The Pharoah of Pals.? or Maybe, The Putz of Jews

Michael Lerner, Rabbi, puts this metaphor into to other persons mouths, so as not to be criticized by people like me for being an out-and-out wacko:

...This year I've been hearing a very different story from my rabbinic colleagues and from many Jews who are not part of any religious community.

...the wildly disproportionate response of the Israeli army that led to the killing of over 1,200 Gazans, hundreds of them children and women civilians, has shocked and dismayed many Jews whose identification with their Jewishness came primarily through their commitment to its ethical teachings. [so, in other words, they are not completely Jewish - either ethnically, nationally, religiously, just morally] Moreover, growing numbers of Jews in Israel and the rest of the world have become aware that the core of the problem lies in the way that Israel's creation in 1948 led to the expulsion from their homes of some 800,000 Palestinians. Some fled in anticipation of a quick destruction by invading armies of the newly formed Israeli state. But Israeli historians in the past two decades have documented that hundreds of thousands of those refugees left their homes because of a fear generated by Israeli terrorists [actually by Arab terrorists who killed Jews - and the Arabs, not being so dumb, sort of realized that something similar might be done to them] that Arab civilians would be targeted during the war [again, as if hundreds of Jewish civilians, weren't targeted by Arabs] or to escape a war zone as civilian have traditionally done during active hostilities...

...The recent election of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose central campaign promise was to never allow an independent Palestinian State, and the selection of Avigdor Lieberman, whose campaign was filled with racist attacks on Arab citizens of the State of Israel, as the new Israeli Foreign Minister, have pushed many American Jews to question how they can celebrate Passover with a full heart this year. As several congregants put it to me, "We Jews have become Pharaoh to the Palestinian people -- so we would be hypocrites to sit around our Passover table celebrating our own freedom, rejoicing at the way the Egyptians were stricken with plague and their first born killed, while ignoring what Israel is doing today in the name of the Jewish people."

They are not ignoring but ignorant as is Lerner for not correcting the wrong historical parable.


P.S. And she backs me up.

Lerner Needs A Tikkun

He has cancer:

...Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine, was recently diagnosed with lung cancer, he alerted his supporters in an e-mail message...that read “Bad news: I have cancer...Lerner, a 66-year-old nonsmoker, is battling what he described as a “relatively rare form of lung cancer” that his doctors believe is in an early stage. According to an NSP blog, a recent surgery was deemed successful, and a biopsy found no evidence that the cancer has spread.

Who Spoke Such Calumny?

These words were uttered by...?

the current apartheid must end, such as Palestinians forbidden from driving on paved roads reserved for Jews.

If you go here, you'll read this:

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine and co-chair for the Network of Spiritual Progressives, this week will publish a full-page ad in the New York Times [full text here] urging President-elect Barack Obama to call for a Gaza cease-fire now. The ad's headline will read, "President Obama: It’s Time to End the Violence in the Middle East — Once and For All. Convene an International Middle East Peace Conference. Impose a Final Settlement on All Parties."

Affirming that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have valid grievances against one another, Rabbi Lerner asserts that the United States Government has backed Israel so blatantly...

...the rabbi wants Obama to call for the major nations to insist upon an immediate and simultaneous cease fire. He has no patience for any more nonsense about which side has to stop its attacks first.

...Elements of this solution might include Israel returning to its 1967 borders in exchange for all the Arab nations recognizing the right of Israel to exist. Ideally, all residents of Israel would become citizens with full voting rights. The West Bank could become the new state of Palestine. The Jews who have settled there could return to Israel or stay, as they wish, but the current apartheid must end, such as Palestinians forbidden from driving on paved roads reserved for Jews...He just wants a practical solution that enacts the ethical and moral precepts of both Judaism and Islam, a solution that recognized the civil rights and social responsibilities of all parties.

...Rabbi Lerner disclosed plans for the New York Times full-page ad during a public talk this past Sunday in Boulder, Colorado. He reported on Tuesday that $60,000 had been raised to pay for the national ad, half of it from online donations of less than $25 each. He noted that more than 3,000 people from all walks of life had signed the ad.

As my veteran readers know, that canard of highway apartheid is not true. Just this morning, five PA-licensed vehicles pass the #148 bus I took to Jerusalem - on the same road that I travel. Just like everyday.

Rabbis can be so ignoble, so self-serving and so wrong, on purpose.


Anyone have $60,000 for an ad I'd wish to place in the NYTimes?


P.S.

Thursday morning, I got a lift, tremp in Englishized Hebrew, or Hebrish, and so managed to snap so pictures of my Arab neighbors driving past on the same road Jews use, all the way from Shiloh to the Hizma roadblock. The PA plates are on a white background with green lettering/numbers:

R' Lerner's Freudian Slip

The Saudi King was followed by the King of Spain who talked about tolerance as an old Spanish tradition, presumably referencing the period when Christians, Jews and Muslims lied in Spain in the 11-th to the 14th centuries.

Michael Lerner reporting on his visit with the King of Saudi Arabia.