It’s not too often we find people in support of dear Yeezus, the self-proclaimed “God” of hip-hop. Leave it to Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam to defend the rapper and his alleged anti-Semitic comments made about President Obama’s “weak” global connections.

During Farrakhan’s weekly “Time and What Must be Done Series” the minister offered his two cents on Kanye West’s bold comment: “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people. Black people don’t have the same connections as oil people.”

Here are the highlights from the minister’s lofty sermon on Abe Foxman’s press release, which requested an official Kanye apology:

“Did he (Kanye) lie? No he told the truth,” at the 25 second mark.

(About Jews) “You’re not all powerful, but you certainly are powerful, and you control the levels of government. You don’t want to admit it,” at the 1 minute mark.

“Kanye West, don’t bow to the pressure to apologize to anybody. You said nothing wrong. I am directly from the christ and the messiah, so what I tell you has more weight than anything that these enemies might want to say,” at the 2 minute mark.

If he wasn’t before, it looks like Minister Farrakhan is now president of the Kanye West fan club. He calls for Yeezus to stand firm on his overreaching comments, and it’s highly doubtful that the filter-less West will break from his beliefs.

But what can we say? Just another day in the life of a God.

(Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images For BET)

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The New York Post reported this morning that disgraced designer John Galliano, who recently entered ADL-sanctioned sartorial rehab at Oscar de la Renta’s famed fashion house, was spotted during fashion week dressed suspiciously like a Hasidic man—peyos, black hat and all.

I’m apparently not the only one who thought his outfit seemed more deranged Willy Wonka than pious Hasid. The ADL stepped in, calling the Post story a “a ridiculous, absurd distortion.” According to ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman:

There is no truth to their accusation that John Galliano was dressed in Hasidic garb, and anyone familiar with the dress of traditional Orthodox Jews should not mistake what Galliano is wearing in the photograph as “Hasidic garb.” Hasidim do not wear fedora hats, pinstripe pants, blue jackets or an ascot tie.

“He has spent hours with me and with others in the European Jewish community, including rabbis and Holocaust scholars, in an effort to better understand himself and to learn from his past mistakes. He is trying very hard to atone,” Foxman added.

Abe Foxman, John Galliano’s biggest fan?

Jew-bash designer Galliano’s costume mocks faithful [NYP] Resignation Over John Galliano [The Scroll] A Plea on Behalf of John Galliano [The Scroll]

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The post ADL Defends John Galliano From New York Post’s ‘Hasidic Garb’ Accusation appeared first on Jewcy.

Will conservatives, liberals, moderates and everybody else finally wake up and agree that Glenn Beck is a dangerous idiot who really needs to just go away after his attacks on billionaire George Soros?  The Fox News commentators 2 night sludge slinging should have been titled “Rupert Murdoch Presents: The 2010 Edition of The Protocols of The Elders of Zion” for the “puppet master” accusations leveled against Soros, and in my opinion, Beck should be run out of town for his repulsive suggestion that as a child, Soros sent fellow Jews to the death camps.

But don’t just take my word for it.  Here’s a handy little roundup:

• Abe Foxman FINALLY takes Beck to task.

• At The Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg’s take on the matter is a critical read.

• At Tablet, Marc Tracy surveys the situation, and the comments that follow him are worth reading.

• Steve Clemons at The Faster Times: “I learned a long time ago that when someone is so compulsively committed to tearing someone down, to bullying them, to spending every moment obsessed with them that it often exposes one’s own views of himself.”

• From The Jewish Week: “Fox news commentator Glenn Beck may have thought he had an easy target in the controversial financier George Soros – but he didn’t reckon with Jews who care about Holocaust remembrance and don’t take kindly to reckless charges being thrown into the political maelstrom.”

The post The World Reacts To Glenn Beck’s Comments On George Soros appeared first on Jewcy.

• Money-grubbing crooks only out for their own kind.

• Judases willing to betray their own for a quick buck.

• An alliance more threatening than the Freemasons and more enmeshed in society than that secret society.

• Big nosed, free air swilling, free pork pondering, copper wire inventing, wandering the desert for 40 years looking for a quarter someone dropped, rich, cheap, greedy, controlling, dishonest shysters.

At best these are harmless playground taunts, the standard go to insult hurled by those who have no idea where these stereotypes originated. At their worst they’ve been the rationale for shifting the blame of faltering economies and civil unrest. One need look no further than Weimar-era Germany to see how that story played out.

Throughout history Jews have been pushed to the fringes and relegated to certain trades either by religious decree–someone else’s religious decree mind you–or by virtue of no one else wanting to do the dirty work. The business of money has tended to be that profession. Stick with something for long enough and you’ll develop an acumen. But nobody likes shelling out a cut for the taxman and when the business of money is your stock in trade you’re bound to be maligned; the shylock coming to collect you’re figurative pound of flesh; an economic scourge

In the new book Jews & Money: The Story of a Stereotype (Palgrave-Macmillan) Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, traces the roots of society’s long-held attitudes towards the aforementioned subjects and seeks to determine who and what drives them and what can be done to reverse certain negative sentiments. At its best we get a praiseworthy history of society’s contempt towards Jews and their money, one that stretches from the ancient biblical temple moneychangers through Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and on up through the 20th and 21st centuries. At its worst Foxman’s pointed attacks rely too heavily on assumptions and inferences drawn from the three main tenets of anti-semitism—deicide, disloyalty to anyone but themselves, and a penchant for manipulating the world around them through financial means—attacks that fall flat, especially in light of recent events.

To be fair, the finger wagging goes every which way: towards conspiracy theorists who posit Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke are pulling the strings of finance for the benefit of world Jewery; towards fringe groups to the far left and far right; towards mainstream media and their perceived biases–Matt Taibbi in particular is taken to task for his 2009 assault on Goldman Sachs and, Foxman insinuates, the Jews who run it as a “blood-funneling and money-sniffing vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”; towards comedians like Woody Allen, Sasha Baron Cohen, and Fran Drescher (though Drescher should be held accountable for the atrocities her sitcom The Nanny wrought on the television viewing public); towards the gonif Bernie Madoff.

Madoff was a crook and the truth about fantastic conspiracies is that they don’t really exist and in normal times that would be all well and good but these aren’t normal times we live in.

The unrest from insurgent factions on the far right has created a volatile political climate. In 2008 the bottom fell out on the speculative housing market. Credit lines tightened in markets across the globe. Thousands of jobs evaporated over the next few months. Iceland fell apart. Greece is still a teetering column. The last days of the Bush administration and much of the current one saw the U.S. government extend unprecedented bailout loans to Wall Street firms. Deep seeds of resentment have given rise to the Tea Party. Though Foxman pays America’s newest political party a nod as “one to watch” whether deliberately or not he completely overlooks the eventual threat this group, whose lightning rod moment was the government bailouts to big Wall Street firms, poses to the Jews.

Let us consider for a second the modern Jew in business who shares only the vaguest connection with their old world and biblical ancestors. They are the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of the wave of Jews that fled to America to escape pogroms. They came to America with nothing and instilled a work ethic to move out off the ghettos of the Lower East Side (where coincidentally some have now returned to and resettled though at a much inflated cost). They have their elaborate coming of age rituals—the ones that include a kiddush luncheon with the honoree’s name is spelled out in giant block letters of cream cheese, hardly what the great tzadikim had in mind.

And anyone who has done a turn on the bar and bat mitzvah circuit will tell you that the ostentatious cocktail parties that have become a rite of passage for large swaths of conservative and reform Jews in America serve a distinct purpose: they are a finishing school for the future moneyed class; a year and a half long immersion course where tomorrow’s doctors, attorneys, and Wall Street hot shots learn how to schmooze it up.

We are potentially on the verge of the worst era of anti-semetism since, well, since the last spat of severe anti Jewish sentiment brought on by a faltering economy and a need to play the blame game. Thus far there has been an uneasy truce between the freshly minted Tea Party—spin-masters who have successfully recast the current president, a black progressive liberal from Chicago, as a Marxist Manchurian Candidate…where have you heard that one before?—and Zionist and moderate Jews who love Israel for their own personal reasons. One group votes like Puerto Ricans—though they are said to earn like Episcopalians—while the other would prefer to keep Puerto Ricans off mainland U.S. shores if only they could legally figure out how. Calling the plays as they come, both share a common enemy in fundamentalist Islam and, some would say, to a greater extent, Islam as a whole. The party’s ire over the Park51 Islamic Cultural Center in New York gave a preview of what it is capable of. But the shaky unspoken peace between the New Right and American Jews is worrisome and completely unsustainable. If and when the Muslims—even the most moderate ones—are no longer seen as a threat it is not so far-fetched to imagine that same rage coming down on the Jews who are perceived to control Wall Street; the Jews who Foxman alleges that Taibbi insinuates are the ones that pushed complicated financial products on trusting investors, pensions funds, and the central banks of several nations; the Jews whose alleged grasp on the monetary system has wrought so much havoc on world economies. Through much conjecture wherein any reference to financial institutions, blood, snakes, or other images used at one time or another to disparage Jews is treated as a direct affront Jews & Money seems to completely miss this obvious and looming point.

On a recent Sunday afternoon a man making copies at a local Kinko’s was approached by two Hassidic gentlemen in coat and black hat who asked if he was a Jew. Indeed he was. They inquired as to what he was making copies of and finding out it was for something other than a commercial venture the first Hassid advised the man that he ought to focus his energies in other directions. “We all have our hobbies and mine is making money,” the second Hassidic intoned in a thick guttural Yiddish accent.

Those unsolicited remarks may be little more than a minor PR disaster for someone looking to dispel old stereotypes—they’re certainly not doing anyone any favors—but are they the ones to be held accountable for the stigma of Jews as monsters with an insatiable hunger for lucre?

The post A Dilemma Bigger Than Free Pork: A Rambling Review of Abe Foxman’s New Book <i>Jews & Money</i> appeared first on Jewcy.

You’ve been at the forefront of American Jewish criticism of President Obama’s renewed push for Israeli-Arab peace. After a recent meeting with the President along with 15 other Jewish leaders, you confessed that you continue “to feel uncomfortable with the assumptions that underlie President Obama’s approach” to Israel and the Middle East. 

You’ve charged that President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world is being conducted “at Israel’s expense.” For Obama, you say, “there is a need for the US to demonstrate that it can be tough with Israel to win back credibility with Muslims. We are seeing it already on the settlement issue…”

But being tough on Netanyahu about settlements is not at “Israel’s expense.” It is a blessing to Israel, given the grave threat which many Israeli military and political leaders have said the settlements pose to Israel’s security, to the very possibility of a two-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, and to Israel’s ability to remain a democratic Jewish state.   For the last eight years, we’ve had a president who recklessly squandered American prestige.   He had no credibility to broker an Israeli-Arab accommodation.   He made little more than token efforts to do so, when not trumpeting his outright opposition to negotiations with Syria, despite the unanimous advice of Israel’s intelligence and military brass, and its political leadership.  An American president who has regained the confidence of the Arab and Muslim worlds is quite simply a strategic asset to Israel.   American pressure over settlements is an investment in Israel’s future, a gift to the Zionist project.

Nor does pressure need to be applied simultaneously and in equal doses to satisfy some artificial notion of even-handedness.   As Larry Derfner points out in the Jerusalem Post, “The Palestinian Authority has been cracking down on Hamas for a long while, it kept the West Bank miraculously quiet during Operation Cast Lead, it’s enforcing the law in city after city… If the PA wasn’t giving us peace and we were giving it land – we’d be right to demand that Obama put all the pressure on the Palestinians and none on us.  But the fact is that Abbas and the PA are giving us about as much peace as they’re capable of, while we aren’t planning on giving them an inch; instead, we’re thinking only about how much more conquered land Obama will let us build on.”

You’ve said that President Obama’s “notion that we have to pressure Israel to show our bona fides to the Arabs is to buy into their distorted version of history.”   You’ve accused the president of ignoring the history of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.   But such criticisms stand reality on its head. Obama understands all too well why past peace efforts have failed.  His new way is designed to overcome the errors and missteps of the past.  By adopting a regional approach, he is more likely to gain wide Arab backing for historic Palestinian compromises on Jerusalem and refugees, issues which resonate throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.   By enlisting the help of Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, he stands a better chance of bringing about a unified Fatah-Hamas Palestinian government that will hew to the international and Arab consensus:  a government that will have both the will and the wherewithal to honor its commitments under a peace accord with Israel.

Obama recognizes that the US cannot help forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians while allowing Syria and Iran to continue to stoke Hezbollah and Hamas extremism. While Bush added fuel to the fires of Arab and Muslim radicalism, Obama is cutting off their oxygen supply, sapping Hezbollah’s political power and reinforcing the impetus towards pragmatism in Hamas.  Obama is finally ending the practice, perfected under Bush, of saying one thing–whether about settlements or the president’s commitment to help negotiate an accord–and then doing something else. 

You hold up President Bush’s “enunciation of the need for a Palestinian state, the road map, Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and the Annapolis process in 2007” as having “provided opportunities for progress toward peace if the Palestinians were truly interested.”  You highlight what “Israel has done in recent years to advance peace:  Israel’s offer of a Palestinian state at Camp David in 2000, its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, also in 2000, and its disengagement from Gaza were all steps upon which there could have been building toward peace.”  Instead, you conclude, “the Palestinians responded with rejection, suicide bombs and kidnappings, extremist politics and rockets.”

But this Manichean narrative of righteous Israelis and evil Palestinians – the stock-in-trade of right-wing hasbarah – is a cartoon version of what went wrong, ignoring true causes and effects. Annapolis did not fail because the Palestinians refused to accept another “generous Israeli offer,” but because President Bush did nothing to help the parties bridge the gaps, failing to apply diplomatic tools to encourage their agreement to a US-proposed compromise, as President Carter successfully did with Egypt and Israel.   Similarly, Bush did nothing to hold either party accountable for their commitments under the Road Map, even after promising to “ride herd” on both as he left the company of Sharon and Abbas at Aqaba.

The Road Map and Annapolis were built not only on the wobbly foundation of isolating and excluding Hamas and Gaza, but on an unrealistic, and ultimately failed, American-Israeli bid to topple Hamas by besieging Gaza and its entire population.   This siege, more than anything else, coupled with the lack of real progress on the ground in the West Bank–and not Israeli “concessions”–were responsible for the attacks which Israel has endured on its southern communities.   Had Sharon truly wanted to promote peace by withdrawing from Gaza, rather than to simply cut Israeli losses and bury any serious peace plan in “formaldehyde”–as his chief aide Dov Weissglas put it–he would have withdrawn Israeli troops and settlers from the Strip as part of an agreement with Abbas, rather than unilaterally.  In this way, he would have enabled the PA and Fatah moderates to take credit for a diplomatic achievement, rather than allowing Hamas to gain bragging rights before the Palestinian public that Israel had been pushed from Gaza only by its “resistance”–much as Hezbollah did with its Lebanese audience when Barak unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon.

By the same token, Barak’s move was largely motivated by Israel’s need to cut its ongoing losses from guerrilla attacks while Israeli troops remained entrenched in Lebanese territory.   It was a gift to Hezbollah, not a step towards peace, after Barak had walked away from a potential peace treaty with Syria, an act of political cowardice for which President Clinton and his chief Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, have criticized him harshly.   Barak balked on a Syrian-Israeli deal after Assad had committed to the US that under a land-for-peace bargain, Syria would insure that Hezbollah, its client, would be reined in, according to Ross.

You claim that the Arab world wasn’t ready to reach an agreement with Israel when Carter and Brzezinski were in the White House, and that the same is true now–as if nothing has changed in thirty years and there were no Arab peace initiative offering Israel recognition, normal ties and peace with the entire Arab world today; as if the rise of Iran were not providing powerful new incentives for the Sunni Arab states to end the conflict and form a close alliance with Israel and the US.

Nothing’s changed?   Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal has recently said that his group would not stand in the way of a peace deal between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel.  Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin told the Israeli government that “Hamas rhetoric has changed in recent weeks. ‘Public statements by leaders attest to efforts by Hamas to appear interested in ending the conflict with Israel, based on the model of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in exchange for a long-term hudnah'” or truce–until Netanyahu silenced him.  Netanyahu’s spokespeople claim that these changes in rhetoric are purely “cosmetic” and that Hamas “remains rooted in an extremist ideology which fundamentally opposes peace and reconciliation.”

But the great Jewish historian Walter Lacqueur was closer to the mark when he observed in the 1970’s that “even in the war aims of religious or quasi-religious movements a discrepancy often exists between the desirable and the possible. . . All such movements have come at one stage or another to the realization that with an enemy who cannot be defeated, temporary compromises have to be made.  The old enmity, the odium theologicum, is itself subject to gradual erosion as such compromises become permanent; the formulas of hatred may linger on but they no longer carry the same conviction.”

The latest poll of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, conducted jointly by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, between May 21-June 3, 2009, showed that “59% of the Israelis support and 36% oppose a two-state solution. Among Palestinians, 61% support the two-state solution while 23% support a one-state solution and 9% support other solutions.” Are you imposing an idealistic, romantic definition of what constitutes acceptance of Israel by Palestinians, rather than a practical and realistic view of what it takes for there to be peace between two countries – whether Israel and Egypt, Palestine or Syria?

It is a categorical mistake to suggest that the Arabs aren’t ready to make peace with Israel because some, notably the Saudis, are unwilling to start the normalization process in exchange for the partial settlement freeze Netanyahu will finally offer. His government has been unwilling to come to a full stop on settlement construction, as requested by the US and the international community, and as required by the Road Map.  Instead, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue building Jewish housing in Palestinian Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, regarded by the Arab world as the future capital of a Palestinian state.   Does this strike you as a wise way to inspire confidence in Israel’s good intentions about a future peace?

As any schoolchild knows, but so many Jewish leaders pretend not to, there can be no two-state solution without sharing Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis.    What’s more, Netanyahu remains adamant about continuing to build in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including those in heavily populated Palestinian areas which have no chance of becoming part of Israel under a future peace accord.   To genuinely promote peace, Israel needs to start offering economic incentives to settlers deep in the West Bank to begin returning to Israel, rather than erecting yet more housing for continued settler growth in areas that Israel will most certainly have to leave in any peace deal.

The Saudis want to begin a normalization process only once there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.  Even if Netanyahu adopts a partial freeze on settlement building, they are rightly skeptical that he will countenance the establishment of a Palestinian state on fair terms.  Netanyahu’s long-standing opposition to a viable two-state solution, with a territorially contiguous Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, justifies their skepticism.  Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Netanyahu has failed to engender the kind of trust and good faith that would enable Arab leaders to begin an incremental process of normalization with Israel now.   Still, some Arab states–including Qatar, Tunisia, Bahrain and others–will probably agree to further normalization steps in exchange for a settlements moratorium.

Now let’s turn to what may be your biggest concern: that President Obama is pursuing Israeli-Arab peace with a genuine sense of urgency. I’ll address this issue, within the context of the dangers Israel faces with Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and the Palestinians, in the second part of this open letter, which is available here.

B’virkat shalom,

(Gidon) Doni Remba

The post An Open Letter to ADL Leader Abe Foxman: A Response to Obama’s Critics on Israeli-Arab Peace appeared first on Jewcy.