{"id":2146,"date":"2007-06-29T22:45:45","date_gmt":"2007-06-30T03:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2146"},"modified":"2008-07-29T14:20:11","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T19:20:11","slug":"rachael-kamels-response-to-michael-lerners-june-16-current-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2146","title":{"rendered":"Rachael Kamel’s response to Michael Lerner’s June 16 “Current Thinking”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Lerner’s post on the current situation in Gaza cannot be found on line in its original from at this point: As a result of criticism (such as the one below), he has retracted his statements, and the essay, to be found on [LINK<\/a>] ends with the retraction\/apology.<\/p>\n

I appreciate the fact that Lerner is able to apologize – not an easy thing, I’m sure. I’m also VERY troubled by what he had written to begin with. It’s so blatantly racist, that it’s hard to imagine why rabbi Lerner needed this pointed out to him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Racheli Gai, New Profile<\/em>, 29 June 2007<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yesterday’s “Current Thinking” commentary<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was shocked and disappointed to see this sentence in a posting yesterday by Tikkun editor Michael Lerner :<\/p>\n

even when Jews were forced to live under real starvation conditions and wild-overcrowding in the ghettoes of Nazi Germany and then the concentration camps, they did not take up systematic violence against each other. There is something in the culture of the Palestinians, or of the Arab world, or of the Muslim world (you tell me which, I’m not sure) that is too tolerant of violence, and too willing to excuse it, whether it be in the disgusting violence of Sunnis vs. Shias that took place in the Iraq\/Iran war and in the current civil war in Iraq, in Lebanon, and now the struggle in Palestine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps the greatest irony is that this statement is embedded in an article that purports to offer a hard-headed analysis of the current Gaza crisis … including the role of Israeli authorities over the years in financing Hamas, as well as the “slow starvation of the Palestinian population.” (Which, presumably, does not quite rise to the level of the “real” starvation inflicted on the Jews.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Lerner comments that he finds it “morally troubling” that U.S. supporters of Palestinian human rights can’t “face up” to what he kindly explains are the moral deficiencies of Palestinians — or perhaps all Arabs, or Muslims, adding “(you tell me which, I’m not sure)” – which he kindly explains by contrast to the moral superiority of Jews, in the passage quoted above.<\/p>\n

Of course, Lerner is not quite hard-headed enough to include in his commentary that his own government has been arming Fatah and encouraging them to launch a civil war against Hamas … a military bid that ended in a rout, precipitating the current crisis. (Would it have reflected better on the moral sensitivity of Palestinians if Fatah had been successful in doing the U.S. bidding?)<\/p>\n

I’m not sure how Lerner’s moral compass allowed him to miss that point, since, like me, as a tax-paying U.S. citizen, he is helping to bankroll the vast majority of the bloodshed in the Middle East – Israeli against Palestinian, Palestinian against Palestinian, Iraqi against Iraqi, not to mention direct U.S. military action. But I digress …<\/p>\n

Let me see if I can understand this: we Jews occupy the moral high ground because we “did not take up systematic violence against each other” even when we were faced with the Nazis. (I guess Lerner has not read up on the capos<\/em>, collaborators, and judenrat<\/em> bodies who helped the Nazis administer their policies more efficiently.)<\/p>\n

If I’m understanding this right, this would set we Jews apart from, say, the Nicaraguans, since the 1980s-era contras<\/em> killed any number of their countrymen (who were also their co-ethnics and co-religionists) in several years of civil war … So does the Jewish claim to moral superiority also extend to Catholics (or Nicaraguans – or Latinos – you tell me which, I’m not sure)? Or does it only apply to Arabs?<\/p>\n

What Lerner finds most troubling is the failure of Palestinian-American activist Ali Abunimah, who he singles out for particular mention, to speak to the moral deficiencies of his “kind.” For some inexplicable reason, Abunimah, who appeared Friday on Democracy Now, focuses single-mindedly on the structural and policy dimensions of the current crisis – even pointing out that Elliot Abrams, the architect of the original contra<\/em> war, is back in the picture, coordinating Palestine’s new contra<\/em> war. Of course, that’s what interviewer Amy Goodman asked him to comment on, but that’s no real excuse.<\/p>\n

Much to Lerner’s sorrow, Abunimah failed to mention that Palestinians who pick up guns are acting immorally. Instead he makes statements like this (from the June 15 Democracy Now transcript):<\/p>\n

In 2006 Israel killed 700 Palestinians, half of whom were civilians, and 141 of whom were children. In the same period Palestinians killed 23 Israelis. And the world is demanding that Palestinians renounce violence? It’s time to start treating the Palestinians fairly and end this dirty war that the United States and Israel are waging against the Palestinians just as the United States and Elliott Abrams waged such a dirty war for so long against people in central America.<\/p>\n

Lerner’s claim to the high ground?<\/p>\n

We at Tikkun who have always been critical of those distortions in the Jewish world that have allowed Jews to deny the realities of the horrible oppression visited on the Palestinian people by Israel … we who have consistently criticized the war ethics that have allowed Christians to fight Christians for centuries, have a right to ask Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians to be similarly PUBLICLY critical of those elements in their own culture that have led to such distortions in their world.<\/p>\n

I’m still confused, though (much like Lerner), as to whether we’re doling out the moral responsibility according to ethnicity, religion, or nationality. (You tell me, I don’t know.)<\/p>\n

Isn’t Lerner an American who is failing to mention American culpability in the Gaza crisis? (Or does being a Jew get him off the hook?)<\/p>\n

Isn’t Lerner a believer in the humanistic values of the modern era, who would never stoop to holding one member of a group responsible for all the misdeeds committed by any member of that group?<\/p>\n

Or who would never ask a member of a minority group to apologize for anything he doesn’t like that other members of the group have done?<\/p>\n

I guess not.<\/p>\n

Help me out here, Michael. Can you send me a list of all the Jews you have PUBLICLY denounced on the radio (maybe just this year, I have a lot to do) … now that we understand that this is the new standard of moral responsibility?<\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\nRachael Kamel
\nPhiladelphia<\/p>\n

Michael Lerner’s retraction:<\/p>\n

But telling the truth requires a self-criticism. In an earlier version of the analysis above which was mailed to people on our email lists, I, Rabbi Michael Lerner, included in my editorial introduction a comparison with the way that Jews during the Holocaust had not turned upon each other under far worse conditions than the Palestinians face today. I was rightly criticized for that remark, and have removed it from this version above, for two reasons: a. because it seemed to suggest a moral superiority of Jews over others which I did not mean to imply and which I do not actually believe to be true, at least in any essentialist sense–Jews may under certain circumstances act in a more moral way than others, but as their behavior in the West Bank makes clear, they act in as immoral a way as anyone else under other circumstances; and b. Some individual Jews acted as collaborators with the Nazis, others acted with extremes of self-interest in trying to survive that involved betraying other Jews or acting with cruelty toward them, and in general Jews, like others, exhibited a wide range of different kinds of behavior from heroic and saintly to hurtfully or immorally, and the generalizations make little sense. What I was thinking when I wrote that, but didn’t make clear, is that no official Jewish institution ever ordered Jews to attack fellow Jews. But that point itself was wrong for two reasons: c. Zionists did attack other Zionists in 1948 when revisionist Zionists sought to bring arms into Palestine for the purpose of carrying on their war of terror against Palestinians to drive Palestinians out of their homes, and David Ben Gurion ordered the nascent Israeli army to sink the ship that was carrying those weapons and d. There is no clear evidence that the actions of either Hamas or Fatah were in fact ordered by their higher leadership, and some evidence that at least some of the actions that took place were done without the intention of either the top leadership of Hamas or of Fatah. So, I apologize for having made that statement, which others have subsequently criticized, I think rightly, as racist or potentially racist.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rabbi Michael Lerner Editor, Tikkun
\nRabbiLerner@tikkun.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Lerner’s post on the current situation in Gaza cannot be found on line in its original from at this point: As a result of criticism (such as the one below), he has retracted his statements, and the essay, to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-yC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3426,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions\/3426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}