Foxman comes Clean

Early this morning, Y-NET, the English website of the Israeli daily paper Yehidot Ahranot, published an astounding interview with the director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman.

In it, Foxman waxed hysterically about the “Christianization” of America:

While referring to American Christian Evangelicals as "our friends," Foxman went on to warn: "If they succeed on their domestic agenda, to change the balance of the separation of church and state, and bring America closer to a Christian nation, as they wish, if they would judge candidates as they wish to judge them, by whether or not they will act under Jesus' philosophy, how many Jews do you think will eventually get elected?"


Foxman said that Evangelical Christians are attempting to implement changes "by legislation," adding that religious organizations in the United States are aiming to control "what pharmacists may or may not dispense, what operations can or cannot be undertaken, and what books can be read."

Every single statenent contained a provable falsehood, except for the first. I suppose it is possible that Foxman has at least one Evangelical Christian friend. However this statement seems oddly remincent of those by anti-Semites who start their rants with “Some of my best friends are Jewish…”
His supposition of a universal separation of church and state is unwarranted. Surely Mr. Foxman is aware that there is no Constitutional separation of church and state, and that it was formulated in Thomas Jefferson’s private letter to a Danbury Baptist minister, where he explained that the Federal government had no authority over churches. Of course if Mr. Foxman and the ADL actually cared about the “Separation of Church and State,” they would oppose government entanglement in the affairs of religious institutions. However, I have never heard Foxman denounce efforts to force Catholic institutions to become complicit in abortion or efforts to regulate the affairs, composition of, and curriculum of religious primary schools.

Foxman’s fear of America as a Christian nation is somewhat amusing. In 1789, a majority of states had official churches. Even cosmopolitan New York, home of the second oldest Jewish community in the America of 1789, taxed citizens to pay for the Episcopalian Church. In fact, one of the primary reasons for the First Amendment was to protect Congregationalist Massachusetts and Episcopalian Virginia from federal interferenceUntil the middle of the 20^th century, public schools had official prayers modeled on Protestant rituals. I don’t recall the US being terribly anti-Semitic back then, especially compared to the USSR, which actually had separation of Church and state mandated in its constitution.
Contrary to Foxman, Christian voters have always judged the morality of candidates based on Christian ideals. All people judge candidates according to their personal and public moral code. Religious Christians respect Orthodox Jews and non-Orthodox Jews who speak to traditional morals. It is no coincidence that the only Orthodox Jew in Congress is from Virginia, while Jews representing liberal districts are rated on their obedience to unrestricted feticide, Homosexual Rights (rights for an abomonation), unrestricted divorce, and a refusal to stand up to the Islamic threat.

Foxman continued with an almost laughable assertion holding Christian concerns on the secular assualt on Christmas in contempt. “The ADL leader dismissed claims made by some Christian conservatives in the U.S. that there was a coordinated campaign against the Christian holiday of Christmas, saying: ‘There's nobody at war on Christmas. 95 percent of the country is Christian. No body's fighting them. It's a made up conflict.’” I wish this were true. However, it is the ACLU, supported by the ADL, which tries to force Christian observance from government.

Continuing his slander, Foxman said:

…”what was troubling was that those pushing for a particularist truth have convinced that the majority of America that religion and Christianity is under attack in the United States. It's a growing phenomenon... motivated by faith.”


In an ominous warning, he added that while the intent was not anti-Semitic, "the Hollywood media" was a common reply given to the question of who was plotting against Christmas.

I believe that the term for this is “projection”. The ADL, long pretending to by the protector of the particularist faith, Judaism, used guilt for real or perceived past victimization as a tool. Now, Christians seeing their faith slandered in the media, political class, and professorship, all largely Jewish, refuse to be victimized. Foxman is rightly annoyed that the victimization card will no longer silence his critics. He may even have to try to persuad people with historically coherent arguments, a task well beyond his recent performances.

However, Foxman’s true motivations and allegences are clear with his defense for Steven Spielberg’s morally ambiguous movie Munich.

"It shows unbridled, brutal terrorism on the part of the Palestinians. It shows the need to respond. Also, this is not a documentary… it's a work of fiction based on a historical event. It was a movie waiting to be made. And if anybody makes it, if I had my choice, it wouldn't be Mel Gibson. It would be Spielberg. And all of the sudden to make Spielberg the enemy of Israel and the Jewish people… is a distortion of what it's all about," he said.

The film, which focuses on the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Massacre refuses to actually portray the terrorists as evil. Instead it focuses on the moral complexities inherent in the response of killing terrorists. As other writers have noted, Munich is a vehicle for appeasement. Spielberg teamed up with the anti-Zionist playwright Tony Kushner and based in on George Jonas’s discredited account “Vengeance”. Spielberg and company are about to release movie as a Hannukah gift for the Anti-Zionist (and largely anti-Jewish) activists.

Foxman, who hysterically predicted anti-Jewish pogroms in response to Gibson’s The Passion, seems to have no problem with a movie that shows perfidious and vengeful Jews killing people for what Spielberg presents as morally ambiguous reasons.

For all of Mr. Foxman’s protestations of having Christian friends, it is quite clear that he is a committed secularist leftist who fears Christian and Biblical morality more than he fears anti-Zionists and true haters of Judaism.
I doubt that I could write a better parody of Foxman’s position, than what he gives in his own interview.