Posted on 12/14/2007 7:12:57 PM PST by Forgiven_Sinner
Christopher Hitchens’ attack on Chanukah has received no major push-back to date in major media outlets.
Several weeks ago, the Jewish world shook its collective fist at Ann Coulter’s audacity in admitting on CNBC (Oct. 8) that she, a Christian, believed in Christianity: “We just want Jews to be perfected,” said Coulter. “That’s what Christianity is.”
The Anti-Defamation called her “anti-Semitic.” They lectured her about the power of words “to injure others and fuel hatred.” On the Web, the popular blog Wonkette, blared, how will Coulter “finally complete Hitler’s Dream? She’s going to convert all the poor lost Jews to her religion,” although Coulter had no plans to do that.
From across the United States came editorials and organization press releases demanding news shows blacklist her. But now Chanukah, of all things, is getting slashed and burned in ways far more offensive than anything Coulter ever said, but with almost no media or organizational defense of the old holiday, or condemnations of its critics.
Jewcy, an online hipster magazine praised by The Guardian in the UK for being “a cultural icon at the forefront of a new wave of Jewish culture and pride,” greeted Chanukah (Dec. 4) with the headline, “A Very Osama Hanukkah.” Writer Steve Almond describes himself as assimilated and intermarried, but his wife wanted to convert to Judaism so he did some homework: He concludes, “Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah.” After all, the Maccabees were an “insurgency,” and Eliezer, one of the Maccabees, who died sacrificing himself in battle, “sounds to me like a Biblical version of the suicide bombers who launch themselves at military convoys in Iraq. He isn’t trying to kill and maim innocent bystanders, so it’s not an exact comparison, but his mindset is essentially the same: He relishes the chance to give his life in exchange for the glory of the cause, and his own name.”
When Judah Maccabee decapitated an enemy general, Almond writes, “isn’t the gesture really just an old school version of the decapitation videos Al Qaeda uses today to horrify its Western foes?” Chanukah is “about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side.”
Slate, a usually excellent online journal, offered this headline (Dec. 3): Chanukah “celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness.”
The writer, Christopher Hitchens, author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” argues that if Judaism would have been conveniently eliminated by the Greek-Syrians, “we would never have had to hear of Jesus.” And “without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity... there would be no Islam, either.... When Judaism repudiated Athens for Jerusalem, the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.”
So far, no condemnations of Slate or Hitchens, no fist shaking across the continent and, to the best of our knowledge, no major media rebuttal except by Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.
In Israel, environmentalists charged that lighting Chanukah candles contributes to global warming. This is a serious charge. As syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wrote earlier this year in The Boston Globe (Feb. 9), “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers,” and she’s not the only one to make that comparison. Can we expect media support for legal ordeals, boycotts and reprisals against “green” denial as there is for Holocaust denial?
Gil Hoffman reports in the Jerusalem Post (Dec. 4), “In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment. The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.”
Liad Ortar, the campaign’s cofounder, told the Post, “Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation.”
Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem’s Ramban Congregation, who considers himself an environmental activist, told the Post, “People in the green movement who have an agenda have unfortunately made it anti-religious.... The damage ends up being a thousand times the benefit.”
Tikkun’s Rabbi Lerner, driving force behind the interreligious Network of Spiritual Progressives, told The Jewish Week in a phone conversation, that Hitchens, and other malevolent critics are “simply ignorant of the history of interpretation of Torah that has developed over the course of the past 2,500 years. From the perspective of many of the anti-religious types in our society, there is really no difference between fundamentalist religion and religion as a whole. In liberal and progressive circles, and (not just liberal) academic circles, there is deep antagonism toward religion, a deep conviction that religion is fundamentally irrational, and that those who believe in God are at a lower level of intellectual and psychological development.”
He added that Tikkun to some extent is isolated by Jewish liberals “because we’re pro-God.” He laughed at the “ludicrous” greens who see Chanukah as a threat to the earth rather than a gift to it.
And somehow, all over the world, Jews lit candles, told the old stories, praised God and enjoyed the eight days and nights as they have for centuries, undeterred by the assault dujour, each assailant thinking himself more enlightened than his Jewish targets.
The Chanukah lesson for the new wave of bitter atheists and anti-God radicals, says Lerner, is that when people are “faced with the choice between an imperialist system that is ‘enlightenment’ oriented, and a religious system that is love oriented, people choose the love.”
What next?
It’s no more insulting to Jews for a Christian to state that Christianity is “superior” to Judaism than it is to Christians for Jews to make the opposite claim.
Over the last forty years I’ve noticed that when a holiday arrives and an iconclastic opposition group springs up, the news media will automaticly move toward that group.
Maybe it is the old newspaper rule...On a slow news day throw a dead cat in front of a politician and report his reaction.
In this case it is... throw an iconclastic viewpoint in front of a religious person and report the reaction.
‘On the Web, the popular blog Wonkette, blared, how will Coulter “finally complete Hitler’s Dream? She’s going to convert all the poor lost Jews to her religion,” although Coulter had no plans to do that.’
Hitler’s dream was to rid the world of both Jews and Christians; the latter he viewed as “polluted” with “Jewish tainted” ideas. His contempt for the Christian churches, and especially the clergy, was complete.
Wonkette is just an ignorant twit.
You have GOT to be kidding me!
Am I the only person who remembered the dire predictions of weather calamity that were supposed to occur when Sadaam set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields back in the Gulf War?
Why, if the atmosphere can't handle a lousy 15 extra gms of C02, would that have not PERMANENTLY catapulted us toward disaster?
I recently started selling candles - nice ones, made in the USA and everything. Never been much of a candle person, but now it seems I'm burning them every day for HOURS at a time. And I also have this nasty habit of breathing. And if there's any global warming, could someone please send it my way? It's pretty nippy here right now.
Hey! We can offset the candles CO2 by having a bunch of "Chanukah bushes!"
Mark
There you go again... blaming the Bushes!
There you go again... blaming the Bushes!
Not this time!!! This time, "The Bushes fix the problem!!!"
Mark
According to this dolt, this is only a minor consideration. And liberals wonder why we think they're idiots?
Don't worry! I'll smoke an extra turkey next year to make up for the loss of carbon dioxide by not burning a Hanukka candle.
Hey, I think I just found a new tagline!
"Liberalism: The damage ends up being a thousand times the benefit!" :)
“network of spiritual progressives.”
kind of like a cracked bell.
Go ahead and burn your Channukah candles—you can use my offsets. I promise not to burn any this year! ;)
According to this dolt, this is only a minor consideration. And liberals wonder why we think they're idiots?
Just another example of "moral relativism," which in reality is a complete LACK of morals. It allows the leftist to excuse ANYTHING. It allows them to justify any horrible action, no matter what the cost or results. That's one of the reasons that many of the most brutal and deadly regimes have been by leftists of one stripe or another throughout history, and certainly within the last 100 years.
Mark
I haven't noticed Osama relishing the chance to give his OWN life.
Michael Medved says the same thing.
BTW, Chanukah ended last week, so no more of this "Happy Holidays" baloney. MERRY CHRISTMAS FREEPERS
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Bush’s fault.
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