This week’s Misguided Jew Award

Every day brings with it more tales of Jews seemingly unaware of their own ethnicity and wholly ignorant of their own interests and that of the Jewish people.  If it’s not a Bernie Sanders threatening to send millions to Palestinians so they can build more tunnels, it’s a Congressman Stephen Cohen boycotting Benjamin Netanyahu while embracing Palestinian terrorists, or it’s young Jews saying Kaddish for dead Palestinian terrorists.  No shortage of progressive, brain-addled Jews more than willing to throw their countrymen under the bus.

But just when you think you’ve seen everything, along comes an individual or a group of Jews whose actions are so egregious, so irrational, so self-loathing that all you can do is make sure you haven’t somehow stumbled into an episode of Monty Python.

So step up, Rabbi David Lerner, president of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, and accept this week’s ‘Misguided Jew Award’.

In early November, the Ahavath Torah Synagogue organized an evening with three eminent and articulate critics of Islamism, Frank Gaffney, William Boykin and Tom Trento.  None of these individuals is Islamophobic; they are scholars and editorialists who have spoken out about the threats posed by militant Islamism.

The reaction of Rabbi Lerner and his colleagues on the Board of Rabbis was to write a stern letter to Ahavath Torah demanding that they cancel the event due to “its inappropriate behavior” and because the event would be “embarrassing for us as Jews”.  This Rabbi then worked with the local chapter of CAIR to stage a demonstration against the synagogue’s event.

First, that this Rabbi can’t acknowledge that one can have reasonable and fact-based concerns about some of the darker aspects of Islam without being Islamophobic speaks volumes about his political orientation and his lack of knowledge about the history and the current state of the Islamic world.

Second, this Rabbi’s condemnation of the three speakers shows that he has not read anything they’ve written because they do not propose or encourage blanket condemnations of Islam, they simply point out (backed up by voluminous research) that there are aspects of Islamism which pose an existential threat to Israel and have created a host of problems for the Arab countries of the Middle East as well as for the rest of the Western world.

Third, even if one disagrees with the Congregation’s decision to host this event, how can one justify cooperating with CAIR, a known supporter of terrorism against Israel and a group that makes no secret of wishing for the extermination of the Jewish state?

I believe Rabbi Lerner makes it clear where his loyalties lie.  He has no sympathy for Jews who are victims of Muslim acts of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States on a daily basis; he closes his eyes to the incessant Islamic terrorism targeting Israel; he has no time for those who don’t share his dedication to the cause of distorting the truth so they can live in peace with their leftist bedfellows.

This learned Rabbi chooses instead to wrap his arms around his CAIR buddies who had the audacity to claim that they were responding to the ‘hatred’ espoused by Ahavath Torah by doing what the Koran instructs : “Repel evil with that which is better”.   I assume Rabbi Lerner and the CAIR spokesmen were unaware that the same Koran has hundreds of references to converting and killing Jews and Infidels.  That inconvenient truth is better left ignored, right Rabbi Lerner ?