Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

One of the constant themes repeated ad nauseum by right-wing Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz and their supporters is that Muslims are uniformly extremists filled with hate. There are no “Muslim moderates.” No imams denounce terror. They all support Al Qaeda, etc. etc.

Walter Ruby in Jewish Week brings yet further evidence of the utter falsity of such claims. He writes about the new interim imam of New York City’s largest and most influential mosque, the Islamic Cultural Center, the Indonesian-born Mohammed Shamsi Ali. The interview with him is wide-ranging, candid and impressive:

[He] declared in a dialogue with Rabbi Schneier at the New York Synagogue earlier this month that it “cannot be accepted to deny the existence of Israel” or to deny the Holocaust. Appearing last week at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Imam Ali delivered a special sermon during Mincha services in which he urged Jews and Muslims to revisit “problematic” passages in the Koran and Torah. Those passages buttress bellicose stances against other religions by understanding them as having been written in earlier times, and not necessarily relevant to today’s world.

Imam Ali also urged his listeners to “look beyond what is presented in the media” about Jewish-Muslim relations in order to create “real connections” based on trust and affection. “Once you get to know Muslims,” he said, “you will ask them, ‘Are you really the people I see portrayed [negatively] on Fox News?’”

Key Muslim leaders in New York praise the Indonesian-born Ali as a charismatic and compassionate leader whose embrace of interfaith dialogue represents “mainstream” opinion within the Muslim community.

It is sad, but somehow reassuring that those in both the Muslim and Jewish communities who reach out to the other side are rebuffed by their respective extremist right fringes:

A shadowy Queens-based militant group known as the Islamic Thinkers Society has attacked Imam Ali on its Web site as an “FBI mouthpiece” and “moderate Uncle Sam Muslim” who has corrupted young people at his mosque in Jamaica by allowing them to have “access to guitars and drums.”

Imam Ali…makes no apology for his cooperation with the FBI and New York City police. “We understand the job of law enforcement [in the post-9/11 situation),” he said. “I myself have said publicly that if anyone [in the Muslim community] sees something suspicious, he has an obligation to report it to the police. At the same time, law enforcement must be careful not to overreact and create a situation where there is an interruption of basic American values when it applies to Muslims.”

This reminded me of one of my own personal experiences on that score. I was the western director of New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s during a time when Alex Odeh, then director of the Arab American Anti Discrimination Committee, was assassinated by a letter bomb probably orchestrated by members of the Jewish Defense League. I received a voice mail message from the JDL’s Earl Krugel threatening our group and reported this to the FBI and agreed to meet investigators in my office. I was excoriated by some Agenda members for doing so. My view is that when my life is threatened I’m going to have to trust somebody. While I don’t see the FBI as necessarily my friend, they sure know a lot more about the JDL and the threat they pose than I do. It was trust them or trust no one. And when I’m in danger I have to trust someone. That’s why I allowed them into my office.

The Muslim religious leader’s views put him squarely in the mainstream of American religious life. This is a man who Jews should be able to “do business with” to quote Maggie Thatcher’s infamous phrase about Gorbachev:

Imam Ali believes that American Jews and Muslims should build a relationship “that is more influenced by religious commonalities than by political differences. We cannot deny the emotional impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, yet we need to ensure that our relationship is not determined only by that.” He added, “We also should remember that there have been bright times in our relationship as well, such as the cooperation between Muslims and Jews in Andalusia during the Middle Ages.”

I’m pleased that Jewish academic institutions like the Jewish Theological Seminary and HUC-JIR have hosted talks with him and are reaching out to him.

Unfortunately, as I’ve documented here the N.Y. Jewish federation has not taken as forward-thinking a role. In fact, it has backslid into fear and mistrust of the local Muslim community. Federation rabbis have been directed to withdraw from interfaith dialogue projects. Rabbi Michael Paley was once a member of Debbie Almontaser’s support committee and listed as a keynote speaker at one of Rabbi Schneier’s conferences. He backed out of both projects mysteriously.

Also, after enthusiastically endorsing the Other Israel Film Festival devoted to Israeli Arab cinema, the Federation executive Jon Ruskay, abruptly told the festival organizers that they must remove the Federation’s logo from publicity brochures. Festival founder Carole Zabar was taken aback by Ruskay’s change of tack. An ill wind apparently blows through the Federation when it comes to Muslim-Jewish relations in New York.

Unfortunately, the Jewish communal group is missing out on an important opportunity to engage local Muslims in dialogue and debate about issues that divide and link us. Events in the Middle East are too bloody and too catastrophic to miss such possibilities when they arise. To the Ruskays of the Jewish world I say (paraphrasing Hillel): if you will not be for peace, who will be for it? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when?

The NY Times’ Samuel Freedman weighs in on the smear campaign against Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran Academy by the Jewish neocon world. It’s a fine article which I wish could’ve been written a little earlier in the campaign so that it could’ve made more of a difference in defending Almontaser and her reputation. But no matter, it’s important that Freedman has documented for the world to see the overt racism of the school’s and Almontaser’s accusers. After quoting some especially pungent anti-Arab vitriol from right-wing blogs, Freedman notes:

Thus commenced the smear campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy and, specifically, Debbie Almontaser. For the next six months, from blogs to talk shows to cable networks to the right-wing press, the hysteria and hatred never ceased. Regrettably, it worked.

Ms. Almontaser resigned as principal earlier this month. Nominally, she quit to quell the controversy about her remarks to The New York Post insufficiently denouncing the term “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization. That episode, however, merely provided the pretext for her ouster, for the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.

The Times columnist has come forward to draw a line in the sand and say: “This should not be acceptable discourse in our city.” I only wish more prominent figures like Joel Klein, Michael Bloomberg, Randi Weingarten (who sealed Almontaser’s fate by her betrayal), and even Abe Foxman would’ve done what Freedman did. Where are the leaders when you need them? Covering their asses and ducking down in their foxholes.

Who ever cared about Debbie Almontaser and what she went through in this ordeal?? Listen to a friend speak about it:

“She feels that she’s been violated, personally and professionally,” said Louis Cristillo, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who has studied the experiences of Muslim children in the New York public schools. “To be painted as somebody who’s un-American, questioning her patriotism, is extremely hurtful for her. She’s really shocked at how devastatingly effective the defamation was.”

And here Freedman names names of those responsible for blackening Almontaser’s reputation:

In syndicated columns by Daniel Pipes, in articles and editorials in The New York Post and The New York Sun, on such Web sites as PipeLineNews and Militant Islam Monitor, both concerned with radical Islam, the Gibran school was repeatedly characterized as a “madrassa,” an Arabic term plainly meant to evoke images of indoctrination into terrorism and holy war.

Bella Rabinowitz, writing on March 9 in PipeLineNews, called Gibran “an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the Sept. 11 terrorists.” Alicia Colon wrote in The Sun on May 1, “How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news” that New York “is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals.”

Also important to me are the inclusion of two statements of support from local rabbis with whom the ex-Gibran principal worked in laying the groundwork for the school:

“There’s zero correspondence between the caricature and the actual person,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation in Park Slope, who was on the Gibran school’s advisory board. “The words that were used to describe her, the fears that were evoked, are absolutely unrelated to her and her life’s work. Not in any way, shape or form.”

Another rabbi who has worked with Ms. Almontaser on interfaith efforts, Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, said: “It’s all about insinuation and innuendo and this formula of Arab equals Muslim equals terrorist. The viciousness and the vileness of this case surpass anything I’ve seen before.”

This entire episode brings to mind a quotation from Pirkey Avot:

“Whoever destroys one life is as if he has destroyed an entire world.”

Similarly, whoever destroys one reputation is as if he has destroyed the good name of us all.

Does Jack Kemp know what strange company he keeps?? (David Yerushalmi on left)

I don’t use that term lightly because it’s thrown around all too easily by those with extreme ideological agendas. In order to understand why I’ve used it hear you must read Larry Cohler Esses’ second in a series on the efforts to open the Khalil Gibran Academy, a New York public school dedicated to teaching Arab language and culture. Larry’s first piece focussed on the involvement of Campus Watch in the successful campaign to unseat Debbie Almontaser as school principal; and its overall efforts to destroy the school.

In his second article he focuses on the Brooklyn group, Stop the Madrassa, behind the local campaign to derail the school. The erstwhile leader of the group is not a Brooklyn local and not even a New Yorker. In fact, he was originally a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s. [UPDATE: David Yerushalmi was NOT born in the Ukraine. His ancestors were. He was born in the U.S. and did not emigrate here. My error was due to a misunderstanding of something my informant wrote to me about Yerushalmi's background.] He ended up in Los Angeles where he worked as a junior associate for my friend, Dean Hansell. Dean, who is an extremely mild and decent man not known to speak ill of many, knew Yerushalmi then as David Beychok and called him “very conservative.” If anything, this was an understatement as Larry makes clear:

A key leader of the group opposing a new, Arab-focused public school in Brooklyn is a virulent opponent of a democratic Jewish state who denounces “Zionist Israel” and calls on it to “cast off the yoke of liberal democracy.”

Stop the Madrassa leader David Yerushalmi also condemns democracy in the United States and, in comments that evoke classical anti-Semitic stereotypes, says he finds truth in the view that Jews “destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite.”

Stop the Madrassa and other critics seeking to derail the opening of the Khalil Gibran school, set for next month, have charged that the school’s advisory board includes radical Islamists.

Now, Yerushalmi’s comments have raised concerns about Stop the Madrassa’s own leadership by some of its own advisory members.

Yerushalmi, a national advisory board member, counsel and de facto treasurer for Stop the Madrassa, wrote regarding conservative criticism of Israel, Zionism and Jews: “Much of what drives it is true and accurate.” Conservatives’ primary “critique,” he said, “is that the Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite.”

“One must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one,” he wrote. “Indeed, Jews in the main have turned their backs on the belief in G-d and His commandments as a book of laws for a particular and chosen people.”

In Israel, he said, other than the ultra-Orthodox, “Most Israelis are raging Leftists, and this includes the so-called nationalists who found a home in the ‘right-wing’ Likud political bloc or one of the other smaller and more marginal right wing parties.”

In a message to a pro-Israel rally last June he asked: “What interest does America have in a strong Israel? If your answer is democracy in a liberal or western sense, know you have sided with the Palestinians of Hamas.”

You tell me…is this guy a fascist or what? This may be one of the rare times when using that term is actually totally accurate and apt.

So how does Daniel Pipes feel about getting into bed with reptiles like Yerushalmi. Oh, he’s terribly concerned with how it might look:

Asked if, in light of Yerushalmi’s background, Stop the Madrassa might be harboring extremists among its own leadership, Daniel Pipes, another member of its national advisory board, said “These are troubling statements and raise questions about my serving on the same board as Mr. Yerushalmi. I shall be looking into the matter.”

We await with bated breath Pipes’ decision on whether he will continue being associated with someone who is actually even more extreme, racist and hateful than he himself is (and that’s tough to do).

Another Stop the Madrassa board member wasn’t put off by Yerushalmi’s overt racism:

Jeff Wiesenfeld, a former aide to ex-Gov. Pataki, who also serves on the group’s advisory board…also drew a distinction between Yerushalmi’s views and the outlook of some of the school’s supporters. Yerushalmi, he said, had expressed “a Jewish supremacist type of thought” — one he rejects — “but nowhere in those quotes did I hear him advocating violence or harm to anyone,” as words like intifada and jihad do.

I see. Yerushalmi renounces democracy, embraces Jewish supremacism (that’s a nice way of saying Kahanism or Jewish racism) but he’s still OK unless he puts an axe in some Arab’s head. But Debbie Almontaser, who has been a devout student of the ADL’s multicultural programming and worked tirelessly at reaching out to New York’s Jewish community in building support for the school–she’s the one who espouses violence because she explained the meaning of a word on a T-shirt. Is this feeble-minded rhetoric of what.

I originally heard about Yerushalmi from a law partner of Dean’s in Washington, D.C. who was involved in interfaith work with Arabs, Jews and Christians. A Falls Church imam discovered that Yerushalmi had sent people to “infiltrate” his mosque in order to prove that it supported radical jihad. Dean’s colleague asked me what I knew about him and sent me to Yerushalmi’s website, SANE. I thought I’d heard of many of the Jewish right-wing extremists out there. But I hadn’t heard of this one. At his site, I learned some wonderful things: That Bill O’Reilly is a “secular progressive” and Sean Hannity “”participates in the destruction of America’s national existence.” That worship of Islam in the U.S. should be illegal.

Crackpot? Sure. Harmless? No. Daniel Pipes and David Yerushalmi have hijacked Jewish-Arab relations in New York City and made a huge splash in the media. They are not ineffectual extremists with no following. They are a force to be reckoned with and the fact that the organized Jewish community does not recognize this and combat it speaks volumes about its own lack of leadership in this area.

Daniel Pipes: Let’s be ‘overt’ in our Arab racism

Larry Cohler-Esses proves once again in Jewish Week why he is one of the best Jewish journalism investigative reporters in America with his expose of what I call the Jewish Jihad against Debbie Almontaser. She was the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, scheduled to open this fall as the first New York public school emphasizing Arabic language and culture. You may recall a New York Times article a few weeks ago describing her self-immolation after a New York Post interview in which she did not sufficiently denounce a T-shirt a reporter had asked her about which contained the phrase “Intifada-NYC.” Here is how Larry describes the interview:

At the very end of the interview, Almontaser told one of these sources [Cohler-Esses' informant], [New York Post reporter] Bennett, without bringing up the t-shirts, asked her almost incidentally what the word “intifada” meant. She consulted an Arabic dictionary and told him:

‘The word basically means ’shaking off.’ That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic.”

Bennett then told her about the t-shirts, adding that they were produced by a group that shares space with another group on whose board she sits. She replied: ‘I understand it is developing a negative connotation due to the uprising in the Palestinian-Israeli areas. I don’t believe the intention is to have any of that kind of [violence] in New York City. I think it’s pretty much an opportunity for girls to express that they are part of New York City society . . . and shaking off oppression.’

This is a perfect Frontpagemagazine-style guilt by association ploy. Almontaser is responsible in some way and must explain to the reporter why a group with which she has no direct association (it merely rented space with another non-profit on whose board she sits) has a T-shirt using the word “intifada.” She should’ve told the guy to shine it on. Instead, she attempted to actually tell him the meaning of the word and place it into some social context. For this she’s given the auto da fe by the forces of hate.

Who do you think in our community is behind this jihad? If you’ve been following my reporting on Nadia Abu El-Haj you’ll recognize the sleazy MO. It’s Daniel Pipes, of course:

Almontaser had by then withstood months of attacks from prominent Jews on the right in New York and nationally. Pipes, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, joined with others to support a local group called Stop the Madrassa, the term for an Islamic seminary.

According to Education Department plans and curricula, the school is set up as a purely secular project. Two Arabic teachers will teach math and social studies. Science and other courses will be in English. But Stop the Madrassa, led by Brooklyn resident Pam Hall, assailed the school as an Islamist undertaking crafted to promote extremism and sectarianism with taxpayer money.

In pressing their attack Hall’s group received crucial research assistance from Pipes, a Web site called PipeLineNews.org and another called Militant Islamic Monitor. In articles and editorials, The New York Post and New York Sun also pursued the story relentlessly.

Many of the research pieces, authored by Beila Rabinowitz and William A. Mayer, attacked Almontaser for her associates — or her associates’ associates. One piece pointed to the presence of Imam Shamsi Ali on the school’s advisory board. Ali, the writers said, promoted “Jihad by groups like the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Circle of North America.” The article offered no evidence of ICNA’a links to al Qaeda…

Another piece claimed that Almontaser was a “9/11 denier.” The piece quoted her saying, “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.”

The full quote, given to young students asking her questions about Muslim involvement in 9/11, as reported in a Columbia University publication, was: “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims. … Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion.”

People, this is how low we can go as a Jewish people. We’ve let swine like this take the lead when it comes to our relations with the Arab American community. We let them steal the spotlight with their headline-grabbing, but intellectually dishonest, charges. No one calls them out. This is work the ADL would be rebutting if it itself was doing the job it should be doing. But of course, the ADL under Foxman’s leadership is hopelessly attenuated by its own search for anti-Semites, Arab and otherwise, under every bed.

Larry’s research and my own have proven that Jewish journalists should no longer accept anything Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Campus Watch or Frontpagemagazine say at face value unless it can be unassailably corroborated. Ben Harris in his JTA story about Nadia Abu El-Haj fell into this trap. I hope no other Jewish journalists will do so.

And for the Pipes coup de grace. Let’s read as he hangs himself on his own anti-Muslim petard in an interview with Cohler-Esses:

Pipes, in a piece published in both the New York Post and Jerusalem Post, argued that “learning Arabic in itself promotes an Islamic outlook.” He said he supported such a school in principle because the country needs native-born Arabic speakers. But Pipes warned that in practice, “Arabic language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage…”

The very notion is utterly preposterous. Does learning Latin predispose someone to becoming a radical supporter of Opus Dei? Does learning Hebrew predispose someone to becoming a Kahanist or extremist settler? Their response would be–of course not–because western religions don’t contain elements of extremism inextricably woven into the religions themselves as Islam allegedly does. Again a preposterous, intellectually bankrupt notion.

The interview continues with Pipes pontificating:

The Arab-American community right now — and any Arabic language and culture school — should be subject to “special scrutiny,” he said. “I believe such a school requires scrutiny beyond that of any other group’s school, he said.

“It fits into a larger pattern in which Muslim officials require greater scrutiny, whether they be chaplains [or] law enforcement officers. There is a tendency to sympathize with Islamism that we ignore at our peril. … When law enforcement is looking for a rapist, it looks at men, not men and women. If you’re looking for terrorism you must give special scrutiny to this community.”

Well, that must be because the only terrorists in the world are Muslim, right?

And this is the part of the interview where Pipes calls Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein leftists (I kid you not):

Asked how Khalil Gibran and Almontaser had garnered such substantial Jewish support, Pipes replied, “Jews are generally on the liberal side of things. There is a softness on Islamism the more you go on the left.”

Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein were part of this pattern, he said. “They’re modestly to the left. It’s just such an established pattern.

“What I am arguing for — special scrutiny — is often done,” he said. “But it’s done in an unofficial, underhanded way. It’s lying basically. It’s a disservice to Muslims who don’t believe law enforcement when they say you’re not being singled out.

“Let’s make it overt. Let’s say there is a difference. It would be healthy to have a debate about it.”

Yeah, let’s make our national racism overt. Let’s admit that we suspect all Muslims of being terrorists. Let’s admit that Daniel Pipes’ agenda of hate is the agenda of the American Jewish community and America as a whole.

And in case all of the above didn’t persuade you that Pipes’ is a disingenuous charlatan take a look at the following and tell me who he thinks he’s fooling:

Asked if he would have favored “special scrutiny” of the immigrant Jewish community teeming with socialists, communists and anarchists on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century to deal with terrorist bombings by some anarchists during that period, Pipes replied, “I’m happy to apply this wherever it’s useful.”

Either Pipes is serious and he would’ve been among the Jews serving as informants against his fellow Jews to the Justice Department during the infamous Palmer Raids of the 1920s (in which case he would’ve been a miserable snitch); or else he’s a liar. Can you imagine any Jew who would accept the singling out of his own religious compatriots for suspicion of disloyalty AS A GROUP? Again, the idea is preposterous and only shows Pipes for the intellectual double-dealer he is.