By Daniel Greenfield ——Bio and Archives--December 15, 2011
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"American Jews look at Israel and fear that occupation has done the same... and the other sees a fatal chauvinism, a triumph for an extremism fostering nightmares of a Taliban-like takeover of a faith tradition that was built on tolerance."I'm not going to blame people for not researching Hammerman, though it might not have been such a bad thing to do, but it's not really about him, it's about using common sense to identify people who think the way that he does. The obsession with the threat of a theocracy is the idee fixe of liberal clergy from both religions who will spill barrels of ink about Christian and Jewish extremists who are just plotting to take over, while having nothing but good to say about Mohammed. The Hammermans are secular, but they are not secularists. They use a theological skeleton to advocate liberalism, while warning everyone about the dangers of right wing extremism and traditional beliefs. Their religion is liberalism, their altar is the Democratic Party and their theology is social justice with everything else stripped away. The most obvious tell is Hammerman's scope of concern in his Tebow article. "Burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants." All this has little to do with religion and a great deal to do with the obsessions of liberal politics. This isn't theocracy, illegal immigration has nothing to do with the subject. It's generic paranoia about "right wing extremism". Hammerman, like most left-wing clergy, assumes that conservative religious streams are just another political movement wrapping their agenda in religion. The "religious left" is not afraid of theocracy, they're afraid that the balance will shift from the left to the right. They can't conceive of religion except in political terms. To them, Tebow only matters as the incarnation of the right. If he wins, then NPR funding will be cut and the homeless will be left to starve on the street. They can't divorce religion from politics, because there is no religion there. Just social justice. And they see the right as the anti-social justice force. It's important to understand where these people are coming from, and when that is understood they can be identified and dismissed, without responding with essays on Jews "dressing up a tribalistic hatred in socially-acceptable clothing". Jews don't respond to hostile articles from liberal Christian clergy as if they represent all Christians. We don't treat Reverend Tim Kutzmark as representative of "Christianity", the way that too many articles have treated Rabbi Joshua Hammerman as if he represented Judaism or Jews.
"The recent vandalism against mosques by Israeli Jewish extremists does not point to apartheid, but Israeli officials need to be especially vigilant or such hate crimes could easily lead Jerusalem to a moral place not too distant from Johannesburg and Jackson, where houses of worship were also set aflame."Anyone who thinks that Hammerman represents tribalistic hatred dressed up in socially acceptable clothing really doesn't understand the left. The left is not a tribe, its identity is ideological, it uses ethnic, racial and religious identities as vehicles for that ideology. Nothing more.
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Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.