Rob Kall, the editor in chief of OpEdNews (OEN) recently published a provocative edition of a weekly Zoom call among editors and contributors to his website. It was provocative because the remarks of one of the participants about fascism and the Great Holocaust caused several Jewish attendees to take offense and vehemently accuse him of holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
Basically, the offending remarks identified Germany's wealthy Jewish 1% as providing Hitler's fascism with pretext for his genocide of the other 99%. (I've summarized what was actually said here.) The discussion that ensued led Rob to wisely recommend caution in approaching such sensitive topics.
Rob's recommendation reminded me of a sobering experience I had years ago in Mexico. It put me in the position of the OEN provocateur. It also caused me to reflect on the role of self-criticism that is part and parcel of the Judeo-Christian tradition and of critical thinking in general.
My Report from Israel
The experience I'm referring to came when I was invited to give a "Report from Israel" after a three-week study tour of Israel, Jordan, and Egypt sponsored by Berea College, where I taught in the Philosophy and Religion Department for 40 years. The invitation came from the Unitarian Universalist (U.U.) congregation of San Miguel de Allende.
My report was heavily influenced not only by our time spent in the Palestinian community, but by a separate visit my wife, Peggy, and I made to the Sabeel Ecumenical Center for liberation theology in Jerusalem. Scholars there connected the Palestinians' situation with colonialism. They pointed out that ever-expanding Jewish settlements stood in blatant contravention of UN Resolution 242. It was a continuation of the European colonial system that had supposedly been abolished following World War II. In Israel-Palestine, Jewish occupation represented the familiar European settler pattern repeated throughout the former colonies. It had (Zionist) settlers from Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and elsewhere arriving unexpectedly in lands belonging for millennia to poor unsuspecting Palestinian peasants, and then confiscating their homes, fields and resources.
With all of that fresh on my mind, the thesis of my U.U. presentation was clear and unambiguous. "The real terrorists in Israel," I said, "are the Zionists who run the country." I didn't consider my basically historical argument particularly original or shocking. The Sabeel Center and Noam Chomsky had been making it for years.
What I didn't realize was that almost everyone in my audience was Jewish. (I didn't even know about San Miguel's large Jewish population - mostly "snowbirds" from New York City.) Nonetheless, my remarks that Sunday stimulated an engrossing extended discussion. Everyone was respectful, and the enthusiastic conversation even spilled over beyond the allotted time.
The trouble started after the head of San Miguel's Center for Global Justice (CGJ) where Peggy and I were working at the time invited me to publish my talk as an article in San Miguel's weekly English newspaper, Atencià ³n.
I'll never forget what followed; it was very similar to what occurred during Rob's OEN Zoom call. All hell broke loose:
- A barrage of angry letters flooded the Atencià ³n pages for the next two weeks and more.
- As a result, Atencià ³n threatened to cancel the column space set aside for the CGJ each week.
- San Miguel's Bibliotheca (library) talked about ending the CGJ's access to meeting rooms there.
- My article was removed from Atencià ³n's archives.
- Someone from the AIPAC(American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) phoned my provost at Berea College reporting me for my inflammatory article, asking whether I really taught there and if my credentials were genuine.
- The CGJ's leadership was forced to do some back-pedaling distancing itself from me and my remarks.
- They lit candles of reconciliation at a subsequent U.U. meeting begging forgiveness from the community and absolution for that mad man from Berea.
- The guiding assumption in all of this was that my argument was patently false.
In other words, an article that should have stimulated critical thinking and discussion (with CGJ activists leading the way as a voice for Palestine's voiceless) was met instead with denial, dismissal, and apology.
Biblical Perspective
Of course, I know that criticizing Zionists for their treatment of Palestinians is quite different from the holocaust denial that some on the OEN call perceived a few weeks ago.
It is also probably futile for members of the goyim like me to comment on the topic. Frankly, I'm unqualified to do so, because:
- My relatives and loved ones weren't the ones slaughtered in Hitler's crematoria and gas chambers.
- They weren't among the peasants, laborers, shopkeepers, mothers, fathers, grandparents and children whose lives were cruelly wasted and destroyed by the Third Reich.
- Instead, as Elie Wiesel has pointed out again and again, my Christian religious cohorts were the very ones who incinerated Jews during the week, went to confession on Saturday, were given absolution, received Holy Communion on Sunday, and then returned to their gruesome work the following day.
Yet, it must be acknowledged that my religious tradition is also specifically Judeo-Christian. Its central figure is the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, who was a reformer of Judaism and had no intention of founding a new religion. Jesus was not a Christian; from his birth to his death, he was a proud and faithful Jew.
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