Poor Michael Lerner's Petunias
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/07/poor-michael-lerner%E2%80%99s-petunias/
by Steven Plaut
May 7th, 2010
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 Dershowitzmore 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.
.
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