Rabbi Gets a Cold Splash of "Progressive" Jew Hatred

Well, isn't this interesting news. It turns out that the Rabbi who outed Helen Thomas as a anti-Jewish bigot is actually a liberal, New York, Democrat who is now rethinking his own progressivism in the wake of an outpouring of anti-Jewish hatred toward him.

Here is Rabbi Nesenoff's website, Rabbilive.com, on which he has posted some of the 25,000 pieces of hate mail he has received since his interview with Thomas. (Warning: In typical anti-Semitic fashion, much of the material is crude and filthy.)

Here is a story on Newsbusters entitled: "Rabbi Who Outed Helen Thomas is 'Liberal' Who Agreed w/ Her on Iraq War, 'Reevaluating' His Views."

Maybe somebody should send him a copy of Norman Podhoretz' book Why are Jews Liberal? Podhoretz can't figure out why so many American Jews continue to support a political movement that calls itself "Progressive" but apparently thinks that the destruction of Israel would constitute progress. What I can't figure out is why so many Christians continue to support a political movement that calls itself "Progressive" but apparently thinks that the destruction of Christianity and Western Civilization would constitute progress.

As the secular Jihad in alliance with militant Islamofascism picks up steam, Jews and Christians are going to find that we are in the soup together. There is nothing like getting persecuted together to warm up Jewish-Christian relations. But here is an idea: "How about working together to prevent it getting to that point?"

Anti-Christian Madness on Parliament Hill

Barbara Kay's column in The National Post, "Gilles Duceppe Owes an Apology to Catholics," names and shames the extreme anti-Christianity of Gilles Duceppe and the dominant political class in Quebec.

This mentality is the same as that which characterized the madness of the French Revolution. No literal guillotines yet, but the level of rhetoric is getting pretty violent and, of course, violent speech prepares the way for violent acts. When secularists start calling for the dissolution of the Church and for the painful death of Cardinals, we have passed way beyond liberalism and tolerance into a dark space that reeks of fascism and irrational fanaticism.

On May 27 Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe tried to set a witch hunt in motion with a political drive-by shooting of several completely innocent people:

“Mr. Speaker, Ottawa’s bishop stated yesterday that a sizeable pro-life caucus is working behind the scenes within the government. The Prime Minister, who controls everything, must know about this caucus.” With McCarthyite melodrama, M. Duceppe then intoned the names and positions in the Conservative Party of three practicing Catholics, as if that were proof of the ominous “caucus.”

These Catholics are all members of Opus Dei, a prelature of the Catholic Church, a group I am very familiar with, and amongst whom I count some of my closest friends. Opus Dei means in Latin “God’s Work.” Members of “the Work” believe that holiness is something to be strived for in one’s daily life: in one’s job, however important or however humble, in one’s friendships, one’s family life and civic obligations.

Opus Dei does good works all over the planet (I have seen documentaries on their projects in the hellholes of the world, bringing aid, comfort and social assistance to the poorest and most forgotten, without fanfare or publicity-seeking or missionary profit), punching far above their demographic weight. Few in number – about 85,000 world-wide and only a few thousand in all of Canada – they are immersed in public life in the most positive and benign ways. And of the more than 100,000 members of the Conservative Party, why yes, there are probably two or three members of Opus Dei.

But the back-story to Duceppe’s naming (and by implication shaming) of these three good people (two of whom I know well as ideal Canadian citizens and warm, engaging, admirable human beings ) is not his apparently high-minded upholding of the division of church and state. It is his loathing for the Catholic Church, a loathing he is at small pains to conceal. In this he is entirely representative of the media and political elites that dominate Quebec’s public discourse. And that is the real story here.

Look at the reaction to Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s call for public debate on the morality of abortion. Note: he did not call for legislative change. He called abortion a “moral crime.” In response the francophone media went ballistic. Would Patrick Lagacé of La Presse have dared to curse any non-Catholic religious leaders? It is unthinkable that any Canadian pundit would say of an imam, as Lagacé did of Cardinal Ouellet: “We must all die. We are all going to die. Cardinal Ouellet is going to die one day. I hope he will die of a long and painful sickness…Yes, the paragraph I have just written is vicious. But [Cardinal] Marc Ouellet is an extremist. And in this debate, all blows are permitted against religious extremists…the Cardinal is a fundamentalist. This is a known fact. From there on, whoever agrees to share a political podium with him should be treated like an accomplice to the fanaticism of Kazem Ouellet… “

(By “Kazem” he refers to Kazem Sedighi, an imam in Teheran who declared that recent earthquakes had been caused by certain women’s indecent wardrobe.)

Similarly, would any Canadian journalist call for the dissolution of Islam because parts of shariah law run counter to Canadian gender values? Yet on May 28 Le Devoir published an op-ed written by a sociologue who calls for the dissolution of the Church and its transformation in Quebec into a network of cooperatives : “This cooperative network, based on modern values of equality and non-segregation of the sexes, of anti-racism and the rejection of homophobia, would permit us to experience together, socially and ceremoniously, the great moments of life between birth and death. This project of modernization of the Catholic institution seems to me, moreover, completely compatible with the fundamental secularity of the state which is indispensable to social peace.”

Read the rest here.

Secularism has become a new religion and, like many new religions, its zeal, if not checked, can lead to a kind of violence that most of Christianity has outgrown. If Marc Cardinal Ouellet is an extremist then practically every religious leader, political leader, great artist, humanitarian and scientist who lived prior to 1968 was also an extremist. So who is the real extremist here?

Kay is right that these people would not dare criticize Islam. I am growing weary of journalists insulting and bashing Christians and holding back from saying anything critical of Islam. Let's be honest: they are cowards and eventually cowards are conquered and dominated by the strong. To be blunt: they are crazy in the sense of not recognizing their own enlightened self-interest.

The McCarthyism of the Canadian Left Picks Up Steam

David Warren had a good column in The Ottawa Citizen the other day about the new McCarthyism that has appeared in Canada recently.

The notion that, simply because people are Christian, they should be "exposed" and hounded out of public life, or dragged before human rights tribunals, is becoming a commonplace of "progressive" thinking. It is hardly confined to Canada: the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing an astounding case (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez), in which the most basic right of free association could be denied to Christians on university campuses; the ACLU has made the removal from public property of all visible evidence of America's Christian heritage an expression of "civil rights."

In Ottawa this week, a "scandal" has been alleged because the member of Parliament for Regina-Qu'Appelle (a Catholic!) arranged a lunch with colleagues (not all of them Catholic) to meet the Canadian vicar of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei. Neither the organization nor the lunch was in any way secret, unprecedented, nor otherwise abnormal, and yet it was presented in Le Devoir with the gravity of the Spanish Inquisition.

This is an example of the sort of thing that promises to become, in the shadow of McDonald's much-touted book, a "meme" of agenda-driven, liberal journalism: "outing" those who quite openly practice the Christian religion and advocate for its long-received views as if they were subversives.

How does Warren suggest that Christians respond?

How should Christians respond to such attacks? To fellow Catholics, I would suggest, take the Rosary out of your pocket and wave it in their faces. To all other Christians, likewise: do not be cowed, do not retreat an inch. You have every right to maintain the beliefs that built Western Civilization against the beliefs that are taking it down and a duty in good conscience to affirm Christ, regardless of the consequences.

We must not respond passively by allowing ourselves to be browbeaten into silence. That is the coward's way out. Like Peter and John in Acts we have to speak of what we have seen and heard - it is our duty of love to those around us.

Ezra Levant has some comments on the specific individuals involved in a post called
"The McCarthyism of the Canadian Left":

Pat Martin is the NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre. Last week he told reporters that members of the Catholic lay order, Opus Dei, "give me the creeps".

I'm sure that's true. Martin doesn't like Christians in general, even when they're doing social services in his own decrepit downtown, a downtown that has got more decrepit under his watch as MP. Martin would rather have urban decay than development, if the developers are Christian. Here's his own hometown paper calling him out as "irrational" for his anti-Christian outburst earlier this year.

But Martin went further this time. In response to news that fifteen or so MPs and staff had a meeting in the Parliamentary restaurant with the Canadian vicar of Opus Dei, Martin didn't just call conservative Catholics creepy, he expressed his objection that any MP would invite such people to soil the sacred precincts of Parliament Hill. Martin "certainly wouldn't attend anything associated with them," he said.

After discussing Gilles Duceppe's contribution to the witch hunt, Levant ends with a summary of the situation:

So what do we have here?

1. The obvious: that anti-Christian bigotry remains an acceptable form of intolerance in Canadian politics.

2. This bigotry has infected the parties of the left.

3. The mainstream media, and indeed the rest of the political establishment, ignores this bigotry (and in many cases approves of it).

4. Like Marci McDonald's book on Christians, Duceppe's comments are ridiculous on the face of them: to ascribe government policy to two party volunteers without any government office. I doubt that either woman blacklisted by Duceppe have spoken to Harper in a year.

5. Like McDonald's book, Duceppe's comments are error-ridden: he says that a Conservative (MP Andrew Scheer) invited "his colleagues" to dine with Opus Dei "leaders". In fact, Scheer sent an e-mail to all of Parliament Hill -- including to Duceppe himself. And it wasn't Opus Dei leaders, but rather one man, Msgr. Fred Dolan.

6. How terrifying is Msgr. Dolan? Who was attracted to his diabolical meeting? Well, Mario Silva, for one. Who's he? Oh, just a Liberal MP. A gay Liberal MP. That just proves how deep the Christian conspiracy is though, doesn't it -- it even has left-wing gay activists as part of their master plan!

But the real point is this: anti-Christian bigotry has metastasized from quiet prejudices into full-blown witch-hunts. McDonald's hateful book was a catalyst, but as Martin's comments earlier this year (and Duceppe's comments in the Toronto Star in 2008) show, the hatred was already out there.

(By the way, look at Duceppe's comments in that Star article. The atheist Marxist Duceppe is actually giving his political opinions about what Catholic rituals are "questionable" or not. Could you imagine him inspecting an Orthodox Jew or Sikh this way?)

Back to my list:

7. Do Duceppe and Martin meet the definition of "bigot"? I think so; here's the dictionary definition: "one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance". Yeah, the shoe fits.

8. Will Canada's self-appointed anti-hate squads pounce on Martin and Duceppe? The Canadian Human Rights Commission? Of course not: they're part of the anti-Christian persecution themselves, having prosecuted Fr. Alphonse de Valk, Rev. Stephen Boissoin, the Christian Heritage Party, etc. I'm surprised they haven't gone after Msgr. Dolan yet.

9. How about the Canadian Jewish Congress? Pause for laughter.

10. Look at Duceppe's bizarre answer about McCarthyism: "McCarthy was you can’t say something because you can’t prove that you don’t have a card of the Communist Party and prove that you don’t have." We've all heard Duceppe enough to know that his English, while accented, is excellent. He is making the usual Marxist argument: censorship is only censorship if it's applied against the left. Witch-hunts against conservatives, by definition, aren't witch hunts.

11. But he saved the worst for last: he says that Opus Dei should not be allowed to participate in our democracy. He fudged it a bit; saying they ought not to participate "as a group". But that makes no sense: Opus Dei, as a group, is not involved in any political party. It is a lay organization -- it's not a group of priests. It's just a group of Catholics who have a particular belief. The very people he named in Parliament were participating as individuals -- it's ridiculous to claim they were Opus Dei candidates, for example. But they were precisely the ones Duceppe was damning.

12. One more point about the media. Duceppe's attack was either inspired by or coordinated with Le Devoir's Helene Buzzetti, who has written several breathless reports about Opus Dei in recent days. You need a subscription to read the full text, but here are some of her gems (my translation, helped by Google): Opus Dei "arouses suspicions"; it is "controversial"; it engages in "secrecy"; and my favourite: "it urges its members to pursue graduates studies and then mingle with the elite". (How suspicious! Sounds like the Jews, really!) Don't you love it when journalists put their own editorial opinions in as facts, merely by stating them without attribution? They "arouse suspicions", you know! . . .

Levant closes with this challenge:

How do you feel about people being blacklisted because they're Catholic? How do you feel about MPs calling different religions "creepy"? How about a leader of a party declaring certain private religious rituals "questionable"? How about the condemnation of even inviting such people to lunch?

If your answer is anything different than it would be if Marci McDonald and Pat Martin and Gilles Duceppe were counting Jews or Sikhs or Muslims, then shame on you.

Anti-Catholicism is Always Just Below the Surface

But it has broken through the surface recently in the attacks on Pope Benedict XVI. The sheer volume of accusations, half-truths, mis-quotes, unchecked rumor-mongering and outright lies coming out of the anti-Catholic press, especially the New York Times, these days can be overwhelming.

Many ordinary people have one of three instinctive responses:

1. It is too terrible - I can't be bothered to try to think about it. (Yet they have been subconsciously influenced anyway.)

2. There are probably lies in the overall coverage but where there is smoke there is likely fire. (This is what they are counting on you thinking when they get caught out in a lie.)

3. The Pope is responsible for the clerical abuse scandal even if he personally did nothing wrong. (This is what they are hoping: they are out to get this particular pope.)

The liberal Protestant media and their liberal Catholic Quislings are in cahoots to put a liberal on the throne of St. Peter. That is what this is all about.

They know that Benedict is righting the ship and steering the Church back to the center of orthodoxy after it veered sharply to the left during the post-Vatican II period. Pope John Paul II saved the Church from becoming just another dying liberal Protestant denomination, which is what the liberal Catholics wanted, but they waited out John Paul because they were afraid of his personal popularity and convinced that once he was gone their time would come. But now they are beginning to realize that their time may never come.

The world is changing. Orthodoxy is rising; heresy and compromise are fading. All the aging hippies in the Roman Catholic Church now realize that time is no longer on their side. They fear a window is closing. As the culture of death chokes Western culture ever more tightly in its icy grip, more and more Christians of all denominations are awaking to the reality that modernity is a failed experiment, that life without God is impossible and that the sexual revolution is a dead end for humanism.

This is why there is one last gasp attempt to wrest control of the Church from the conservatives and assert the will to power of "progressivism." The victims of the child sex abuse tragedy are not the focus here; they are pawns in a power game that has one objective only: to bring down Pope Benedict XVI. The Church should be criticized but the foundation of criticism must be the truth - not lies, deceit and character assassination.

MSNBC ran this headline on a story on the Catholic Church yesterday on its website: "Pope Describes Touching Boys: I Went Too Far.” When you clicked on the story you found nothing related to the headline whatsoever. MSNBC today apologized and the Catholic League accepted the apology. As far as I'm concerned, the Catholic League speaks for itself. I don't accept the apology. I want somebody fired first. I want screaming headlines running for days on all MSNBC news outlets saying: "MSNBC Employee Engages in Anti-Catholic Hate Speech: the Investigation is On-going." Then once the person or persons responsible for this deed has been identified publicly and it has been determined how high up the ladder the buck should stop and the appropriate terminations for cause have taken place. Then, and only then, will it be time to talk about accepting apologies. It is far too easy for this king of "bait and switch" and "O my goodness, who would do a thing like that" baloney to be used to poison minds and destroy people.

The New York Times has degenerated into a parody of a once proud "newspaper of record." Investigative journalism for them means opening the electronic equivalent of brown envelopes and publishing whatever accords with their mean, narrow-minded prejudices. This story attempts to implicate the pope in the abuse scandal on the flimsiest of evidence supported by almost no investigative reporting. Who needs to interview the principals or dig into the background - or even keep dates clear - when the goal is just to shovel another load on mud onto an innocent man?

The replies to the NYT hatchet job have been quick in coming.

The Anchoress at First Things has a number of good links here, including a scathing reply by William Cardinal Levada and a plea for fairness from the New York Daily News. CNA has a story on the priest who was the Vicar-General of the diocese of Milwaukee at the of the alledged incidents that formed the substance of the NTY story. He notes that they NYT felt free to quote him but never bothered to call him to ask questions.

Father Zuhlsdorf of "What Does the Prayer Really Say?" has a number of good posts on this issue including a good summary of Archbishop Timothy Dolan's rebuttal to the NYT (aka Hell's Bible). He published a piece back in October on his blog about the anti-Catholicism of the NYT, which the NYT refused to publish as an op-ed piece. Dolan's comments on the latest NYT scandal are here.

Look, the clerical abuse scandal is terrible and the cover-up was criminal. The truth should come out and the guilty should be punished. But the whole Roman Catholic Church should not become the punching bag for indiscriminate attacks by groups with their own agendas. Truth is the minimum standard for all "crusaders for truth and justice."

I'm not Catholic and I'm not Jewish. But I want to condemn all anti-Semitism and all anti-Catholicism any time I see them. Why? Because once they have destroyed the Catholic Church and Israel, guess who is next in line for persecution, slander and hate speech? Conservative Protestants won't have anybody to call on for help if that happens. We need to speak up now while we still have allies. Liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, atheists and secularists may have Benedict in their cross hairs today. But tomorrow it could be you.

Some More Responsible Headlines

Never read only one newspaper.

Today's National Post has a story on the subject of Pope Benedict and the German sexual abuse cover-up scandal: "Vatican Says Bid to Link Pope to Abuse Issue Failed."

Even the New York Times (!) gets it right. Yesterday the headline was the edgy but not "over-the-line" one: "Abuse Scandal in Germany Edges Closer to the Pope." Today, it dials back on the sensationalism with: "Vatican Sees Campaign Against the Pope."

This is not a one-off for the Times of London. It is part of a pattern. And don't be naive about one thing: there are many extreme liberals in Germany who are out to get Benedict XVI. This attack was not unexpected by those who follow internal Church politics.

Are You Worried About Christian Extremists?

Here is the "Quote of the Day" from the Sojourners email newsletter.

"I am more concerned with the threat from the Christian-identity groups than the homegrown Islamic terrorists. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. The fact that this guy did what he did may be symptomatic of things to come."
- Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, on yesterday's shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (Source: The Washington Times)

Well, isn't that just precious? She is more worried about Christian terrorism than about Islamist terrorism. Now that makes sense! What an opportunistic misuse of a headline grabbing event to slam Christianity. What a warped view of the world. She is quick to identify a nutcase as representative, not of some radical, fringe group, but as "Christian," a member of a "Christian-identity group." I'm a Baptist; I believe that would be a Christian-identity group. (The apostle Paul was into the same sort of thing - going around claiming that his citizenship was in heaven.)

Ironically, she would probably object strongly to calling the suicide bomber a representative of Islam. This is the kind of rhetorical double standard one would expect from an anti-Christian propogandist.

Some people just hate Christianity and take every opportunity to taint Christianity with all the evil in the world (eg. Christopher Hitchens). She could have condemned the hateful actions of this spiteful old man without condemning Christianity as such. She just chose not to. And Sojourners thought it was so profound and insightful that it chose to display it proudly at the top of its newsletter. That tells you a lot about how far Sojourners has fallen from its original Christian roots.