Spare Jews (and others) the cult of victimization

A day without reading a quote from Abe Foxman is a day without reading the newspaper. The head of the Anti-Defamation League is in there without fail, purportedly defending Jews against disparagement. Now and then he has something real to discuss, but as often as not he must fill the space by magnifying slights and sometimes manufacturing them.

Foxman has become a major irritant to many non-Jews, but he drives Jews even more nuts. I'm Jewish and don't recall voting for any spokesman. And I have lots of company in finding Abe Foxman's daily pronouncements to be intensely aggravating.

Case in point is his recent carping on Chevrolet's sponsorship of a Christian music-and-worship tour. What do the media do but speed-dial Foxman, who of course has comment. "I'm a little uncomfortable with a major commercial venture going into propagating religion," he says. Oh? "Evangelical Christians believe they have the truth, so they are selling a product because it's God's product? I find it troubling." Why is that your business?

If anyone has an issue here, it is Christians — some of whom might not want religious worship tied in with moving Silverados off the lot. But whether they consider it acceptable or not is strictly their call. Chevrolet has decided to ignore Foxman, which is the right response. (My own feeling at being left out of an advertising campaign is nothing less than gratitude.)

Nearly every religious and ethnic category now has a group of paid defenders looking to justify their continued employment. In an excellent article at www.reason.com, "E Pluribus Umbrage," Tim Cavanaugh describes "a Mad Monster Party of advocacy groups dedicated to rebutting every real and imagined racial or ethnic slur." The anti-defamation industry, he writes, "attracts the talented and the warped, passionate crusaders and transparent self- promoters."

There are anti-defamation groups supposedly representing Mexicans, Italians, Latvians, Arabs, Poles, Celts and just about everyone else who can be hyphenated to "American." American Hindus Against Defamation has protested the inclusion of Sanskrit shlokas (hymns) in an orgy scene in the movie "Eyes Wide Shut." You noticed the shlokas, of course.

Cavanaugh pays special attention to the Catholic League, which started off as an advocate of socially conservative views but has turned into "the champion of an abused religious sect in a relentlessly bigoted environment." Catholic League President William Donohue likes to call anti-Catholicism the "anti-Semitism of the elites" — avoiding the painful reality that his main foes are liberal Catholics.

The cult of victimization clearly attracts a diverse following, but with $40 million a year to work with and an especially tragic history to exploit, Foxman's ADL stands out. While many of its campaigns rate as trivial — the Anti-Defamation League actually protested the naming of Hurricane Israel — some are downright appalling.

In 1994, the ADL stupidly rushed into the center of a feud over fighting dogs and missing ornamental rocks in a Denver suburb. In it, the ADL immediately backed a Jewish couple's charges that their neighbors were vicious anti- Semites. The neighbors, subjected to hate mail, death threats and the loss of a job, sued the couple and the ADL for defamation. Last year, a federal judge upheld most of a $10 million judgment against the ADL.

Then there was Foxman's famous letter to President Clinton supporting a pardon for Marc Rich, the fugitive crook. Rich had sent the ADL a $100,000 donation a few weeks earlier. Foxman expressed hurt and shock at the insinuation, totally believable, that he had been bought.

The ADL's most toxic contributions are the "rising tide of anti-Semitism" letters sent to potential contributors. I've been on those mailing lists and can testify to the monthly doses of skinheads and Nazi insignia meant to frighten mostly older Jews into writing checks.

As for the young people, defining Jewish identity as a torment of persecution and death sends them walking out the door. What can they do when Foxman issues batty warnings about a "big eruption" of anti-Semitism in New York, and the media treat him not as a lunatic or publicity hound, but as a serious spokesman?

The media really have to help out, because Foxman has no "off" switch. Reporters can be lazy, and there are the pressures of the slow news day. But they should question whether it's their job to slake a man's unquenchable thirst for media attention.

Jews are now into the eight-night festival of Hanukkah. Few gifts would be more appreciated than eight consecutive days of no Abe Foxman.

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com.

Appreciate the ping.

Always nice to end one's day with a healthy dose of Anglo-Israelism ;)

As to the original topic of discussion (the ADL and Foxman's antics), I personally think that Foxman's energies, as well as his wallet, would be better spent fighting the relentless tide of Wahhabi missionary programs and pamphlets from Saudi Arabia designed to tell American Muslims the "real" story about the Middle East. You know, the ones that come with a copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

That being said, onto the topic of Anglo-Israelism (and I'm still not sure why exactly this became a topic of discussion in a thread about the ADL, but okay ...), let me just lay out my basic understanding of it.

First of all, my use of the term Anglo-Israelism to describe the beliefs of LostTribe in others concerning the Jews is not intended as denigrating these beliefs but rather to classify them into a belief system rather than as simply Lost Tribe's own belief system. If he has a more preferred term for this belief, he can post it and I'll use that.

Without going to far, let me just say that I don't buy it, primarily because there seems to be a number of lapses in both logic and history to the data that Lost Tribe has provided for us in the various links above:

"But the Tribes 'couldn't all get along' there, so ~922 BC these 5 Million Israelites split into the Northern and Southern Kingdoms."

Here and in various other sections of the canonical Bible (with or without the deuterocanonicals), we see rather exact figures like 5 million Israelites at the time of the schism. The biblical accounts schism within the Israelite Kingdom in 1 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 10 provide no such figures, so I'd be very interested as to where he's getting his numbers from.

"Israelites helped the Medes and Persians overthrow the Assyrians, then escaped north through the Caucasus Mountains and around the Black and Caspian Seas, to explode into history ~610 BC as The Celts. These Celts mixed with (and fought against) each other, and with other scattered Israelites (proto-Celts) who had escaped from Egypt by sea nearly a thousand years earlier, before the overland Exodus."

A couple of points here. First of all, I fail to find any record, biblical or otherwise, of Israelites leaving Egypt prior to the Exodus, so here again there is a question of source material. The second thing is that the Celtic Bituriges, Arverni, Senones, Aedui, Ambarri, Carnutes, and Aulerci tribes were already settled in what is today Switzerland and France and moving into Italy by 600 BC to accomodate a growing population according to Pliny. Needless to say, there was no way that the Celts could get from the Black Sea to Western Europe, establish a stable infrastructure, and then breed to the point of over-population. Even in our own era civilizations do not just bounce back from the kind of very near genocide and slavery that the Assyrians were known to practice.

Also, Lost Tribe's overview references Hallstatt in Austria as a major center of Celtic civilization, presumably post-610 BC. However, most archeologists date the Hallstatt site as having been inhabited by the same people from 1100-450 BC, which quite a bit longer than Lost Tribe's data.

These are my two major arguments just from reading the cursory overview of his material, but I'd recommend "The Ancient Celts" (1997) by Barry Cunliffe as being a fairly decent argument against your overall thesis when it comes to Celtic history.

Now, just to take one of the later posting (his comments to the Great Civilizations Stuff) and put down my arguments against it:

" maybe they learned something about 'international' business from the Assyrians"

I honestly doubt it because Assyrian society was rather tightly stratified and their belief system makes the Wahhabis look tolerant. I doubt they would have allowed subject nations to learn anything more than what they needed to produce for the good of the empire.

"aka separate Tribes"

A clan is a specific family group, roughly equivalent to the medieval concept of a "house." In the traditional (i.e. Greco-Roman) set-up, there is the immediate family, then to the extended family, then to the gens or clan (or house), and then to the tribe.

"they were still in tribes. Had apparently not assimilated even among themselves"

"Tribe" in the context of groups like the Celts or the Germanics refers to homogeneous non-settled groups.

"ED: named after the tribe of Dan?"

Dan is rerived from the Hebrew word for "to judge." Danu is derived from the shortened form of the Celtic "Danand mathair na ndeeu" or ("Earth, Mother of the Gods"). More to the point, Danu is a goddess while the biblical Dan was a male.

Just based on this, I have to say that I find the Anglo-Israeli thesis rather lacking in terms of supporting evidence. Which does not, however, excuse the extreme skepticism that certain posters have used in reference to the Bible, which is generally accepted, polemics aside, by many a historian and an archeologist as an accurate insight into the world of past. To ignore it simply on the basis of ideology betrays an underlying prejudice that is unbefitting to serious historical discussion.

Welcome to this thread from a mostly lurker who believes most learning takes place when listening, not when talking.

You came onto this thread like a hyperactive precocious Mothers darling who just received a 3-volume edition of the Thrifty Drug Store Junior Encyclopedia of everthing in the world for Christmas. I may be wrong, but I think every breathless "point" you raise has already been addressed either in this thread, or in comments by the participants in related threads. That makes you the only one here who is unaware of this long and detailed history, which raises the pertinent question, what other history are you unaware of?

In polite society it is customary to learn what is going on in a room before bursting onto the scene like an ill timed expulsion of lower intestinal gas. We like to think this is polite society.

So, welcome to the thread from we who mostly listen. Open your eyes and ears, mind your manners, respect other peoples opinions like adults do, and you will do fine. Oh, and always be aware that you are not the smartest person in the room

"Tranquil Sea," right?

Anyways, touche and the point is well taken, but there was just one thing you said that stood out for me:

"You came onto this thread like a hyperactive precocious Mothers darling who just received a 3-volume edition of the Thrifty Drug Store Junior Encyclopedia of everthing in the world for Christmas."

I'll take that as compliment.

"I may be wrong, but I think every breathless 'point' you raise has already been addressed either in this thread, or in comments by the participants in related threads."

Untrue. The question of where exactly numbers that Lost Tribe is citing for the population of Israel are coming from since they are in the Bible had not been raised before in this thread, at least the way I read it.

Additionally, Pharmboy had yet to address his comments on the Assyrians or his misunderstanding of the use of the term "tribe" and what it meant in reference to the Celts.

Similarly, there is the etymology of the goddess Danu which had likewise not been addressed.

So I think you're rushing to a little bit of a premature judgement in this regard.

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