas tree had been
put up in Ms.Levy’s school, but Ms.Levy had ordered that it be taken
away.
Ms.Levy and her fellow travelers rejected the League’s demand that
a
nativity scene be displayed alongside the other symbols, which the
League contended were religious symbols, not secular symbols. Schools
chancellor Harold Levy responded that “The Supreme Court has previously
refused to permit erection of a nativity scene on public property.”
Mr.Levy was blowing smoke and the Catholic League knew it; they fired
back a letter to Levy citing a 1984 high court ruling that “religious
symbols placed next to secular symbols pass constitutional muster
because the government is not endorsing religion.” The nativity scene
that Harold Levy had alluded to had stood alone in a government complex.
When Mr.Levy was subsequently asked if he believed that a nativity scene
could be displayed in a New York public school if grouped with other
religious and secular symbols, the League was told by his spokeswoman
Margie Feinberg that Mr.Levy was reviewing the matter. Mr.Levy continued
to “review” the matter until his tenure as schools’ chancellor
expired.
Harold Levy has since moved on. New York has a new mayor, Mayor
Bloomberg, and a new schools’ chancellor, Mr. Joel Klein. Mr.Klein
shares Mr.Levy’s cultural perspectives. Mr.Klein allows displays of the
Jewish menorah in New York’s 1,200 public schools, but denies Christians
the opportunity to display a single nativity display. Mr.Klein defends
his lopsided favoritism by asserting that the menorah has a “secular
dimension.”
Mr.Klein’s argument is that menorah displays, even
extravagant ones, are
more acceptable in public schools because they are
less religious than
nativity displays; this is the most common defense of
menorah inclusion
and crèche exclusion. The strength of this argument
depends on whether
or not the menorah is a time-honored religious symbol of
the Jews, or
just some value-free artifact with no particular pedigree as a
symbol of
the Jewish faith. How might we resolve this question? Fortunately,
there
are devout Jews who have created some very helpful websites to explain
Judaism and Jewish history to the large number of nominal Jews who
haven’t a clue about these things. These websites are very
instructive.
According to Jewish legend the first menorah was created for
the
Tabernacle in the Wilderness by the craftsman Bezalel, who followed the
precise instructions given to him by Moses. It is described in Exodus
37:17. When King Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem, the menorah was
moved to that location. The menorah appears on Judean coins minted
during Roman rule. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Roman general
Titus in the year 70 AD and the menorah was carried to Rome as a trophy
of war. It is depicted on the Arch of Titus which commemorates the Roman
victory.
According to the website www.shofar.org, “When the Second Temple was
destroyed, the menorah, and not the Magen David (Star of David), as so
many erroneously believe, became the principal decorative art symbol of
the Jewish faith. It appeared on Hellenistic sarcophagi lids and on
ossuaries (bone caskets). It was sculpted in relief on the facades and
over the doorways of some early synagogues. It was even painted on
Jewish tombs in the catacombs of Rome and carved into the rock walls of
Judean burial catacombs.” From the days of Moses to the present Jewish
calendar year of 5749 is a long time. For most of that time it has been
the menorah and not the Star of David that has been the symbol most
closely associated with Judaism.
By contrast, the six-pointed star
was a pagan symbol that predated
Judaism; it had long been used on
kabalistic artifacts, but it was not
closely identified with Judaism. It was
not until the emancipation of
Jews after the French Revolution that educated
European Jews began the
search for a symbol to represent them in the way the
cross identified
their Christian neighbors. They finally chose the
six-pointed star, the
Magen David, the Shield of David. Many Jews accepted
this symbol because
of its previous associations with kabalism, even though
it had few
previous religious associations and is not mentioned in the Torah
even
once. The star was adopted by the Zionist movement in 1897. “Theodor
Herzl chose the Star of David because it was well known and because it
had no previous religious associations,” we are told at
www.angelfire.com. The choice of the star as
a symbol on the flag of
Israel was controversial as late as the 1940s. “Even
though the Magen
David is known as the Jewish symbol, the Jewish people have
another
symbol which is the ‘menorah’ which is also the emblem of the State
of
Israel and its origin is already in the Bible,” says www.ukmda.org.
So there you have it. As a
symbol of the Jewish faith the menorah has an
ancient tradition; as a
religious symbol it is far older than the
Christian cross. As a symbol of
the Jews the six-pointed star is a
comparative new comer, a junior member of
the team, perhaps even an
upstart. And yet, there is the menorah on display
in countless public
school classrooms while the cross and the baby Jesus are
kept locked in
a trunk in the basement.
When asked about this
favoritism toward the Jewish faith, William
Donohue, president of the
Catholic League replied: “It’s the most rank
example of discrimination
against Christians that I can offer in the ten
years I’ve been at the
Catholic League. It was two years ago that a
Catholic woman who was teaching
in a public school in Queens, New York
City contacted the Catholic League
and said that the principal there
said it’s OK to invite teachers to bring
to schools Jewish and Islamic
religious symbols. And as far as the
Christians were concerned, well,
they can bring a Christmas tree. We thought
it was an anomaly, maybe an
exception to the rule. I found out otherwise.
They had a written policy
at the Board of Education.”
When Mr.Donohue
appeared on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, host Joe
Scarborough inquired of
Mr.Donohue: “What do the New York City lawyers
tell you? What’s their
justification for saying its OK if you’re Jewish
to bring your religious
symbol in. It’s OK if you’re a Muslim to bring a
religious symbol in, but if
you’re a Christian, you can’t bring that
symbol into our school, because
that symbol alone will undermine our
constitutional rights?” Mr.Donohue
replied, “They’re trying to claim
that there’s a game here, that somehow the
menorah became a secular
symbol. And it’s insulting to Jews who practice
their religion, and
there are millions in this country, to claim that it has
a purely
secular value. The same is true of the Islamic crescent and star,
which
is the functional equivalent of the crucifix in the Christian
religion.
The fact of the matter is we’ve gone on with this for too long,
and I
blame Christians in part who are 85 percent of the people in this
country who have allowed the Christmas tree to be a substitute for the
crèche and the nativity scene. It’s about time we had a wake-up call and
educated people and stop with the atheists who claim that they’re value
neutral. A lot of atheists in this country have hatred in their hearts
for Catholics. Why don’t they just admit it?”
A federal lawsuit was
filed last year [2002] by the Thomas More Law
Center challenging New York’s
policy of encouraging the display of
menorahs during Hanukkah and
encouraging displays of the star and
crescent during Ramadan, but then
slamming the schoolhouse door in the
face of Christians who wish to display
anything other than a tree at
Christmas. The tree is a mere decoration,
something as barren of meaning
to Christians as tinsel; it certainly doesn’t
have an ancient pedigree
dating back to Moses, as the menorah
does.
Attorney Robert Muise observed, “This case will decide whether
public
school officials can enforce a policy that shows preference for
Judaism
and Islam, but disfavors Christianity. Can Christianity be erased
from
the public school? Can‘Christ’ be removed from Christmas? We will soon
find out.” The Law Center’s legal motion asserted that New York’s policy
favored the Jewish and Islamic faiths while conveying to school children
the impression that Christianity is something of which their school
disapproved. That is exactly what it does. It’s a scummy little message
and it smacks of religious bigotry. Richard Thompson, president of the
Thomas More Law Center said that, “New York City’s policy seeks to
de-Christianize Christmas and redefine our nation’s religious heritage.
The Thomas More Law Center is determined to protect the important
celebration of Christmas from such discrimination and censorship.”
In
any case, to claim that the menorah is anything less than the most
time-honored symbol of Judaism is preposterous. To whine that at
Christmas time Christians are somehow upstaging the Jews and the
pantheists and the latter-day revivalists of the blood-drenched altars
of Quetzalcoatl is the worst sort of bad manners. To complain about how
Christians celebrate the birth of Christ in a nation that Christians
created is sniveling, snotty, selfish and small minded. There isn’t a
single one of these minorities that doesn’t appear less dignified when
behaving this way.
The Damage They Have Done
The rancor that
non-Christians now bring to each Christmas season has
soured its traditional
festive mood considerably. Every year they gate
crash the party and demand
to share the spotlight with their minor
holiday (Hanukah), their
racially-exclusive celebration (Kwanzaa), and
their compulsion to sweep the
town square clean of all religious
symbolism (atheism). The unpleasant and
unauthentic way the great
majority of Americans must now observe the birth
of their savior is a
monument to the smallness of spirit of the Christmas
haters. These
complainers have coalesced into an umbrage industry and they
are never
idle. Here are a few examples of the mischief they have wrought in
recent years.
In Eugene, Oregon the city manager, Jim Johnson, asked
city employees to
stop displaying Christmas trees or decorations in public
spaces or
places shared with other workers. The irony of his request was
lost on
no one. Oregon is one of the largest exporters of Christmas trees,
but
if even one of those green things appears on a certain courthouse lawn,
watch out!
Local firefighters filed a grievance challenging the ban.
They said that
Christmas trees are a tradition in fire stations. Jim Johnson
grudgingly
allowed the firemen to put up a Christmas tree for two days:
Christmas
Eve and Christmas Day. He said the trees could go up after eight
in the
morning but must be gone by 8 AM of December 26th. Furthermore, Mr.
Johnson declared that if even one person objected to the tree, then that
tree must be removed. So, just one religious bigot could trash a
tradition by casting a heckler’s veto.
Kensington, Maryland excluded
Santa from its tree-lighting ceremony
because of only two complaints. What
began as a well-intentioned desire
to be sensitive to minority sensibilities
has emboldened these
minorities, some of them as small as a single person,
to assault the
sensibilities of the majority and to claim an entitlement to
sweeping
veto powers over community events. When the majority won’t discard
its
traditions, the malcontents grumble that the majority isn’t being
“inclusive.” Well, a celebration is for celebrants; if anyone doesn’t
want to join the celebration, then they can go to a movie or a Chinese
restaurant.
While we are on the subject of the sensitive person’s
veto, the South
Orange Middle School, in South Orange, New Jersey, cancelled
a much
anticipated class trip to see an enactment of Dickens’ A Christmas
Carol
because of an objection by a single Jew. The school’s principal, Kirk
Smith, offered a lame lie to explain away the last-minute cancellation;
he said the Dickens classic didn’t square well with the school’s
curriculum. No one believed him. A single parent had objected to the
story’s “Christian theme” and that was enough to wreck the trip, but
Kirk Smith didn’t have the guts to admit that South Orange Middle School
has an unwritten “one grumpy Jew” rule.
If I seem a bit petulant it’s
because both of my children were the
victims of educational malpractice at
this particularly wretched outpost
of PC hypersensitivity. It was at South
Orange Middle School that my
son’s Language Arts (please don’t call it
English) teacher looked by
wife straight in the eye and told her that it was
his mission in life to
“save black boys,” and then proved it by making every
assignment a
lesson in black liberation. It was at South Orange Middle
School that a
former principal painted a target on my son’s back by
distributing a
school-side letter to all students and parents that labeled
my son a
troublemaker because he and I had granted an interview to
conservative
columnist Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star Ledger after I had
criticized
this school’s left-leaning curriculum. The following day my son
was the
target of threats that were incited by the principal’s inflammatory
letter. I rushed to the school to rescue my son from the school’s office
where he had taken refuge; I kept him home until the crazies had cooled
off. It was at South Orange Middle School that I pulled my daughter out
of class, never to return. I home schooled her for a year and then
placed her in a private school, but that’s a story for another day.
Suffice it to say that struggling with these new-age utopians made me a
soldier for sanity.
So what was the real reason for canceling the
much-anticipated trip to
see Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? The single Jewish
parent’s objection
that the story has a “Christian theme” would be simple
religious bigotry
if that was the reason, but the only discernable theme of
the story is
the redemptive power of charity. Surely charity is a Jewish
value;
Jewish philanthropy is legendary. Perhaps the words “Christian theme”
mean something here that is completely detached from theology; perhaps
they are code words for some bogeyman of the Jewish psyche.
When I
cross referenced the words “Jew” and “Scrooge” on my computer it
produced
two thousand references. A whacking big number of them were
copies of Adam
Sandler’s The Hanukah Song which includes the couplet
“Some people think
that Ebeneezer Scrooge is, Well, he’s not but guess
who is: All three
stooges.” And what is it that some people think that
Ebenezer Scrooge is?
They think he’s a Jew.
Now recall Andrew K. Mandel’s paranoid vision that
“stereotypes
depicting Jews as greedy and selfish, and the correlations
between these
images and those of the nasty and self-centered Grinch and
Scrooge, help
foster the ‘Jew as evil outsider’ connotations.” Apparently,
Jews who
share Mr.Mandel’s paranoid vision believe that A Christmas Carol is
cryptically anti-Semitic. Columnist Cal Thomas took note of the South
Orange Middle School trip cancellation and said he couldn’t find a
distinctly Christian theme in the Dickens story, to which blogger Max
Jacobs (common-sense.blogspot.com) responded that “you don’t have to dig
deep into that story to find blatant anti-Semitism, so a Jewish parent
has every right to keep their (sic) kids from having to see it.
Ebeneezer Scrooge is a businessman who doesn’t celebrate Christmas and
is ‘shown the light’ of the error of his ways and converted. Do I need
to draw you a picture?” Max himself is described on this blogspot as
“The smart, hip, young and brash one.”
So, never mind that Scrooge
never sets foot in a church, never mentions
Jesus, never offers a prayer,
and never mind that his family is happily
celebrating the approaching
holiday in a very secular fashion and never
mind that Scrooge’s sour
demeanor is explained by his own early
heartbreaks and bitter experiences
and you just focus your entire
attention on the haunting idea that Scrooge
must really be a crypto-Jew
whom Dickens has created to smear the Jews. How
sad that the Christmas
joy of so many children could be taken hostage by a
single Jew who may
be gripped by this paranoid vision. You can bet that the
children of the
South Orange Middle School will never again be offered a
class trip to
this Dickens classic.
In the name of “inclusion” there
is a campaign afoot to erase all
visible signs of Christmas from the
Christmas season. The city of
Pittsburgh has dumped the now controversial
word “Christmas” and will
henceforth celebrate “Sparkle Days.” Some schools
across America are
crushing their student’s free expression by prohibiting
the exchange of
greeting cards; public institutions are doing likewise. In
the state of
Washington, King County executive Ron Sims demanded that all
employees
stop saying “Merry Christmas.” He backed off when uproar ensued,
but he
continued to caution everyone that greetings should be “in a
respectful,
inclusive and sensitive manner.” Two thirteen-year-old girls
were
suspended from their Rochester, Minn. middle school because they wore
red-and-green scarves and said “Merry Christmas” in a school video. Last
year, at New York City’s Jesse I. Strauss Elementary School, the song We
Wish You a Merry Christmas was changed to We Wish You Happy Holidays,
even as Hanukkah songs were still being sung two weeks after the end of
Hanukkah. The school was festooned with Hanukkah decorations and the
story of Hanukkah was discussed. It was only the story of Christmas that
was never told. Books touching on a secular Christmas were relegated to
a remote corner.
At the beginning of 2000 the Anti-Defamation League
issued a pamphlet
called The December Dilemma: Guidelines for Public Schools
During the
December Holidays The “guidelines” that these Jews thought
appropriate
would impose a virtual prohibition on the use of the word
Christmas and
the elimination of any explanation of the Christmas holiday.
Their
pamphlet was yet another weapon in the campaign to cleanse all signs
of
Christian culture from American public life. If the pamphlet catches on,
then more schools will become as culturally lopsided as the Jesse I.
Strauss Elementary School. But the Jews understand that if there were no
Christmas there would be no December Dilemma. Long before the ADL used
it, this expression had become a time worn catch phrase for Jewish
discomfort at Christmas time. The ADL literature has little to do with
observing the law and everything to do with expanding a Jewish comfort
zone at the expense of others.
Two years ago, in St. Paul, red
poinsettias were banned from City Hall
because someone was offended by them.
Surely these offending plants must
be a Christian symbol. After much rancor,
white poinsettias were
permitted into the courthouse and City Hall, but not
red ones.
Do you see what’s happened? What at first pretended to be a
high-minded
movement to maintain a separation between church and state has
devolved
into bitter arguments about whether red tropical plants are stealth
religious symbolism. Does anyone in their right mind believe that red
poinsettias threaten America with an impending establishment of
state-sponsored religion? Matters have degenerated in this manner for
one reason alone: the campaign against Christmas was never really about
guarding against government favoritism toward a single religious sect;
it was always about driving Christmas and Christian culture into the
shadows. When thirteen-year-old girls can be suspended from school for
wearing red-and-green scarves and saying “Merry Christmas” it’s time to
admit that Christian culture ensnared in a barroom brawl with a bunch of
obnoxious religious bigots.
By posing as victims of Christmas
festivities, these
small-minorities-with-big-priorities have taken advantage
of the
generosity of the greater Christian culture. What began as a
big-hearted
attempt at inclusion has ended with the Christian majority being
told
it’s time for them to leave their own party. What began as an offer of
friendship has ended as a parasitic relationship with the host culture
being eaten alive.
Perhaps Christian culture can never reclaim a
civic space uncluttered
with alien artifacts. Perhaps the only way for
entire Christian
communities to come together and be their authentic selves
is to
privatize the most meaningful aspects of their community lives. They
could do this by agreeing to move entire community-wide functions into
private venues, thereby depriving dissonant voices of any opportunity to
naysay the spiritual life of the larger community. Let the complaining
minorities live their own lives and perform their own rituals well out
of sight and beyond earshot; leave them wondering where the rest of
their community has gone – no hard feelings. And isn’t it odd, that with
so many Jews complaining about what a heavy burden the Christian
festivities are on them, that not one of them has ever suggested that
Christians could lighten that burden by avoiding Jewish merchants during
the Christmas shopping season? Perhaps that’s because so many Jews
depend upon shopping Christians for their financial survival: generous
Christmas spending at Jewish-owned businesses pays for Bar Mitzvahs,
memberships to synagogues and donations to Hadassah, not to mention
donations to Israel.
The “Hurt Feelings” Scam
President
Ulysses S. Grant declared Christmas a secular national holiday
in 1870 to
celebrate a philosophy of “goodwill toward men.” It is
certainly a
celebration of good will; charitable giving swells during
the Christmas
season. It is a time of genuine caring and introspection
and generous gift
giving. The spirit of the season unites families and
puts people in touch
with their better selves. It strengthens social
bonds; it deepens an
appreciation of tradition. So it is with heightened
concern that we are
confronted each Christmas by the dark animus of the
Christmas haters who
resent the traditional religious and cultural
practices of their own
society, who dream of creating a more “rational”
clockwork utopia. Christmas
should be cherished as a force for social
cohesion. Instead, the Christmas
haters are drawn to this bright holiday
by a mean-spirited impulse to dim
its light and warmth.
Here’s a classic quotation that recapitulates the
entire devolution of
the phony church-state separations campaign. It’s from
Anne Chernin,
director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the
Jewish
Federation of South Palm Beach County in Florida: “We have safeguards
in
a pluralistic society because we don’t want one religious group
dictating what is good for all the people. We really believe that a
society where everyone is allowed to flourish, including the minority,
is a much better place to be. The important thing is to put oneself in
the shoes of a child who is being made to feel different.”
Her first
sentence appears to be a simple recitation of every
separationist’s first
article of faith, but it masks a few absurdities.
Just which religious group
has the power to dictate what is good to all
people? Who is she talking
about? Ms.Chernin wisely doesn’t name the
potential “dictators.” In fact, no
such group exists; both Christianity
and Judaism are fragmented into sects.
I once heard an Orthodox Jew only
half-jokingly refer to Reform Jews as
“Christians.” Among the Jews there
are the Orthodox, the Conservative, the
Reform, the Reconstructionist,
the Renewal, the Hasidic, the Ultra-Orthodox,
etc, etc. One branch of
Judaism identifies its sects by the stetls (small
villages) their
forebears once called home: Satmar, Ger, Bobov, Belz, etc.
There were
lots of stetls. It would take pages to name all the Protestant
sects. So
no group is capable of dictating to “all the people,” or even to
just
the Jews. Or is Ms.Chernin using the term “one religious group” to mean
all Christians collectively? That’s equally absurd. All of those
Christian sects could never reach an agreement about the meaning of
“what is good.” Questions like that are the reason there are so many
sects to begin with. Christians had free rein in America for centuries
and there never emerged an “establishment” national religion. It simply
isn’t in the nature of things for that to happen.
Ms.Chernin’s second
sentence merely describes the status quo. Minorities
in America are free to
flourish right now; that’s why persecuted
minorities chose to emigrate to
America.
Her concluding sentence, which is a plea on behalf of “the child
who’s
being made to feel different,” is an appeal to the generosity of the
Christian majority not to make Jewish children “feel different.” Is she
kidding? Or is she just pretending to be a Jew?
For millennia Jews
have gone to considerable lengths to make themselves
distinctly, even
ostentatiously, different from their gentile neighbors;
it was a point of
pride with them. Throughout their exile in Egypt, the
Jews clung tenaciously
to their distinctive language and mode of dress.
There is nothing in Torah
that requires Jews to wear black hats, black
waistcoats, black gabardine
pants, black shoes, untucked white shirts,
full unclipped beards and
tzitzit. They do it to be distinctive in
appearance. As one Jewish website
tells us: “The tzitis is also
distinctive, since it gives the Jew a special
garment that cannot be
found among the gentiles.” The men with their bobbing
payot and the
women in their stiff sheitles do not exactly blend into the
crowd. Men
wearing bushy shtreimelech or tall mink spodikem on their heads
would
stand out at, say, the Mall of America or anywhere west of the Hudson
River. Even in middle-class suburban towns, boys wearing yarmulkes
(kippah) are distinctive. Would a gentile child sense that something was
a little different if he visited a Jewish home and found the kitchen
equipped with two refrigerators, two stoves, two sinks and two china
cupboards? In short, being different is a point of pride for Jews who
aren’t trying to hide their distinctive heritage.
To gain deeper
insight, I went to the AskMoses website at
www.askmoses.com which includes the very
helpful article What’s the
difference between a Jew and a Non-Jew? In the
first sentence we are
told that “The basic difference between a Jew and a
Non-Jew is: A Jew
is, and has the ability to be, Godly; a non-Jew has the
ability to be
spiritual.” Non-Jews, we are told, possess an Animal Soul
which allows
them to be spiritual and productive, but only a Jew has
Neshama, which
is “a Godly spark,” with which the Jews alone “were given the
ability to
actually connect with God Himself. . .” Well, bless my gentile
Animal
Soul, Jews are definitely different.
As you can see, amongst
themselves Jews openly acknowledge what
distinguishes them from all
gentiles. They acknowledge that they are a
people apart, with a unique
history. The most religious among them glory
in these differences.
Assimilated suburban Jews, like Ms.Chernin, are
simply conflicted and
confused; they want to be different when it suits
them, but they want to be
“just like everybody else” when it doesn’t
suit them. They want to be
different, or not, at their convenience, even
if that means jerking around
the Christian majority. It’s long overdue
for Christians to wake up to this
scam; it’s time for the tail to stop
wagging the dog. This isn’t
anti-Semitism, it’s just insisting on good
manners.
At the AskMoses
website the question is asked, “Is there a way to
explain anti-Semitism?” to
which the answer is given that “it is part of
God’s master plan for us to be
hated by the rest of the world. The
adversity is what keeps us unique,
separate, and focused on our
mission.” (Emphasis added)
The Jewish
scholars at AskMoses enlighten us to the fact that “Much of
Jewish integrity
centers on rejecting foreign religions and ideologies .
. .Negative Mitzvah
#10 forbids a Jew from examining, studying, browsing
or perusing the tenets,
key points and definitions of any belief system
outside of Judaism. Negative
Mitzvah #47 stipulates that an intellectual
‘fence’ be constructed around
Judaism’s belief system, so you don’t come
to a point where an idea foreign
to Judaism makes enough sense to you
that you believe it over the Jewish
approach to the same idea.” And you
expect these people to be broad-minded
about Christian festivities at
Christmas time? It won’t happen. They will
defend their comfort zone
until the last crèche is safely in the
dumpster.
This Jewish perspective goes a long way toward explaining why
Hanukkah
gets showcased in so many schools while the baby Jesus is kept
under
wraps, why the Christmas story gets cancelled after the Hanukkah story
has been completed, why the class trip to a Dickens’ classic is
protested because of its frightening “Christian theme.”
From the
Jews’ perspective the protesting Jew is simply being
observant, loyal, and
consistent. But to the Christian communities that
are struggling to maintain
their festive traditions, these protesters
are a headache. At their worst,
they are obnoxious bigots.
The cultural traditions of gentile America
mean nothing to these Jews;
they are focused solely on inflating their
comfort zone, that wonderful
homey Jewish feeling, haimisher Yiddishkeit.
They have a well-worn
Yiddish aphorism: Er shmekt nit un er shtinkt nit (“He
doesn’t smell and
he doesn’t stink.”) which is used to describe the goyim
(gentiles) as an
inconsequential and unimportant people. A gentile is but a
simpleton
with a goyisher kop, a queer gentile mind.
The Exclusive
Nature of Religion
So, being different is an important dimension of
Jewish psychology and
culture. It is, in fact, essential. If a Jew weren’t
different, then he
wouldn’t be a Jew. Probably, what many Jews really don’t
want is to be
excluded. But every religious observance must be, to some
degree,
exclusive. The American Christmas season is more inclusive than most
December observances; does any Christian feel included in Hanukkah?
Hanukkah is about God’s love for the Jews. Period. It commemorates the
rejection of non-Jewish cultures.
Kwanzaa is a racially exclusive
celebration that goes on for a week.
It’s for blacks only. The first
principle of Kwanzaa is Umoja: “to
strive for and maintain unity in the
black family, the black community,
the black nation and the black race.” The
seventh principle is Imani:
“to believe in our hearts in our black people. .
.” Kwanzaa observances
include libations such as “For our black people, the
original people.”
The words “original people” are not borrowed from any
science text, but
from the ultra-racist theology of the Nation of
Islam.
Kwanzaa websites stress that “It is important that the kinara
[candelabra] not be confused with the menorah,” and “you should not mix
the Kwanzaa holiday or its symbols, values and practices with those of
any other culture. This would violate the integrity of the holiday.” In
other words, Kwanzaa is as hermetically exclusive as any Hasidic ritual.
One Kwanzaa website gives home decorating tips: “The kinara, along with
other symbols of Kwanzaa should dominate the room, which should be given
an African motif.” Would little Shlomo feel different in this
environment? You bet he would, but no Jew has ever said that the black
nationalists were making Jewish children feel “different;” they only
kvetch about Christmas.
At the www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org
we are told that “The greetings
during Kwanzaa are in Swahili. Swahili is a
Pan-African language and is
chosen to reflect African-Americans’ commitment
to the whole of Africa
and African culture.” This racially-exclusive seven
days is accorded
respect in classrooms across America. But imagine the
uproar if people
of the Caucasian persuasion chose to observe a seven-day
celebration of
their own “commitment to the whole of Europe and European
culture.”
Suppose they rededicated themselves to the “unity of the white
community, the white nation and the white race”? Would the schools
respect such a holiday? On what grounds could they reject it, after they
had accepted Kwanzaa? Black people have every right to be proud racial
patriots, but this right is not theirs alone and their right is not
superior to that of any other people.
And yet, Christians and their
Christmas holy day are treated with
disrespect at every turn. The campaign
to strip Christmas of its sacred
message continues apace. Yahoo!Greetings
offers the public 443 Christmas
cards, of which only 9 are religious (2%),
while 26 of its 33 Hanukkah
cards display the Magen David and are clearly
religious in tone (79%).
American Greetings makes matters worse with its
line of vulgar and
sexually suggestive Christmas cards. Does the tag line
“It’s Christmas.
Hope yours doesn’t suck” capture the essence of Christmas
for you? For
some reason American Greetings neglected to distribute cards
with
sentiments such as “Hope your Hanukkah isn’t really scummy.” Only
Christians are fed the dirt sandwich.
Central Michigan University
publishes a calendar that identifies the
December holidays, including
Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Las
Posadas. Only Christmas warrants an
asterisk next to it. If you click on
the asterisk shown in the on-line
version of the calendar, up pops “How
to celebrate Christmas without
offense,” which helpfully informs
Christians that “It is inappropriate to
decorate things with Santa
Claus, or reindeer or other ‘Christmas’
decorations.” It suggests that
good ideas for decorations during the
Christmas season include
snowflakes, snowpeople and poinsettias “to give a
feeling of the
winter,” even though the birth of one of history’s most
influential
religious leaders and the personal savior of many millions of
people is
what Christmas is really all about. For that “winter feeling” grab
a
Yule log and hang out with the Wiccans.
Please note the
university’s confidence that Jews, blacks and Mexicans
are perfectly capable
of observing their respective celebrations without
offending anyone. Only
Christians are singled out for the special
admonition and prohibitions. It’s
that season again folks.
Trashing Santa
In 1984, the company that
Walt Disney created got a new chairman and
chief executive, Michael Eisner.
Mister Eisner’s gift to the company was
something it had never had before: a
pornography mill called Miramax
Films. The 2003 Christmas season offering
from Miramax is a film called
Bad Santa.
The film stars Billy Bob
Thornton as a foul-mouthed self-hating drunk
who teams up with a dwarf to
steal from stores while working as a mall
Santa. He is also cruel to
children. The dialogue includes over 250
strong obscenities. For example, in
one scene a child asks of Santa,
“You are really Santa, right?” to which
Santa replies, “No, I’m an
accountant. I wear this as a fucking fashion
statement!” In another
scene Santa Claus enjoys anal sex with a girl in a
mall dressing room.
Later on, Santa tells a female bartender, “I’m an
eating, drinking
fucking Santa Claus,” to which she responds, “Prove it.”
Moments later
they are having hot pumpin’ intercourse in a parked car. In
yet another
scene, Santa relieves himself while posing with children for
holiday
photos.
Said Russell Scott Smith, film critic for the New
York Post, “The movie
is so depraved it would make the Farrelly brothers
blush.” Billy Bob
Thornton described it to the Post as “the dark side of
‘It’s a Wonderful
Life.’”
The film’s director, Terry Zwigoff, granted
an interview with Mim
Udovitch, the film critic for the New York Times. From
this interview we
gain some insight into what sort of people would make such
a
mean-spirited film. The critic asked the director, “What was Christmas
like around your house?” Zwigoff then describes his isolation as a Jew
in a small Wisconsin farm town and the confusion of Christmas trees and
Hanukkah candles in his home after his uncle married “a woman who wasn’t
Jewish.” Udovitch remarks that “A Christmas movie is something of a
departure for you. What attracted you to this film?”
Zwigoff had
taken over the film after it had been developed by the Coen
brothers. He
tells the critic that his agent sent him the script and he
loved it
immediately. “We took it to a few studios who promptly turned
it down. After
a couple of months of that, I got a call from Bob
Weinstein saying his
brother and he . . .wanted to make a film with me.
They read it right away
and said they wanted to make the film. And they
never wavered from that.
There were many times when I would look around
me on the set and think: I
can’t believe they’re letting me make this.”
Angela Dawson, writing for
Entertainment News Wire, observed that “While
other actors might shy away
from such controversial material, Thornton
relished the opportunity to try
something different.” Billy Bob
remarked, “I’ve tried to make choices that
make me happy in my career.”
Soon after his fifth wife, Angelina Jolie,
adopted a Cambodian orphan,
Billy Bob left her. With wife number five gone,
Billy Bob has gotten
closer to his sons William and Harry, from his fourth
marriage. Thornton
says he took his boys to see the family-friendly film Elf
rather than
his own R-rated Bad Santa. Demonstrating a flicker of wisdom,
Billy Bob
opined, “I’ll probably keep them away from it for a few years, at
least.”
This film’s history is like the opening line of a bad ethnic
joke: “So
these four Jews (Zwigoff, the two Weinsteins, and Eisner) decide
to make
a Christmas movie that trashes a cherished Christmas icon. . .”
Would
these four businessmen ever consider making a movie about, say, a
bearded Hasidim who buggers a young girl behind a synagogue during the
Yom Kippur service? Of course not! That would be meshugge. It would be
too reminiscent of the imagery in such hideous films as The Universal
Jew made during the Nazi era. And yet, they were eager to make Bad
Santa.
Perhaps you could send Michael Eisner a Christmas card and include
a
note about how you feel about him making a buck polluting the Christmas
season. American Greetings has just the card. It depicts Santa’s elves
doing Santa’s laundry. They hold up his underwear and exclaim, “Man! You
think that a guy who can deliver toys all over the world in one night
could at least learn to wipe himself a bit better.” That’s Mr. Eisner’s
kind of humor.
Parting Thoughts It should be clear to you by now that
all of the
arguments used to diminish the public celebration of Christmas
are
shams. There is no danger of an establishment of a national religion;
there never was such a danger. Minorities in America are free to
practice any faith they wish; we are a nation of sects. The “umbrage”
crowd and the “hurt feelings” people are, in reality, bigots
masquerading as victims; their campaign against Christmas is low and sly
and contemptible. Acceding to their demands would be a victory for
bigotry and hate.
Many of the same people who jabber incessantly
about the importance of
keeping the baby Jesus off the courthouse lawn
because his presence
there hints of governmental favoritism are the very
people who cheer
when billions of our tax dollars, taken from us by force,
are lavished
on Israel, an officially Jewish nation with a religious symbol
on its
flag and a law on its books that prohibits anyone who is not a Jew
from
ever being elected to the nation’s highest office. (There are 142,000
Israeli Christians.) That’s billions of our dollars to subsidize
Judaism, but don’t you dare put the baby Jesus in the town square. So
what’s good for Jews in Israel is bad for Jews in America; when Jews are
in power, then church-state union is good, but when Jews are a minority,
then church-state separation is good. Got that, goyboy?
We see now
the true mindset behind the annual anti-Christmas campaign;
there is nothing
principled about it. Those Jews and atheists, pagans
and Secular Humanists,
Muslims and Wiccans who assault Christmas seek to
share its bright light
even as they strive to dim it. The great
community of American Christians
must stop treating them as though they
were people with a genuine grievance.
They don’t have a genuine
grievance: they are bigots!
Merry Christmas
to all,
And to all, a good fight.
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