Michael Lerner’s home vandalized!

Lerner’s own organization’s website has the scare headline:  “A Right-Wing Zionist Threat: Vandals Strike Tikkun Editor’s Home.” Leftist bloggers have been even less restrained.  The Zionists are violent thugs and hoodlums, Judeofascists, vandalizing the home of Tikkun’s editor and and threatening him.  The “attack” on Lerner’s house in the upscale Berkeley Hills was a direct consequence of criticism from Alan Dershowitz–more proof that foolishly allowing non-leftists to exercise freedom of speech results in violence and hooliganism!

So just what exactly happened?

Lerner, a leading collaborator in leftists’ wars against the Jews, is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.  He calls himself “Rabbi,” although he never graduated from any rabbinic seminary and has no rabbinic ordination recognized by any branch of Judiasm. His Tikkun Magazine, publishes every Jewish anti-Israel crackpot and crank on the planet and many a non-Jewish anti-Semite.  In recent weeks, Lerner made the news for organizing a petition of anti-Israel leftists to support Judge Richard Goldstone and even offered to grant him an award.  Goldstone had headed the UN commission that smeared Israel for “war crimes” when it was forced to go to war against Hamas to stop its rocket attacks.  Since issuing his libelous report, Goldstone has been shunned by the Jewish communities all over the world, including in his own native South Africa, where some members of a synagogue where Goldstone’s grandson was having a Bar Mitzvah declared him persona non grata.

At that point, Prof. Alan Dershowitz, who considers Goldstone an anti Semite, denounced Lerner for his toadying to the jurist and denounced the petition circulated by Lerner as coming from “Rabbis for Hamas”:

“They have no shame and no credibility. They exploit their rabbinical status to support any conclusion that undercuts self defense Israeli actions without regard to the evidence and without regard to the truth.  Not surprisingly, the worst of these rabbis (and that’s saying a lot), Michael Lerner, after attempting to politicize the bar mitzvah by offering his anti-Israel synagogue for the event, has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with Tikkun Magazine‘s ‘Ethics Award.’ I guess all it takes to be honored by Tikkun is to pass Lerner’s litmus test of lying about Israel. That’s Lerner’s definition of ‘ethics.’”

A few days ago, some anonymous people, evidently Jewish students at the University of California at Berkeley, paid a visit to Lerner’s home up in Berkeley Hills.  (Just how Lerner came up with the cash to live with the capitalist class in one of the ritziest locations in the Bay Area is something about which his magazine readers might be wondering.)  The visitors taped up four stickers or leaflets around his home   Here is the Tikkun version of the story:

“They posted a printed bumper sticker saying ‘fight terror — support Israel’” next to a caricature of Judge Goldstone whose UN report on Israel’s human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror by right wingers in Israel and the U.S.  The caricature has Goldstone talking about his being kept from his grandson’s bar mitzvah, and the caricature of Rabbi Lerner responds by saying ‘any enemy of Israel is a friend of mine.’”

Lerner of course called in the cops.  You know – those civil servants whom he used to refer to as The Pigs when he was a leader of the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), a 60s group which participated in numerous violent anti-war protests and riots along side the Black Student Union (BSU) and the ultra-violent  Weatherman terror group.  When the cops arrived they found a victimless non crime.  The leaflet hangers did not assault Lerner, and in fact never met or spoke with him.  They did  not so much as trample on the petunias in his yard.

But Lerner and his supporters are having trouble containing their rage.  The perps of the leaflet hangings are Zionist terrorists, thugs, vandals!  Some political observers in the Bay Area are expressing skepticism.  At least two local pro-Israel activists told me they suspect Lerner himself put up the leaflets in order to play martyr and get himself publicity.  Lerner has a track history of what might be called strategic misrepresentation when it comes to getting himself attention.  A few years back he got caught inventing pseudonymous imaginary letters to the editor printed in Tikkun Magazine agreeing with Lerner’s own writings there. (One wag claimed he should have signed them Ichael-May Erner-Lay.)

Lerner’s whining about being the victim of “Rightwing Zionist violence” is also a bit beyond hilarious.  Lerner himself has a long track record of organizing and participating in violence.  While he was in Seattle, Washington state attorney (and later Senator) Slade Gorton described the tactics of Lerner’s Liberation Front as “totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism.”   Lerner himself was one of the so-called “Seattle Seven,” charged in a federal trial with “conspiracy to incite a riot.”  He spent several months in prison.

In those days Lerner’s two passions, by his own admission, were LSD and Marxism.  Later he moved more into goofy pseudo-Jewish liberation theology and hatred of Israel.  He considers the rebirth of international anti-Semitism to be the fault of the Jews themselves for being so cussedly evil and racist.

He launched the bizarre magazine he called Tikkun in 1986 and has devoted it to radical politics, bashing Israel, and denouncing America, along with a monthly dollop of New Age touchy-feely recreational “compassion” and peace posturing.

Around the same time that he launched his magazine Lerner started telling people that he was an Orthodox Rabbi.  In fact he is neither a Rabbi nor Orthodox.   He says he was “ordained” when three hippy “rabbis,” one of whom claims in fact to be a Buddhist, put their hands on his head and proclaimed him rabbi.  A few years back I emailed him an inquiry as to whether he would submit to a small quiz of his knowledge of the Bible and the Talmud; he indignantly refused.  He claims his rabbinic status is recognized because he is a member of the California Board of Rabbis.  But membership in the Board does not mean anyone has acknowledged one’s rabbinic credentials as bona fide; it just means one pays annual dues.

While insisting that all he wants is peace and justice in the Middle East, Lerner’s prescription for achieving this is essentially the same as that of the Hamas.  He demands that Israel return to its 1949 borders, forego all forms of self-defense, and allow itself to be drowned by an influx of  Palestinian “refugees.”  Lerner has never seen an act of Arab terrorism that he does not rationalize, nor an act of Jewish self-defense he is willing to justify.  Lerner recently hosted Alice Walker on Yom Kippur, who devoted her talk to denouncing Israel for raping Arab women.

Besides Israel bashing, Lerner may be best known for sharing his “politics of meaning” (his nonsense term for disguising leftist politics under a thin veneer of theology) with a credulous Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady.  After 9-11 he demanded that Americans “feel the pain” of the al-Qaeda terrorists.  While claiming to be a rabbi he has also issued calls to “Smash the Synagogue.”   When Professor Edward Alexander from the University of Washington wrote an expose of Lerner, the latter sent threatening letters to numerous Jewish newspapers and magazines, warning they would be sued by him if they printed the piece.  Professor Alexander has described Lerner as “a kipah (skullcap)-wearing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely ‘rabbinic’ appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel and not the Arabs for the absence of peace, and to liken Israeli defense against Palestinian Arab violence to medieval Christian mobs . . . organizing pogroms against the whole Jewish community.”

A few years back Lerner demanded that all Jews devote their traditional Passover Seder to bemoaning the oppression of the Palestinians by the Zionist “Pharaoh.”  The same Palestinians used the occasion that year to murder 29 people at a Seder in Netanya, Israel.   He has long supported sanctions and boycotts against Israel to force it to capitulate to the Arabs.  He considers Arab terrorists to be the “New Maccabis,” and his writings are routinely carried by the publications and distribution lists of Islamic fundamentalists – the sorts of people who support car bombs in Times Square.

This is the man victimized by the merciless violent “terrorist vandalism attack” by Rightwing Zionist thugs against his home in Berkeley that spared even his petunias.

In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty’s death, I subsequently discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American left, the Democratic Party, Bay Area trade unions and even the Oakland business establishment. (The head of Clorox, Oakland’s largest company, for example, sat on the board of the Educational Opportunities Corp.)

On a far smaller scale, the Panther killings were an American version of the “Katyn massacre,” the infamous murder of Polish officers carried out on Stalin’s orders that the left had denied and kept hidden for decades, until the opening of the Soviet archives settled the “dispute” for good. It was much harder for me to understand why the Panthers should be able to get away with these murders in democratic America, and why the nation’s press should turn such a blind eye to a group that the nation’s law enforcement had made an object of its attentions.

Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that to this day not a single organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders, even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the entire liberal establishment, including the first lady and the deputy attorney general in charge of civil rights for the Clinton administration. Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the university and stop the trial of Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.

– Who Killed Betty Van Patter?

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So now that San Francisco is a Jihad-Free Zone, I guess all the airport security personnel will have to be laid off, eh? And the city probably would benefit from having fewer FBI and JTTF folks on the job. They will certainly be able to find jobs in the industries in the city that start to thrive as people flock there from areas that don't enjoy such assurances!

"San Francisco police chief apologizes for terrorism comments," from Bay City News Service, March 27:

San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon today apologized for remarks he made Thursday on the threat of terrorism that drew criticism from members of the city's Middle Eastern community.

Gascon spoke at a breakfast at San Francisco's Ferry Building before construction and trade groups, at which he discussed a $412 million June 8 bond measure to build a new police headquarters and implement other seismic upgrades citywide.

According to Gascon, he also discussed possible terrorist threats to the headquarters at the Hall of Justice as another reason to support the measure. He said he mentioned domestic terrorism but also the threat of international terrorism from Yemen and Afghanistan, and also noted significant populations from those countries residing in the Bay Area.

Today, his office issued a statement apologizing "to those in the Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim communities who were offended by his comments yesterday."

"Chief Gascon did not intend to upset the community and he is mindful of the importance of cultural sensitivity, not only here in San Francisco, but nationally," the statement read.

The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American Islamic Relations said today that it, along with other local Arab and Muslim groups, sent a letter to Gascon in which they expressed disappointment.

The organization said they have asked the police chief to meet with leaders from the Arab and Muslim community in San Francisco to talk about possible negative impacts of his comments.

In a sane world, they would be meeting with him to discuss ways in which they could cooperate openly and fully with anti-terror efforts. But this ain't a sane world by a long shot.

A breakfast to tout the importance of passing an earthquake-safety bond measure on the June ballot wound up sending shock waves through San Francisco's Arab American community after Police Chief George Gascón made controversial remarks about terrorism.

Gascón reportedly said the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St. is susceptible not just to an earthquake, but also to members of the city's Middle Eastern community parking a van in front of it and blowing it up.

The chief was addressing a crowd of about 150 City Hall officials and members of the building trades Wednesday and was one of several speakers discussing the $412 million bond to seismically retrofit a number of city buildings, including moving some Police Department functions out of the decrepit Hall of Justice and into a new Mission Bay facility.

Chief cites countries

Despite some reports to the contrary from those in attendance, Gascón on Thursday said he never referred to Middle Easterners or Arab Americans.

He said he instead singled out those from Yemen and Afghanistan as posing potential terrorism risks - especially in an iconic city like San Francisco with large numbers of residents from those countries. He admitted to saying they could park a van in front of the Hall of Justice and blow it up.

"There was no need to single out the two countries, and I recognize that, but it's not because it was not accurate," he said. "The reality is this is the area where we're seeing most of the international terrorism coming from. ... I think certainly in this case, people are reading too much into it."

He gave no specific examples of threats to San Francisco, but did point to the attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound airplane by a man allegedly trained by an al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen.

Apology expected

Ali Altaha, a member of the Arab American Chamber of Commerce who owns a small engineering firm in the city and was at the breakfast at the Ferry Building's MarketBar, said the chief should be fired.

"He basically said there's a large Arab American community in the Bay Area, a lot of Muslims, and because of terrorism, they need to be very careful," Altaha recalled. "It was very degrading, very inappropriate for a city official to make comments in this manner. ... I felt he was trying to sell terrorism as a commodity to justify his position or funding for his department."

Altaha, who moved from his native Iraq 30 years ago, said he tried to speak with the chief outside afterward.

"I was expecting him to make an apology," Altaha said, noting that didn't happen. "He was very aggressive and very cocky about it."

Mayor Gavin Newsom wasn't at the breakfast, but learned of Gascón's remarks and phoned Altaha on Wednesday.

"He apologized on behalf of his administration," Altaha said. "I told him we don't have a problem with the mayor's office, but clearly this guy needs to be put in check."...

Clearly!

“You’d be surprised how many conservative talk show fans there are here in the Deep Blue Hot Tub,” writes SFGate politics blogger Joe Garofoli.

I know I was. I still can’t believe Michael Savage lives and works in San Francisco, for one thing.

Now a shakeup at KSFO has Bay Area listeners wondering: was veteran morning host Lee Rodgers unceremoniously fired after pressure from “ultra-left and pro-Muslim groups?”

That’s what Rodgers claims. In an open letter to fans, he said:

I was seriously considering retirement at the end of my contract in early July, and I certainly wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye.  Instead, within one minute of the conclusion of last Thursday’s show, I got the word that it HAD been my last one; cut with no notice, in violation of my contract. (…)

I WILL tell you, in all candor, that thanks to [CEO Farid] Suleman’s Citadel management, I could no longer proudly say that the company had never told me what to say or what not to say.  There was an obvious cave-in to some ultra-left and pro-Muslim groups, making it unlikely that I would have ever renewed my contract with the company, anyway.

Getting fired, sometimes abruptly, is a way of life for talk radio hosts, especially when they venture into “politically incorrect” territory. In Lee Rodgers’ case, he made Media Matters‘ “Most Outrageous Comments of 2009″ list for saying that, should a terrorist attack occur, a “few million dead Americans” will “wake up” public “to the fact that they have elected an anti-American President.”

Rodgers also earned the wrath of the George Soros Steno Pool for calling Obama “the most corrupt” president in history, and an “incompetent, Muslim-sympathizing fool.”

So did these and other controversial outbursts really get Lee Rodgers’ fired? If so, why would KSFO replace him with someone like Brian Sussman, who promises to “give the Left a major headache” by spending “four hours daily on one of America’s most successful radio stations to expose” the “shenanigans” of “global warming, government tyranny [and] fiscal insanity.”

Speaking of which: Citadel — the nation’s third largest radio broadcaster — has troubles of its own, having filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December. Like Rodgers, broadcasting industry watcher Brian Maloney has nothing good to say about Citadel CEO Farid Suleman, who he says has “overseen the complete destruction of this once-promising company”:

Under Suleman’s rule, the company’s left-wing political bias became so unbearable that it convinced Sean Hannity to move his program to another syndicator.

Just last month, Citadel admitted that the loss of [#2 rated] Hannity caused it to lose millions in desperately-needed revenue.

So here’s where we stand:

Progressives and/or radical Muslims have tried, and failed, to take down big name talkers like Glenn Beck, Dr. Laura, Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh. Assuming Rodgers is being candid about why he was fired, are AstroTurf activists now setting their sights on more vulnerable local conservative pundits?

While monitoring threats to talk radio coming from “above,” (such as FCC “localism”), we need to watch for leftist AstroTurf campaigns, and worry about implosions caused by ideological incompetence — from within the industry itself.

I guess the price of liberty (and conservative talk radio) really is eternal vigilance.

Being a leftist Anti-Zionist means not only never having to say you are sorry, such as when you get your facts all wrong.  It also means that you have an obligation to represent yourself as a victim of harassment.   Armchair martyrdom is as fundamental a part of leftist ideology as anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel.

In his now-famous essay from July, 1976, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote about how desperately American academics wish to feel persecuted.  A pretense of being persecuted today seems to do wonders both for their ego and for their web traffic.  The entire “Zionist Lobby” is largely an invention by these same people, anxious to show that they are being oppressed by an evil nefarious conspiracy.  You just need to wave your stigmata and denounce the “Neo-Conservatives,” the “Rightwing McCarthyists,” and – of course the Jews.  Whining about being persecuted seems to be the leading participation sport of today’s far Leftists and the radical armchair postureurs.

As documented recently on this web site, Joel Beinin, the Israel-hating pro-Hamas sometimes-Maoist professor of Middle East Studies at Stanford University is just such a persecution whiner.  Here is what we wrote:

‘“McCarthyism” seems to be Beinin’s third favorite “m” word, after Marxism and Mao, and he applies it liberally to anyone who dares to criticize him. Beinin wrote a 2004 article called “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In it, Beinin denounced the Ford Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel.’

Beinin went on to declare that Bay Area Zionists silenced him and prevented him from giving a talk to a school in San Jose.  The San Francisco Chronicle checked and reported that no one at all from the local Jewish Community had even spoken with anyone at that school.

Well, the good professor is back.  Over the Thanksgiving weekend he widely circulated the following epistle, which we reprint for you here in full, spelling errors and all:

26 November 2009

I arrived in Israel at about 15:00 on Wednesday, 25 November afternoon to visit my mother, brother, and sister who are Israeli (and US) citizens resident in Israel since 1973.  My mother has been ill, and this visit was prompted primarily for that reason. I have visited Israel dozens of times before – most recently December 2008 – and resided in the country for extended periods on several different occasions.  Yesterday, for the first time since my first visit to Israel in 1965, I was detained without explanation at Ben-Gurion airport for nearly two hours and ultimately interrogated.  The questioners asked questions that they surely already knew the answers to.  The asked, for example, my profession and my email.  My position as Donald J. McLaughlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and my email are a matter of public record, easily obtainable from the website of Stanford’s Department of History.  The questioners also asked whether I had travelled (sic) to “other countries in the region” which, since they had my passport in their hands for the better part of two hours with all the relevant visa stamps, was also not obscure information.  My luggage was not searched nor was I asked any question remotely related to the security of Israel except whether I had traveled (sic) to Iran (I was there once, for two weeks, in 1970 when Israel had warm relations with the Shah’s regime).

It therefore appears that this “investigation” had no purpose other than to harass and intimidate me.

Upon leaving I was told that I would be contacted further by one “Amos” from the Ministry of Defense.  For my convenience, I was given his phone number: 054-*******.

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History
Professor of Middle East History
Joel Beinin
Contact in Israel: 054-565-2320

The main reports about the horrific suffering by Beinin at the hands of the security personnel at Israel’s airport have been on web sites run by Israel’s own predominantly-Arab Stalinist communist party and on one of its front groups named “The Left Bank.”

Now the above Beinin hysterics about being “intimidated” need a dose of deconstruction.  Beinin routinely travels to countries that happen to be at war with Israel, and has visited Iran, which happens to be officially on record as calling for the annihilation of Israel and its population.  By his own admission, Beinin’s passport is bristling with visas from such countries.  One would expect even the sleepiest airport passport inspector at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to sit up and take notice of someone coming into the country with such visas.  Most passport inspectors at Tel Aviv airport, by the way, are teenage girls.  So you can imagine the terror and intimation experienced there by the poor professor.

Now Beinin’s insistence that the airport security staff must have known who he is rings a bit curious.  I did a search of the Hebrew web, and – sure enough – there are some internet mentions of him in Hebrew, but almost all of those are on the web sites of communist party and its fronts, which the airport inspectors may not visit on a regular basis.  There are two mentions of Beinin’s getting sued by Los Angeles journalist Rachel Neuwirth for his posting false smears about her.

What about Beinin’s claim that being questioned about his travels in belligerent countries constitutes “harassment” and “intimidation?”   (We have only his word that the questioning took two hours, and no mention at all of his being offered cookies and tea; I have waited in that airport for longer just to get a guitar case out of the belly of a plane!)   Well, an acquaintance of mine named Julia is an Israeli Jew born in Libya, a fact noted on her Israeli passport, and you would not believe the hassle she goes through every time she wants to come to the United States for a visit!  My wife was questioned at length and searched at Tokyo airport after 9-11 because her passport says she was born in the Middle East.

More to the point, Joel Beinin is an anti-Israel hate propagandist, someone who has made a career out of rationalizing anti-Jewish terrorism and endorsing Arab demands for Israel’s annihilation.  Other countries routinely bar hostile propagandists for far less provocation.  Canada banned ultra-leftist and Saddam’s agent George Galloway from entering, and also banned some other radicals.  Canada also banned a controversial rap group from entering.  The US banned Tariq Ramadan due to his terrorist connections.  It has banned others for security reasons, including Cat Stevens, the British author Sebastian Horsley, a pro-LSD Canadian psychologist, and at least one Israeli.  The UK banned radio host Michael Savage (along with 15 other people) for being insensitive to Moslems, and tried to ban Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  Egypt has barred Hamas members from entering.  The Ukraine banned the mayor of Moscow from entering the country because of things he said.

Now as it turns out, Israel almost never prevents anti-Israel propagandists and anti-Semitic hate-mongers from entering the country.  For example, it rather stupidly allows lots of “anarchists” from the “International Solidarity Movement” and similar pro-terror groups to enter the country and then to attack its policemen and soldiers as their attempt to help Palestinian terrorists.  The only two anti-Israel propagandists of note who have been barred from entering Israel in recent years were: 1.  Norman Finkelstein, a Neo-Nazi who was fired by DePaul University and who was barred from entering Israel due to his intimate ties with the Hezb’Allah, and 2. Richard Falk, the anti-Semitic retired professor from Princeton who was barred from entering Israel as head of an anti-Israel UN propaganda “commission.”  (When Falk arrived earlier as a private person to give university lectures, he was admitted.)

Anti-Israel fanatics, like Noam Chomsky and the Swedish journalist who recently invented a medieval blood libel about Jews stealing the body parts of Palestinians, have been admitted to Israel freely, although they never would be if I had anything to say about it.  Even Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose nasty diatribe, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, has become the Koran for Israel-bashers and Jew-haters around the world, were welcomed in Israel for a speaking tour.

It goes without saying that Beinin has never expressed any criticism of the fact that Israelis are prohibited altogether from entering Iran and most Arab countries.  Some of those countries prohibit entry to Jews from anywhere.  In Saudi Arabia you will get expelled and beaten to a pulp if you have a Hanukka Menorah or a Christmas tree.

Of course the greatest irony in all of this is that Beinin was not banned from Israel at all, in spite of being a fanatical pro-terror anti-Israel propagandist.   He was simply interviewed by an alert young passport inspector, suspicious of all those visas in Beinin’s passport from countries seeking Israel’s annihilation.  For Beinin, however, the incident was a priceless opportunity to wave his stigmata and show the world what a persecuted martyr and victim he is.  His questioning in the airport proves he is being intimidated and harassed by them damned Zionists!