European Conservatives, the new kids on the block, making strides
By Sue Fishkoff · September 12, 2010
(JTA) -- A recent survey of British Jewry showed a decline in every Jewish denomination since 1990 except for two groups: the strictly Orthodox haredi and the Masorti, or Conservative movement.
Over those 20 years, both have nearly doubled.
Researchers behind the report, published in May by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, understood the haredi growth: Strictly Orthodox Jews have large families, and almost all of them join synagogues. But why were the British Masorti numbers up?
They’re up across Europe. Over the last three years, the number of Masorti communities on the continent has increased by 50 percent, from 20 to 30 congregations. It’s still the smallest Jewish denomination in Europe, but it’s growing the fastest.
Masorti leaders say it’s because they’re the new kids on the block.
“Unlike the Conservative movement in the United States, where they are the establishment, the mainstream, in Europe we are young, exciting, the new thing, experimental,” said Rabbi Chaim Weiner, the London-based president of Masorti Europe, the umbrella body for Conservative communities in Europe. “Each of our communities grows from year to year.”
There are 12 Masorti communities in Britain, six in France, and one each in Brussels, Stockholm, Lisbon, Bern, Prague, Budapest and the Dutch city of Almeer. Spain has a few, as does Germany.
Despite the growth, the overall Masorti numbers pale compared to the Orthodox movement, which dominates religious life across the continent. Masorti is also much smaller than the Progressive, or Reform movement, which claims 150 affiliated congregations in Europe, including 80 in Britain.
Masorti draws from both those movements, Weiner says, attracting disaffected Orthodox Jews as well as Reform Jews interested in more tradition.
Rabbi Andrew Goldstein, chairman of the European Union for Progressive Judaism, says that at least in Britain, Masorti growth comes primarily from the Modern Orthodox community, which has declined by a third since 1990, according to the study.
In fact, the first British Masorti congregation, New London Synagogue, broke away from an Orthodox congregation in 1964 and the third, Edgware Masorti, broke away from a Reform congregation in 1980.
Masorti Judaism in Europe is closer to the Canadian or Israeli model of Conservative practice, although some of the communities -- like in Prague, which is led by an American rabbi -- look more like their U.S. counterparts. This affects everything from egalitarianism to attitudes toward intermarriage.
About half the British Masorti synagogues maintain gender-separate seating during worship, but most European Masorti communities do not. Four of the movement's 15 or 16 European rabbis are women.
By the same token, attitudes toward intermarriage are more lenient on the continent but less so in Britain, according to Michael Gluckman, executive director of the British Assembly of Masorti Synagogues.
“We’re still a bit more traditional than in America,” Gluckman said.
Bernard Weil of Adath Shalom, the oldest Masorti congregation in Paris, says that while he and other congregants drive to synagogue on Shabbat, they would never think of offering a Shabbat parking space to new members -- a membership incentive he said he heard about from American Conservative Jews.
Conversely, even those communities like Adath Shalom that are not made up primarily of English speakers try to cater to them.
“Especially at Yom Kippur, some of the service is in English,” Weil said. “Religiously we’re closer to the Orthodox; socially we’re closer to the Liberals,” or Reform Jews.
Potential converts to Judaism, as well as Jews involved in mixed marriages, are among those most often drawn to Masorti communities in Europe, Gluckman said.
Five years ago, a European-wide Masorti beit din, or rabbinic court, was established to standardize conversions and other Jewish legal procedures. It’s all part of the movement’s struggle to parlay its recent growth into permanent strength.
“For the movement to thrive in Europe, each small community has to be able to provide the full range of rabbinic services, from conversion to divorce,” said Weiner, who heads the new Masorti rabbinic court.
“Even a few years ago, people didn’t believe it was worth making a commitment to us,” he said. “Now our profile has crossed the threshold, and communities are coming to us wanting to join.”
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Don't use chickens in Kapporos
Senior rabbi speaks out against using fowl in kapparot
By JONAH MANDEL
09/14/2010 23:04
Rabbi Aviner sends SPCA Israel letter, video explaining why according to halacha it is wrong to use chickens in pre-Kippur atonement rite.
The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Israel has received a significant halachic backing for this year’s annual campaign against the cruel use of chickens in the kapparot (atonement) ritual.
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the capital’s Yeshivat Ateret Cohanim and rabbi of Beit El, not only provided SPCA Israel with a letter last week showing the faultiness of the rite, basing his arguments on some of the greatest arbitrators, but went on video to expound on the halachic traditions proving why it’s wrong to inflict such cruelty on God’s creations, especially when the underlying motivation is absolution of one’s sins before the same God, as Aviner quotes former Tel Aviv Rabbi Chaim David Halevi.
RELATED:
Chicken ritual is foul, animal rights groups say
Fowl accusations
Since the sixth century, the ceremony of transubstantiating one’s sins into the body of a chicken and then slaughtering it, which traditionally is acted out in the days leading up to Yom Kippur, has prevailed among Jewish communities.
Over the centuries, halachic disputes emerged around the rite, with Rabbi Yosef Karo (who wrote the Shulhan Aruch), the Rashba and Nahmanides among those objecting it for various reasons, including the potentially problematic slaughtering, the non- Jewish superstitious character of it, and the unnecessary cruelty inflicted on the animals at a time of year that ought to be marked by mercy and benevolence.
Alternatives to the fowl were put forth, such as the use of grain or giving charity to the poor.
Before the actual slaughtering, which at times leaves the birds floundering for long minutes in a bloody near-death, the chickens are cooped up in small cages, many times out in the sun for long hours.
The kapparot rite involves swinging the bird over the atoning one’s head, much to the discontent of the animal.
To encourage observant people to choose a non-fowl object of atonement, SPCA Israel sent out requests to many of the country’s leading rabbis, and was happy to receive a clear voice of support from Aviner, one of the most influential rabbis and educators in the national-religious sector.
Under the headline beginning with a pertinent citation from Psalms, “and His mercy is over all his works,” Aviner leads the reader through the halachic discontent over the use of chickens in the kapparot, beginning with Rabbi Karo, the ultimate halachic source for Sephardi Jewry, who called it “the custom of the Amorite – simply put, a superstition.”
Aviner cited the late kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Kadourie, who said that you should abstain from using chickens due to “the cruelty to animals, which is prohibited by the Torah, and kashrut problems.”
He also mentions Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (1910- 1995), who over the years stopped using animals for kapparot, giving charity instead.
“Since this is not a clear duty but rather a tradition, and in the light of the kashrut problems and cruelty to animals, and in the light of all of what our aforementioned rabbis said, it is recommended that one should prefer to conduct the atonement ceremony with money, thus also fulfilling the great mitzva of helping poor people,” Aviner summarized.
Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger also responded to SPCA Israel’s request for rabbinic support, and issued orders to ensure that the chickens facing the ceremony will be treated in a way that would reduce the unnecessary suffering to a minimum, in accordance to the Jewish tradition that stresses the need to show compassion to animals.
“We must treat these animals with the same mercy we hope our Creator would treat us,” Metzger said.
Richard Schwartz, president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America, said on Monday that he was “very happy about Rabbi Shlomo Aviner’s statement.
Using and donating money for the kapparot ritual rather than using chickens is consistent with our mission to be rachmanim b’nei rachmanim (compassionate children of compassionate ancestors) and with the Torah mitzva of tsa’ar ba’alei chaim (the prohibition against causing unnecessary harm to animals). It is also consistent with the Jewish teachings that ‘God’s compassion is over all of His works’ (Psalms 145:9) and ‘the righteous person considers the life of his animals’ (Proverbs 12:10).”
Schwartz also said that “substituting money for chickens supports the urgent need to make dietary changes at a time when the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is causing an epidemic of diseases and contributing substantially to climate change and many environmental problems that threaten all of humanity. Animal- based diets are arguably inconsistent with Jewish mandates to preserve our health, treat animals with compassion, protect the environment, conserve natural resources and help hungry people.”
SPCA Israel members toured Shuk Hatikva in south Tel Aviv on Tuesday dressed in blood-red shirts and bearing harsh pictures of slaughtered chickens, to try to encourage a change of heart among those planning to use fowl in the kapparot ritual with the help of explanatory pamphlets and Aviner's letter, which might bring some to substitute the bird with charitable money.
The chicken slaughterers in the market did not appreciate the initiative, and harsh words were exchanged between the sides. There was, however, more receptiveness to SPCA Israel's agenda among some of the market-goers, while others maintained it was a religious ceremony to be adhered to, regardless of the halachic content of Aviner's letter.
By JONAH MANDEL
09/14/2010 23:04
Rabbi Aviner sends SPCA Israel letter, video explaining why according to halacha it is wrong to use chickens in pre-Kippur atonement rite.
The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Israel has received a significant halachic backing for this year’s annual campaign against the cruel use of chickens in the kapparot (atonement) ritual.
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the capital’s Yeshivat Ateret Cohanim and rabbi of Beit El, not only provided SPCA Israel with a letter last week showing the faultiness of the rite, basing his arguments on some of the greatest arbitrators, but went on video to expound on the halachic traditions proving why it’s wrong to inflict such cruelty on God’s creations, especially when the underlying motivation is absolution of one’s sins before the same God, as Aviner quotes former Tel Aviv Rabbi Chaim David Halevi.
RELATED:
Chicken ritual is foul, animal rights groups say
Fowl accusations
Since the sixth century, the ceremony of transubstantiating one’s sins into the body of a chicken and then slaughtering it, which traditionally is acted out in the days leading up to Yom Kippur, has prevailed among Jewish communities.
Over the centuries, halachic disputes emerged around the rite, with Rabbi Yosef Karo (who wrote the Shulhan Aruch), the Rashba and Nahmanides among those objecting it for various reasons, including the potentially problematic slaughtering, the non- Jewish superstitious character of it, and the unnecessary cruelty inflicted on the animals at a time of year that ought to be marked by mercy and benevolence.
Alternatives to the fowl were put forth, such as the use of grain or giving charity to the poor.
Before the actual slaughtering, which at times leaves the birds floundering for long minutes in a bloody near-death, the chickens are cooped up in small cages, many times out in the sun for long hours.
The kapparot rite involves swinging the bird over the atoning one’s head, much to the discontent of the animal.
To encourage observant people to choose a non-fowl object of atonement, SPCA Israel sent out requests to many of the country’s leading rabbis, and was happy to receive a clear voice of support from Aviner, one of the most influential rabbis and educators in the national-religious sector.
Under the headline beginning with a pertinent citation from Psalms, “and His mercy is over all his works,” Aviner leads the reader through the halachic discontent over the use of chickens in the kapparot, beginning with Rabbi Karo, the ultimate halachic source for Sephardi Jewry, who called it “the custom of the Amorite – simply put, a superstition.”
Aviner cited the late kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Kadourie, who said that you should abstain from using chickens due to “the cruelty to animals, which is prohibited by the Torah, and kashrut problems.”
He also mentions Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (1910- 1995), who over the years stopped using animals for kapparot, giving charity instead.
“Since this is not a clear duty but rather a tradition, and in the light of the kashrut problems and cruelty to animals, and in the light of all of what our aforementioned rabbis said, it is recommended that one should prefer to conduct the atonement ceremony with money, thus also fulfilling the great mitzva of helping poor people,” Aviner summarized.
Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger also responded to SPCA Israel’s request for rabbinic support, and issued orders to ensure that the chickens facing the ceremony will be treated in a way that would reduce the unnecessary suffering to a minimum, in accordance to the Jewish tradition that stresses the need to show compassion to animals.
“We must treat these animals with the same mercy we hope our Creator would treat us,” Metzger said.
Richard Schwartz, president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America, said on Monday that he was “very happy about Rabbi Shlomo Aviner’s statement.
Using and donating money for the kapparot ritual rather than using chickens is consistent with our mission to be rachmanim b’nei rachmanim (compassionate children of compassionate ancestors) and with the Torah mitzva of tsa’ar ba’alei chaim (the prohibition against causing unnecessary harm to animals). It is also consistent with the Jewish teachings that ‘God’s compassion is over all of His works’ (Psalms 145:9) and ‘the righteous person considers the life of his animals’ (Proverbs 12:10).”
Schwartz also said that “substituting money for chickens supports the urgent need to make dietary changes at a time when the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is causing an epidemic of diseases and contributing substantially to climate change and many environmental problems that threaten all of humanity. Animal- based diets are arguably inconsistent with Jewish mandates to preserve our health, treat animals with compassion, protect the environment, conserve natural resources and help hungry people.”
SPCA Israel members toured Shuk Hatikva in south Tel Aviv on Tuesday dressed in blood-red shirts and bearing harsh pictures of slaughtered chickens, to try to encourage a change of heart among those planning to use fowl in the kapparot ritual with the help of explanatory pamphlets and Aviner's letter, which might bring some to substitute the bird with charitable money.
The chicken slaughterers in the market did not appreciate the initiative, and harsh words were exchanged between the sides. There was, however, more receptiveness to SPCA Israel's agenda among some of the market-goers, while others maintained it was a religious ceremony to be adhered to, regardless of the halachic content of Aviner's letter.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
My Rosh Hashanah sermons
http://rabbiginsburg.podbean.com/2010/09/13/moderation-vs-fanaticism/
My erev Rosh Hashanah sermon
http://rabbiginsburg.podbean.com/2010/09/13/good-news-bad-news-american-jewry/
First day Rosh sermon
http://rabbiginsburg.podbean.com/2010/09/13/for-zions-sake-i-will-not-be-silent/
Second day
My erev Rosh Hashanah sermon
http://rabbiginsburg.podbean.com/2010/09/13/good-news-bad-news-american-jewry/
First day Rosh sermon
http://rabbiginsburg.podbean.com/2010/09/13/for-zions-sake-i-will-not-be-silent/
Second day
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
be a bad jew
Today’s column was written by Rami Kaminski, MD, founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York City. I have never met him or communicated with him in any way.
His column is entitled “Why I Am a Bad Jew.”
With that, I present the heartfelt and important words of Dr. Kaminski.
“For centuries, we lived in Berdichev. In the brutal Ukrainian winter of
1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family - babies, young adults, octogenarians - stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies fell silently into a mass grave.
Like most Jews in Europe, my family ‘cooperated’ with the Final
Solution. They did not resist or fight back. Six million Jews were
slaughtered in a period of four years. They received little sympathy
while they were still alive and hunted down like animals. There was no
public outcry because the Holocaust fit the world’s narrative for Jews
during the past 2000 years: a people destined to be persecuted and
slaughtered.
During their two millennia in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to
resist. There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against
their host nations or retaliated against their murderers. Instead, the
survivors - if there were any - were expelled or left for another place.
The murdered were regarded as ‘good’ Jews They accepted their fate
helplessly, without resistance.
This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with
boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel
about it. After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this
particularly ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the
Jews.
Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective. Today, the only good Jew is a powerless Jew willing to become a dead one. The Zionist Revolution is to blame. It changed everything. Jews re-created their own country. The Arabs attacked the new Jewish state the day after independence and promised to complete Hitler’s genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again and again. Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations, adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back.
With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old
script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the
world has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.
The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain. In 2005, Israel
eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it ‘Judenrein,’ and handed it over to the Palestinians. Left behind were synagogues and thriving green houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day after Israel’s withdrawal was complete. Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians built military bases and installed rocket
launchers to shell Israeli civilians. To date, some 7,000 missiles have
fallen on Israeli cities and towns, killing and maiming dozens, and
sowing widespread terror. Medical studies reveal nearly all Jewish
children in the communities bordering Gaza suffer from serious,
trauma-induced illness.
The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews,
take over the land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by
Islamic law.
As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries,
Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling
historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in
Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.
Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to
achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by
Israel’s defensive military action insist Hamas uses only ‘crude’
rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were
somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has
Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Be’er Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminant killing
in the name of ‘holy war’ which Israel has lived with for years.
Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because
the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists’ professed intentions for the ‘infidels.’
The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it
are the Israelis. They’ve not had time for detached philosophical
ponderings. They’ve been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic
fundamentalism.
Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and
Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be ‘good’ Jews willing
to be slaughtered without resistance, or be “bad” Jews who defend
themselves at the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world. Good
Jews would wait for another six million to be murdered, and pick up to
leave for another country to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse
to go calmly into the ditch.
I confess: I’m a bad Jew.”
Rami Kaminski, MD, is Director and Founder of the Institute for
Integrative Psychiatry in New York, a not-for-profit organization aimed
at evaluating current psychiatric services and how they integrate with
medicine, such as the mutual effects between medical and psychiatric
conditions. Prior to that, Dr. Kaminkski was the Commissioner’s Liaison
to Families and Community and Medical Director of Operations at the New
York State Office of Mental Health. Dr. Kaminski also holds an academic
position as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He
earned recognition in 1990 from Mt. Sinai Hospital as Physician of the
Year, and received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Awards from the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Dr. Kaminski’s research explores
neuropsychiatric aspects of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer and
Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders, as well as
psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. He
was for many years Director of The Schizophrenia research Unit at Mount
Sinai Hospital in NYC. Dr. Kaminiski also served as the Medical Director
of the PMHP and consultant to the committee in charge of developing the
Special Needs Program.
As a poem says, I will absolutely not go calmly into that good night.
My family did not survive the Holocaust and bring me into this world so my Jewish generation could be complacent and allow us to be exterminated like rats again.
When people say they want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, do not take the gamble that they are bluffing.
Iran must never…ever…ever…be allowed to have the bomb. Anything and everything must be done to prevent this.
May every Jew heed Dr. Kaminski’s words.
To those who oppose the right of Jews to exist, this Rosh Hashanah I offer only two simple words.
Never again.
eric
His column is entitled “Why I Am a Bad Jew.”
With that, I present the heartfelt and important words of Dr. Kaminski.
“For centuries, we lived in Berdichev. In the brutal Ukrainian winter of
1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family - babies, young adults, octogenarians - stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies fell silently into a mass grave.
Like most Jews in Europe, my family ‘cooperated’ with the Final
Solution. They did not resist or fight back. Six million Jews were
slaughtered in a period of four years. They received little sympathy
while they were still alive and hunted down like animals. There was no
public outcry because the Holocaust fit the world’s narrative for Jews
during the past 2000 years: a people destined to be persecuted and
slaughtered.
During their two millennia in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to
resist. There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against
their host nations or retaliated against their murderers. Instead, the
survivors - if there were any - were expelled or left for another place.
The murdered were regarded as ‘good’ Jews They accepted their fate
helplessly, without resistance.
This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with
boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel
about it. After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this
particularly ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the
Jews.
Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective. Today, the only good Jew is a powerless Jew willing to become a dead one. The Zionist Revolution is to blame. It changed everything. Jews re-created their own country. The Arabs attacked the new Jewish state the day after independence and promised to complete Hitler’s genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again and again. Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations, adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back.
With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old
script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the
world has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.
The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain. In 2005, Israel
eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it ‘Judenrein,’ and handed it over to the Palestinians. Left behind were synagogues and thriving green houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day after Israel’s withdrawal was complete. Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians built military bases and installed rocket
launchers to shell Israeli civilians. To date, some 7,000 missiles have
fallen on Israeli cities and towns, killing and maiming dozens, and
sowing widespread terror. Medical studies reveal nearly all Jewish
children in the communities bordering Gaza suffer from serious,
trauma-induced illness.
The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews,
take over the land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by
Islamic law.
As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries,
Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling
historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in
Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.
Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to
achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by
Israel’s defensive military action insist Hamas uses only ‘crude’
rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were
somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has
Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Be’er Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminant killing
in the name of ‘holy war’ which Israel has lived with for years.
Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because
the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists’ professed intentions for the ‘infidels.’
The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it
are the Israelis. They’ve not had time for detached philosophical
ponderings. They’ve been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic
fundamentalism.
Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and
Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be ‘good’ Jews willing
to be slaughtered without resistance, or be “bad” Jews who defend
themselves at the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world. Good
Jews would wait for another six million to be murdered, and pick up to
leave for another country to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse
to go calmly into the ditch.
I confess: I’m a bad Jew.”
Rami Kaminski, MD, is Director and Founder of the Institute for
Integrative Psychiatry in New York, a not-for-profit organization aimed
at evaluating current psychiatric services and how they integrate with
medicine, such as the mutual effects between medical and psychiatric
conditions. Prior to that, Dr. Kaminkski was the Commissioner’s Liaison
to Families and Community and Medical Director of Operations at the New
York State Office of Mental Health. Dr. Kaminski also holds an academic
position as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He
earned recognition in 1990 from Mt. Sinai Hospital as Physician of the
Year, and received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Awards from the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Dr. Kaminski’s research explores
neuropsychiatric aspects of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer and
Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders, as well as
psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. He
was for many years Director of The Schizophrenia research Unit at Mount
Sinai Hospital in NYC. Dr. Kaminiski also served as the Medical Director
of the PMHP and consultant to the committee in charge of developing the
Special Needs Program.
As a poem says, I will absolutely not go calmly into that good night.
My family did not survive the Holocaust and bring me into this world so my Jewish generation could be complacent and allow us to be exterminated like rats again.
When people say they want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, do not take the gamble that they are bluffing.
Iran must never…ever…ever…be allowed to have the bomb. Anything and everything must be done to prevent this.
May every Jew heed Dr. Kaminski’s words.
To those who oppose the right of Jews to exist, this Rosh Hashanah I offer only two simple words.
Never again.
eric
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Huge Arab lobby
The Arab Lobby
A new book explores the ‘petrodiplomatic complex’ and Saudi influence on U.S. foreign policy
BY LEE SMITH | Sep 1, 2010 7:00 AM | Print | Email |
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A meeting of Arab foreign ministers at the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., 2007.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
One of the characteristic laments of the Arab intelligentsia in both Washington and the Middle East concerns the inability of Arab nations to make their cases to the U.S. public. If only the Arabs weren’t so divided, the refrain goes; if only they better explained themselves and the plight of the Palestinians; if only the Arabs were as clever as the Jews; if only there was an Arab lobby as powerful as the Israel lobby.
But there is an Arab lobby in the United States—one as old as, if not older than, the Israel lobby, and it has helped to shape U.S. foreign policy and economic life since the end of World War II. Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East describes how this Arab lobby—from U.S. foreign service officers, oil companies, Christian anti-Zionists, and Ivy League universities to Gulf Arab states, Arab-American activists and Islamist ideologues—exercises its influence in U.S. politics. The book is already being dismissed by critics as a slapdash attempt by a former AIPAC employee to answer Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, The Israel Lobby. But those who actually read the new book will find a serious and timely look at a powerful and remarkably under-studied influence on U.S. foreign policy.
“Unlike Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, I don’t think it’s illegitimate to lobby for one’s interests,” Bard told me on the phone last week. The executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Bard wrote his dissertation at UCLA on the limits to domestic influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. “I’ve been writing for more than 20 years about this issue,” he said. “The point of my book is to inform the American public that an Arab lobby exists despite the claims of others that it does not and to explain what its interests are.”
In describing AIPAC’s Arab cousin, Bard draws some useful comparisons between the two lobbies, which are not as similar as one might imagine from his book’s title. AIPAC is a grassroots organization funded by U.S. citizens that represents the broad sentiment of Christians and Jews who are interested in one issue—protecting and promoting the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Arab lobby, by comparison, has little organic U.S. backing and divides its efforts between two causes—oil and Palestine. The former is managed in Washington by what Bard calls the “petrodiplomatic complex” of former U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers, politicians, and defense executives. Funded by oil companies, the weapons industry, and Arab energy producers, mainly Saudi Arabia, it enjoys virtually unlimited financial resources. For instance, AIPAC’s annual operating budget is $60 million a year—pocket change to a Saudi prince, like Alwaleed Bin Talal, who in 2005 gave $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard.
The Palestinian issue is paramount to the Arab-American sector of the Arab lobby. However, just as the Palestinians are divided against themselves—between Hamas and Fatah, among contending Fatah factions, as well as among competing clans—it is not the Palestinian cause that unites the Arabs or Arab-Americans but anti-Israel sentiment. The same goes for many of the Arab lobby’s domestic anti-Zionist partners, some of whom are motivated by religious conviction, especially the Presbyterians, and others by political ideology, but all of whom can agree on disliking first the idea and then the reality of a Jewish state.
The Arab lobby’s Palestine agenda, then, tends to be negative and, as Bard writes, “aimed at undermining the US-Israel relationship,” only rarely promoting a positive vision of a Palestinian state as a regional beacon of social justice or economic development, or defending the rights of Palestinian journalists, Christians, or other endangered social groups against the threats of the Palestinian political leadership. This part of the Arab lobby, writes Bard, “is small and mostly impotent.”
The real power is in the hands of the Arab lobby’s oil sector, the role of which is to keep the Arab oil producers happy by ensuring that Americans stay addicted to oil, that the defense industry keeps its production lines open, and that the image of Arab states stays polished, even for state sponsors of terror, like Saudi Arabia, and states whose rule is founded on flagrant social inequalities, the torture of dissidents and unbelievers, and other practices that most Americans rightly find abhorrent.
Surely the most depressing aspect of Bard’s book is his depiction of the craven subservience of so many U.S. diplomats and officials to the Saudi royal family. “Even when the Saudis had no money, and they only started to pump oil,” Bard told me, “a fear permeated the State Department that if we didn’t give in to them, we would lose our interest there. And the Saudis were clever about exploiting our fear. First they said they’d go with the British instead of us, then they threatened that they’d go with the Soviet Union, even as they portrayed themselves as anti-Communist and said they needed U.S. weapons to defend themselves against Moscow.”
Bard says that the Saudis are using the Iran threat now in similar ways. “The U.S. knows that in the end we have to defend the royal family,” he said. “The Saudis just want the latest toys and act like petulant children until they get them. Then the U.S. tells the Israelis not to worry when they sell the Saudis weapons because they can’t use them, but we go to Congress and say Riyadh needs these arms for their defense.”
With all the demands for U.S. presidents to pressure Israel, it’s worth noting that U.S. officials have rarely done anything but accommodate the Saudis. The one striking exception, as Bard notes, was John F. Kennedy’s demand that Saudi Arabia abolish slavery. Typically, U.S.-Saudi relations have been conducted in the dark, a trend that started in July 1945, when President Harry Truman approved construction of the Dhahran air base using existing War Department funds to evade congressional oversight. This became a precedent for keeping most of the U.S.-Saudi relationship secret, or at least beyond public scrutiny. For years, the U.S. government acceded to the wishes of the Saudis and other Gulf states to conceal information about Arab investments in the United States, and even U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia were classified between 1950 and 1972.
Today the unspoken issue is Saudi support for terror. Were U.S. officials to complain about how the kingdom funds jihad against the United States and its allies, “there’s a fear,” says Bard, “that the Saudis may punish us by withdrawing some of their billions of dollars in investments, cut U.S. companies out of deals to explore for gas or oil, or take other measures to damage our interests.”
Nor are the Saudis shy about promising to unleash jihad against those who cross their path, as when they threatened the British government when it was investigating the unsavory details of a Saudi arms purchase from a British weapons maker.
Given the nature of the Saudi regime, it is little wonder that the oil lobby prefers to work in the shadows. As one publicist explained in laying out his PR strategy for Riyadh: “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”
“This is a fairly smart lobbying tactic,” Bard told me. “It is very difficult to take a democratic approach, when most people don’t take your position.”
The story of the Arab lobby is also a story about Washington, more specifically an influential segment of the U.S. political elite that has contempt for the rubes who don’t understand that it is in the U.S. national interest to lean on the Zionists in order to make the Middle East’s Muslim Arab majority happy.
Bard believes that the Arabs and their Washington handlers were spitting in the wind of a post-World War II history that had turned in favor of the Jews. The Arabs, Bard writes, were “convinced that the United States supported the Zionists because of their propaganda. … Consequently, [the Arabs] never understood the depth of Americans’ feeling for the justness of the Zionist cause.”
Perhaps that is true, but it’s worth remembering that at the same time the Zionists succeeded in lobbying the Truman Administration to support a Jewish state, there was still widespread anti-Semitism throughout America, even as the horrors of the Final Solution were becoming known to the general public. It is comforting to believe that the 63 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, who side with Israel rather than the Palestinians are now and will always be stalwart friends of the Jews. But in the end all we know for certain about Americans is that they can smell what stinks. The Saudi lobby pays Washington power-brokers to talk over the heads of ordinary Americans because the latter have enough horse sense to know that a regime that withholds the rights of women as well as those of its Shia minority, outlaws the practice of Christianity and Judaism, and promotes anti-American causes is not in any meaningful sense of the term a U.S. ally.
As Bard’s book documents, the Saudis’ well-paid American agents have been making the same arguments for 60 years. The reason their message is not getting through is not that Americans are stupid and susceptible to Zionist propaganda or that the Jews who “control” Congress and the media are blocking access to the truth. The majority of Americans haven’t yet joined in the chorus led by Walt, Mearsheimer, and their cohort because Americans simply do not like to be threatened by extortionists who warn that if you don’t do what we say we will turn off your lights and shut down your car engines, and if you don’t change your position on Israel, we will kill you.
MORE IN: AIPAC, ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT, ARABS, JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER, MITCHELL BARD, SAUDI ARABIA, STEPHEN WALT, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
A new book explores the ‘petrodiplomatic complex’ and Saudi influence on U.S. foreign policy
BY LEE SMITH | Sep 1, 2010 7:00 AM | Print | Email |
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A meeting of Arab foreign ministers at the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., 2007.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
One of the characteristic laments of the Arab intelligentsia in both Washington and the Middle East concerns the inability of Arab nations to make their cases to the U.S. public. If only the Arabs weren’t so divided, the refrain goes; if only they better explained themselves and the plight of the Palestinians; if only the Arabs were as clever as the Jews; if only there was an Arab lobby as powerful as the Israel lobby.
But there is an Arab lobby in the United States—one as old as, if not older than, the Israel lobby, and it has helped to shape U.S. foreign policy and economic life since the end of World War II. Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East describes how this Arab lobby—from U.S. foreign service officers, oil companies, Christian anti-Zionists, and Ivy League universities to Gulf Arab states, Arab-American activists and Islamist ideologues—exercises its influence in U.S. politics. The book is already being dismissed by critics as a slapdash attempt by a former AIPAC employee to answer Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, The Israel Lobby. But those who actually read the new book will find a serious and timely look at a powerful and remarkably under-studied influence on U.S. foreign policy.
“Unlike Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, I don’t think it’s illegitimate to lobby for one’s interests,” Bard told me on the phone last week. The executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Bard wrote his dissertation at UCLA on the limits to domestic influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. “I’ve been writing for more than 20 years about this issue,” he said. “The point of my book is to inform the American public that an Arab lobby exists despite the claims of others that it does not and to explain what its interests are.”
In describing AIPAC’s Arab cousin, Bard draws some useful comparisons between the two lobbies, which are not as similar as one might imagine from his book’s title. AIPAC is a grassroots organization funded by U.S. citizens that represents the broad sentiment of Christians and Jews who are interested in one issue—protecting and promoting the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Arab lobby, by comparison, has little organic U.S. backing and divides its efforts between two causes—oil and Palestine. The former is managed in Washington by what Bard calls the “petrodiplomatic complex” of former U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers, politicians, and defense executives. Funded by oil companies, the weapons industry, and Arab energy producers, mainly Saudi Arabia, it enjoys virtually unlimited financial resources. For instance, AIPAC’s annual operating budget is $60 million a year—pocket change to a Saudi prince, like Alwaleed Bin Talal, who in 2005 gave $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard.
The Palestinian issue is paramount to the Arab-American sector of the Arab lobby. However, just as the Palestinians are divided against themselves—between Hamas and Fatah, among contending Fatah factions, as well as among competing clans—it is not the Palestinian cause that unites the Arabs or Arab-Americans but anti-Israel sentiment. The same goes for many of the Arab lobby’s domestic anti-Zionist partners, some of whom are motivated by religious conviction, especially the Presbyterians, and others by political ideology, but all of whom can agree on disliking first the idea and then the reality of a Jewish state.
The Arab lobby’s Palestine agenda, then, tends to be negative and, as Bard writes, “aimed at undermining the US-Israel relationship,” only rarely promoting a positive vision of a Palestinian state as a regional beacon of social justice or economic development, or defending the rights of Palestinian journalists, Christians, or other endangered social groups against the threats of the Palestinian political leadership. This part of the Arab lobby, writes Bard, “is small and mostly impotent.”
The real power is in the hands of the Arab lobby’s oil sector, the role of which is to keep the Arab oil producers happy by ensuring that Americans stay addicted to oil, that the defense industry keeps its production lines open, and that the image of Arab states stays polished, even for state sponsors of terror, like Saudi Arabia, and states whose rule is founded on flagrant social inequalities, the torture of dissidents and unbelievers, and other practices that most Americans rightly find abhorrent.
Surely the most depressing aspect of Bard’s book is his depiction of the craven subservience of so many U.S. diplomats and officials to the Saudi royal family. “Even when the Saudis had no money, and they only started to pump oil,” Bard told me, “a fear permeated the State Department that if we didn’t give in to them, we would lose our interest there. And the Saudis were clever about exploiting our fear. First they said they’d go with the British instead of us, then they threatened that they’d go with the Soviet Union, even as they portrayed themselves as anti-Communist and said they needed U.S. weapons to defend themselves against Moscow.”
Bard says that the Saudis are using the Iran threat now in similar ways. “The U.S. knows that in the end we have to defend the royal family,” he said. “The Saudis just want the latest toys and act like petulant children until they get them. Then the U.S. tells the Israelis not to worry when they sell the Saudis weapons because they can’t use them, but we go to Congress and say Riyadh needs these arms for their defense.”
With all the demands for U.S. presidents to pressure Israel, it’s worth noting that U.S. officials have rarely done anything but accommodate the Saudis. The one striking exception, as Bard notes, was John F. Kennedy’s demand that Saudi Arabia abolish slavery. Typically, U.S.-Saudi relations have been conducted in the dark, a trend that started in July 1945, when President Harry Truman approved construction of the Dhahran air base using existing War Department funds to evade congressional oversight. This became a precedent for keeping most of the U.S.-Saudi relationship secret, or at least beyond public scrutiny. For years, the U.S. government acceded to the wishes of the Saudis and other Gulf states to conceal information about Arab investments in the United States, and even U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia were classified between 1950 and 1972.
Today the unspoken issue is Saudi support for terror. Were U.S. officials to complain about how the kingdom funds jihad against the United States and its allies, “there’s a fear,” says Bard, “that the Saudis may punish us by withdrawing some of their billions of dollars in investments, cut U.S. companies out of deals to explore for gas or oil, or take other measures to damage our interests.”
Nor are the Saudis shy about promising to unleash jihad against those who cross their path, as when they threatened the British government when it was investigating the unsavory details of a Saudi arms purchase from a British weapons maker.
Given the nature of the Saudi regime, it is little wonder that the oil lobby prefers to work in the shadows. As one publicist explained in laying out his PR strategy for Riyadh: “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”
“This is a fairly smart lobbying tactic,” Bard told me. “It is very difficult to take a democratic approach, when most people don’t take your position.”
The story of the Arab lobby is also a story about Washington, more specifically an influential segment of the U.S. political elite that has contempt for the rubes who don’t understand that it is in the U.S. national interest to lean on the Zionists in order to make the Middle East’s Muslim Arab majority happy.
Bard believes that the Arabs and their Washington handlers were spitting in the wind of a post-World War II history that had turned in favor of the Jews. The Arabs, Bard writes, were “convinced that the United States supported the Zionists because of their propaganda. … Consequently, [the Arabs] never understood the depth of Americans’ feeling for the justness of the Zionist cause.”
Perhaps that is true, but it’s worth remembering that at the same time the Zionists succeeded in lobbying the Truman Administration to support a Jewish state, there was still widespread anti-Semitism throughout America, even as the horrors of the Final Solution were becoming known to the general public. It is comforting to believe that the 63 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, who side with Israel rather than the Palestinians are now and will always be stalwart friends of the Jews. But in the end all we know for certain about Americans is that they can smell what stinks. The Saudi lobby pays Washington power-brokers to talk over the heads of ordinary Americans because the latter have enough horse sense to know that a regime that withholds the rights of women as well as those of its Shia minority, outlaws the practice of Christianity and Judaism, and promotes anti-American causes is not in any meaningful sense of the term a U.S. ally.
As Bard’s book documents, the Saudis’ well-paid American agents have been making the same arguments for 60 years. The reason their message is not getting through is not that Americans are stupid and susceptible to Zionist propaganda or that the Jews who “control” Congress and the media are blocking access to the truth. The majority of Americans haven’t yet joined in the chorus led by Walt, Mearsheimer, and their cohort because Americans simply do not like to be threatened by extortionists who warn that if you don’t do what we say we will turn off your lights and shut down your car engines, and if you don’t change your position on Israel, we will kill you.
MORE IN: AIPAC, ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT, ARABS, JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER, MITCHELL BARD, SAUDI ARABIA, STEPHEN WALT, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Nation of Islam congressman in Indy opposed
The most important & least known House Race in America
America and indeed the world, anxiously awaits the outcome of the 2010 midterm elections. The political and social direction of the Republic is on the line. Republican versus Democrat, Conservative versus Liberal, RINO versus Tea Party and the beat goes on. Millions of dollars are flowing into campaign chests; miles of print espousing opinions grace the pages of newspapers, magazines and blogs; thousands of hours of programming on radio and television debate the issues, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Volunteers and professionals are burning up the phone lines and the postal delivery folks are bent over with the weight of direct mail appeals.
Meanwhile, the most important House race in the whole country is being totally ignored. A race which exemplifies the ying and the yang. A race which incorporates every exciting and essential element on the political radar screen. A race which will separate hacks from heroes, principle from pragmatism, love of country from lust for power. A race between the power of politicians and the power of the people.
Populist Republican, Dr. Marvin Scott is attempting to wrest the Indiana 7th District from the clutches of a liberal Democrat dynasty. Julia Carson was elected in 1996 and served until her death in 2007. Andre Carson, her grandson, was elected to serve the remainder of her term in a special election and was overwhelmingly reelected in 2008, thanks to the Barack Obama landslide.
Dr. Scott, a tenured professor of Sociology at Butler University, was the Republican nominee for Senate in 2004. He is an extraordinary example of the American Dream. Born to proud, but not formally educated parents in the segregated south, Dr. Scott learned to be a proud American. Robert and Gertrude Scott taught their seven children to appreciate what you have and strive to earn what you want. Three of their children earned PHd’s or finished all the requirements and one of their grandchildren was Flo-Jo, the Olympic champion.
Andre Carson voted 98.9% of the time with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has earned high marks from Organized Labor, Pro Choice organizations, Gun Control Groups, Muslim groups (he is one of two Muslims in the House), Homosexual support groups, Tax Increase lobbies, Arab & Anti Israel groups (Carson earned a 100% rating from the Arab American League) and the NAACP. Andre Carson is a proud member of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.
Marvin Scott is a Constitutional Conservative. He passionately believes that America is the land of opportunity. He is a fiscal and social conservative. He has never been embraced by the Republican power people but is loved by the Tea Party folks. Dr. Scott is a true gentleman, but not a coward. He gets standing ovations from the everyday folk and deafening silence from the DC insiders. His motto is “It is never right to do wrong, and it is never wrong to do right”. He publically commits to term limits and is an unabashed supporter of Israel.
This race is very winnable by Dr. Scott, because of his huge name recognition, the frustration with Andre Carson (he is the one who lied when he claimed the “N” word was used 15 times at a Tea Party rally in DC), the mood of the country, the unpopularity of President Obama, the changes in the District (only 25% black, only 53% Democrat), the fact that Marvin Scott is a black man so the “race” card is eliminated, the high unemployment rate (60+%) among black youth, the strong 2nd Amendment sentiment, the fact that Andre Carson voted for the Health Care Bill with its unconstitutional personal mandates and the publically funded abortion provisions, and Andre Carson’s condemnation of Israel in a letter signed by him and 53 other anti-Israel members of Congress. Andre Carson‘s personal relationship with the hateful Louis Farrakhan and Farrakhan’s endorsement of him, plus Carson’s sponsorship of the J Street Gala Dinner are very troubling for most citizens. 2010 brings with it photo ID requirements which will cut down on the aggressive cheating carried out in the past in this District. Andre Carson supports open borders, a path to citizenship for illegals and a weakened national defense. Dr. Marvin Scott believes in securing our borders, enforcing our laws and strengthening our National Defense.
The “Power” Republicans have done their best to discourage donors to Dr. Marvin Scott’s campaign. Congressmen Mike Pence and Dan Burton have been the notable exceptions. Insiders claim the district cannot be won, but ignore the fact that no Democrat has won the 7th in an off year election by more than 10,000 votes. The reality is, that Power Republicans don’t want to encourage Democrat turnout by backing a vigorous campaign. They have been cowed by the possibility of being called racists and they want a Republican who is a ring kisser. Dr. Scott is a happily married man with 4 children and he is allergic to chapstick.
Will this, the year of the people, end this progressive liberal dynasty?
Will the people’s frustration with RINO like positions and politicians explode at the ballot box? That is the question, you are the answer. Get informed, get involved, get Andre Carson out and Dr. Marvin Scott & the Constitution back in the United States House of Representatives.
America and indeed the world, anxiously awaits the outcome of the 2010 midterm elections. The political and social direction of the Republic is on the line. Republican versus Democrat, Conservative versus Liberal, RINO versus Tea Party and the beat goes on. Millions of dollars are flowing into campaign chests; miles of print espousing opinions grace the pages of newspapers, magazines and blogs; thousands of hours of programming on radio and television debate the issues, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Volunteers and professionals are burning up the phone lines and the postal delivery folks are bent over with the weight of direct mail appeals.
Meanwhile, the most important House race in the whole country is being totally ignored. A race which exemplifies the ying and the yang. A race which incorporates every exciting and essential element on the political radar screen. A race which will separate hacks from heroes, principle from pragmatism, love of country from lust for power. A race between the power of politicians and the power of the people.
Populist Republican, Dr. Marvin Scott is attempting to wrest the Indiana 7th District from the clutches of a liberal Democrat dynasty. Julia Carson was elected in 1996 and served until her death in 2007. Andre Carson, her grandson, was elected to serve the remainder of her term in a special election and was overwhelmingly reelected in 2008, thanks to the Barack Obama landslide.
Dr. Scott, a tenured professor of Sociology at Butler University, was the Republican nominee for Senate in 2004. He is an extraordinary example of the American Dream. Born to proud, but not formally educated parents in the segregated south, Dr. Scott learned to be a proud American. Robert and Gertrude Scott taught their seven children to appreciate what you have and strive to earn what you want. Three of their children earned PHd’s or finished all the requirements and one of their grandchildren was Flo-Jo, the Olympic champion.
Andre Carson voted 98.9% of the time with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has earned high marks from Organized Labor, Pro Choice organizations, Gun Control Groups, Muslim groups (he is one of two Muslims in the House), Homosexual support groups, Tax Increase lobbies, Arab & Anti Israel groups (Carson earned a 100% rating from the Arab American League) and the NAACP. Andre Carson is a proud member of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.
Marvin Scott is a Constitutional Conservative. He passionately believes that America is the land of opportunity. He is a fiscal and social conservative. He has never been embraced by the Republican power people but is loved by the Tea Party folks. Dr. Scott is a true gentleman, but not a coward. He gets standing ovations from the everyday folk and deafening silence from the DC insiders. His motto is “It is never right to do wrong, and it is never wrong to do right”. He publically commits to term limits and is an unabashed supporter of Israel.
This race is very winnable by Dr. Scott, because of his huge name recognition, the frustration with Andre Carson (he is the one who lied when he claimed the “N” word was used 15 times at a Tea Party rally in DC), the mood of the country, the unpopularity of President Obama, the changes in the District (only 25% black, only 53% Democrat), the fact that Marvin Scott is a black man so the “race” card is eliminated, the high unemployment rate (60+%) among black youth, the strong 2nd Amendment sentiment, the fact that Andre Carson voted for the Health Care Bill with its unconstitutional personal mandates and the publically funded abortion provisions, and Andre Carson’s condemnation of Israel in a letter signed by him and 53 other anti-Israel members of Congress. Andre Carson‘s personal relationship with the hateful Louis Farrakhan and Farrakhan’s endorsement of him, plus Carson’s sponsorship of the J Street Gala Dinner are very troubling for most citizens. 2010 brings with it photo ID requirements which will cut down on the aggressive cheating carried out in the past in this District. Andre Carson supports open borders, a path to citizenship for illegals and a weakened national defense. Dr. Marvin Scott believes in securing our borders, enforcing our laws and strengthening our National Defense.
The “Power” Republicans have done their best to discourage donors to Dr. Marvin Scott’s campaign. Congressmen Mike Pence and Dan Burton have been the notable exceptions. Insiders claim the district cannot be won, but ignore the fact that no Democrat has won the 7th in an off year election by more than 10,000 votes. The reality is, that Power Republicans don’t want to encourage Democrat turnout by backing a vigorous campaign. They have been cowed by the possibility of being called racists and they want a Republican who is a ring kisser. Dr. Scott is a happily married man with 4 children and he is allergic to chapstick.
Will this, the year of the people, end this progressive liberal dynasty?
Will the people’s frustration with RINO like positions and politicians explode at the ballot box? That is the question, you are the answer. Get informed, get involved, get Andre Carson out and Dr. Marvin Scott & the Constitution back in the United States House of Representatives.
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