[PhillipHer]

http://njdc.org/search/detail.php?id=483

From news article:


One of America's top Jewish leaders recently noted that the far-right is trying to "'Christianize' all aspects of American life."

How did one of these ultra-conservative leaders respond? By threatening to withdraw support for Israel.


Tom Minnery, one of the top leaders of Focus on the Family, responded with a not-too-veiled threat to pull support for Israel. The Forward reports, "Noting that the evangelical groups Foxman cited are staunch supporters of Israel, Minnery told the Forward, 'If you keep bullying your friends, pretty soon you won't have any.'"

[PhillipHer]

From one link

From news article:
Some Jewish groups welcomed Foxman's call.
Phyllis Snyder, president of the National Council of Jewish Women — which has opposed both of Bush's Supreme Court picks on pro-choice grounds — said her group was planning a daylong symposium on religion and state for March 2006. "We're very cognizant that the radical right has brought forth initiatives that don't allow minorities to have all rights," she said.

The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, said he would likely attend any parley Foxman convened, but he urged caution.

"I'm fundamentally sympathetic to the concerns, many of which we have raised," he said, "but we have to avoid apocalyptic language and... giving the impression that we are subjected to immediate danger to our well-being. America is big, diverse. Some of these people are our potential allies. We don't want to be perceived as attacking religious people."

Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said that Foxman had "put his finger on the problem" but "sometimes overacts."

"I'm always amenable to discussing, but I'd want to see the nature of the effort," Epstein said.

[doctorzlo]

Oh please, you're 85% of the population. Stop signing on to the Bill O'Reilly paranoid issue de jour. It's made up. Even Fox news sells 'Holiday' Ornaments. It's a made up issue. We have creches on public property where I live and no one's declared we throw Christians to the lions.

[LottiFurmann]

Leftists are Islamists in disguise.

No, not really.

[Drugmachine]

Since when did protecting abortion become synonymous with being Jewish anyway?

Since if you ask people and survey them that's more or less what they believe in the majority or something quite close to it. I really don't know anyone, even in
Chabad who would support for example an erosion of the separation of church and state. We're, most of us realistic enough to understand what that would mean. Even in the small things - do you honestly believe these folks worry too much about erecting a menorah on public property or is it just another instance of 'let's show how tolerant we are by including some Jews'. I don't know about you but I'm not wanting to be their house-nigger.

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

In America maybe, but not in the U.K, Canada (where I live), Europe.
Why is America different? Guess why?

Oh I dunno - because we have an aggressive separation of church and state? At least right now we do. Hey isn't Margaret Attwood Canadian? check out The Handmade's Tale for her view of it.

[Peptobismol]

This may be a good time for me to expose the five slanderous lies surrounding America’s most misunderstood movement:

1) The Christian Right wishes to impose a theocracy on America.

A hint for those of you out there planning on imposing a theocracy: In order to succeed, you would first need to subvert the entire United States Constitution. A word to the rest of you worried about a theocracy—if the Constitution goes, you have far bigger problems than a theocracy.

Who really does have a record of forcing their values down the throats of everyone else? Over the past forty years life in America has been made indescribably more squalid, expensive, and dangerous. Mocking moral standards and vulgarizing the culture has brought to any teenager’s ears the throbbing rhythms and hideously violent lyrics that would have brought a blush to the face of a convict in 1960. Back then, a family lived an enviable middle-class lifestyle on one salary. Today, high taxes, regulatory costs, and feminist propaganda have forced mothers into the workplace. Abolishing the Biblical idea of people being capable of evil, crime is now understood in terms of social problems. The result is a sharply diminished sense of safety and security. Forget city parks at night; we worry about children surviving a day at the local public school with its metal detectors and ludicrously unarmed guards. So who has more successfully forced its values down our throats? I think the record speaks for itself.

For Christian leaders to encourage conservative Americans of faith to vote for like-minded candidates is of course no different from Jewish leaders ardently having encouraged all Jews to vote for the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000 because “Joe is a Jew.” Secularism is as much a belief system as is Christianity and secularists who work to elect secularists shouldn’t complain when Christians try to elect Christians to public office. There is a good old-fashioned word for this activity and it is not theocracy. It is—democracy. Every group in America practices it. Christians should be able to do so too without being demonized by a Jewish organization.

2) The Christian right believes all who disagree with them are going to hell.

Even if some believe this, so what? Does our Constitution guarantee freedom of belief only to secularists? I am always amused by those who are most indignant that some Christians have this belief but are themselves secularists who firmly announce their disbelief in heaven or hell in the first place. Why should they care if someone else believes they are going somewhere they don’t believe exists? Go figure.

For me personally, it bothers me not at all that many of my Christian friends believe I am headed to hell. Frankly I am deeply grateful to be living among such wonderful Christian neighbors who do absolutely nothing to accelerate my arrival there. Does the phrase “Spanish Inquisition” mean anything to you?

For most Christians I know, it is not so much a belief as it is a genuine concern for my spiritual future. I appreciate that concern amidst ongoing friendship and generosity to me though I remain a firmly committed Orthodox Jew. It was not always so for Jews in other countries during the past two thousand years.

Israel’s safety belt is undoubtedly America’s Bible belt and I am sure that America has provided history’s safest and longest lasting haven for Jews, not in spite of, but precisely because of her deep Christian conviction.

Christian belief, no matter how difficult for non-Christians to accept, poses no threat to anyone. On the contrary, it has turned out to be the source of blessing for all who cherish the freedom and tranquility of the United States of America. The same George Washington who wrote “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants” was a George Washington who was a deeply religious and very conservative Christian.

One way for the descendants of Abraham to merit the goodwill of our Christian neighbors would be to stop Jewish organizations from endlessly insulting and attacking our friends.

3) Christian conservatives are anti-Semitic and racist.

This might be a good opportunity for me to point out the sheer evil of accusing someone of an undefined crime. You see, with no definition of the crime, it is impossible for the accused to defend himself. Think about it for a moment….do you know the definition of anti-Semitism? See, it isn’t so simple. Is it hurting Jews or their property? That doesn’t need the term anti-Semitism—it is already a crime called assault or vandalism. And in any event, is that really what they are accusing Christian conservatives of doing? I think not.

Does ant-Semitism mean harboring a dislike for Jews in one’s heart? Do we really want to criminalize thought? What about the old liberal disdain for “thought police?”

I do believe it might be time already for some Jewish leaders to abandon their Sharpton-tactics and graciously shelve the term anti-Semitism. It has become nothing but a bludgeon to silence dissent and cause resentment. When Jewish leaders accuse good and decent Christians of anti-Semitism because they oppose wholesale abortion and homosexual marriage, it is more of an indictment of the Jews hurling the epithet than it is of the victims.

The problem is that many Jews, having abandoned the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, have embraced the alternative faith of secular liberalism. In do doing, they adopt the misleading equation that Judaism=Liberalism. Believing that the values of Judaism have nothing to do with the clearly expressed wishes of God in the Torah, they mistakenly assume that the values of Judaism are congruent with those of secular liberalism. Thus anyone who loathes the values of secular liberalism surely must hate the values of Judaism since they are the same. Therefore, any conservative is, by definition, an anti-Semite.

It thus becomes the holy duty of organizations like the ADL, originally formed to fight bigotry and anti-Semitism, to fight religious conservatives. This is tiresome, anachronistic, and just plain wrong. This is an error with potentially tragic consequences and it should stop.

I can only tell you that I regularly deliver speeches to audiences, often of thousands, for the very organizations listed by the ADL in its latest anti-Christian diatribe. I do so as an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and on the dais I wear the same black yarmulke I wore during my Torah studies in yeshiva. I talk of the same Biblical values I was taught in that yeshiva. After the speech I frequently enjoy a dinner brought by the organizers with considerable trouble and expense from a kosher restaurant, often from another city. I am received with enthusiasm and genuine warmth. If this be anti-Semitism, my grandfather in Europe would surely have welcomed it.

Oh, did I mention that many of the pastors making up the Christian Right are themselves black Americans? Of course, to many of the racial demagogues on the Secular Left, any black who becomes a conservative has renounced his blackness. I am accustomed to this because a representative of the Jewish Federation of a large west coast city recently told a friend of mine that “Rabbi Lapin isn’t a real Jew because he is friends with those Christians.” I estimate that at least ten percent of most every audience I address is African American. The charge that the Christian Right is racist is made exclusively by people whose antagonism is exceeded only by their ignorance.

4) Christian conservatives are poor, uneducated, and easy to command.

This allegation was first made by Washington Post journalist Michael Weisskopf in a front page story on February 1st, 1993. In reality, average annual income for Christian conservatives is well above the national average. Furthermore, the average net worth of conservative Christian families rockets ahead of the national average especially when corrected for age and income. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because the values of thrift and industry that build net worth are among the values encouraged by Biblical faith. Finally, the bountiful generosity in the form of charitable donations made by America’s religious conservatives in any year exceeds the gross domestic product of many nation members of the United Nations.

Most of the nation’s hundreds of Christian colleges, with their rigorous academic standards, routinely outperform state universities. Christian home schoolers win the national spelling bees year after year. In a 2003 article entitled God on the Quad, the Boston Globe described how well Christian Evangelical students are doing on New England’s liberal elite university campuses.

As for easy to command, well Evangelical judicial nominee Harriet Miers was forced to withdraw her nomination precisely because America’s religious conservatives are not easy to command.