Ayman Nour & Middle East democracy

We Westerners are desperate to see the political systems in the Middle East evolve from authoritarian theocratic or oligarchical models to some variation of representative government.

That desire suffered another setback on Saturday when former Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour, 41, was sentenced to five years in prison for (what outside observers insist are trumped-up charges of) forgery.

Up and down the region – Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority – the Western pluralist model of representative democracy has failed because broadminded, Western-oriented reformers have been driven away by the intimidation of autocratic rulers, leaving demagogic Islamists to reap the benefits.

Perhaps it is expecting too much for the Western concepts of political parties, elections and parliaments to take root in a so alien a social milieu. But there is no turning back the clock. In the modern age, tribalism is no solution; Arab (and Persian) nationalism has been tried and failed. Now the region flirts with fundamentalism which, even if it works as an organizing principle for society, poses a mortal threat to the outside world.

It is in this context that US President George Bush used his state of the union address last February to challenge Hosni Mubarak to open up Egypt’s political system: “The great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”

This hoped for transition isn’t merely the mantra of neoconservatives or the Bush administration. Everyone understands that representative political regimes tend to be stable, less bellicose and centrist.

Under US pressure – Egypt receives $1.8 billion in annual aid – Mubarak did allow the country’s parliament to adopt a constitutional amendment which introduced a multi-party presidential election in September. The 77-year-old Mubarak, who first came to power with the assassination of president Anwar Sadat in 1981, was reelected. And the now imprisoned Ayman Nour won 8 percent of the vote – a very distant second.

A subsequent series of votes for parliament, spread out over three rounds and five weeks, was marked by crookedness. Supporters of the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood (the political precursor to Hamas and other Isalmist-oriented groups) were allowed to run as independents. Many of their followers were beaten by plain-clothes thugs and riot police; at least 11 people were killed at the polls.

Yet the Brotherhood won some 90 mandates in the 454-seat parliament (and nearly 40% of all votes cast). The Brotherhood could have done even better but feared contesting more than 150 seats against Mubarak’s ruling party. Some 75% of eligible voters shunned the polls because they distrusted the entire enterprise. International monitors were barred.

So how far along is Egypt today – after both a presidential and a parliamentary election – on the road toward “democracy?” Not very.

The secular opposition has been decimated at the polls. Unable to campaign vigorously thanks to various legal and political constraints, the 15 non-Islamist and non-Mubarak parties garnered less than a dozen seats. Nour himself lost the parliamentary seat he had held for 10 years to Mubarak’s well-oiled political machine.

With the Muslim Brotherhood ascendant and a state-controlled media making it virtually impossible for alternative reformist voices to be heard, chances are good that Egypt’s next leader will be Mubarak’s son Gamal.

Like the Shah of Iran back in the 1970s, Mubarak’s express ultimatum is: my autocracy or the Islamist way – nothing in between.

Closer to home, the January 25 Palestinian parliamentary elections are also in turmoil largely because a failed Palestinian establishment fears the rise of Hamas.

As is the case with Egypt, friends of freedom are forced to choose between a nascent alliance of the politically bankrupt old-guard of Mahmoud Abbas coupled with the violent “reformers” led by Marwan Barghouti, or else find themselves saddled with the Islamists of Hamas.

But for genuine democracy to evolve, it needs to be nurtured. Until the West demands reformist policies throughout the region – including a truly free press, accountable government and the kind of political socialization that could contribute to democracy’s development – it will be left to wonder why it must continuously choose between the autocrats and the Islamists.

– A December 26 Jerusalem Post editorial

Christmas in the Holy Land

Will the most memorable Holy Land image of Christmas 2005 be the siege of Manger Square in Bethlehem last week by hundreds of gunmen from the Aksa Martyrs Brigades?

And if it is, what does this foreshadow for a Christian Arab minority destined to live under a sovereign Palestinian state?

The gunmen, underscoring the lawlessness to which Bethlehem and other places in the Palestinian Authority are subjected, held up the municipality demanding jobs with the PA’s security forces.

In light of the season and international attention focused on the nearby Church of the Nativity, revered as Christ’s birthplace, the PA moved to quickly find a solution to the standoff. A short while later Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh urged foreigners to visit his “peaceful city,” saying: "There’s no reason tourists shouldn’t come. Our great city depends on tourism for its economic survival.” Palestinian officials, though, need to start thinking about Christians – Palestinian Arabs as well as visiting pilgrims – not only as sources of tourist revenue, but as having a rightful connection to this shared and holy place.

The sad fact is that many Christians no longer feel at home in a city that was once over 90 percent theirs. Today Christians comprise less than a quarter of Bethlehem’s population. And their numbers are constantly dwindling. While it may be good public relations, it isn’t enough for PA officials to attend Christmas services once a year. Christians must be made to feel safe in a Palestinian political environment which is increasingly taking on Islamist overtones.

With (anticipated) Palestinian sovereignty also comes responsibility. Is the Palestinian leadership – which polls now suggest will include members of the Islamist Hamas movement – ready, as well as able, to protect minority Christian Arabs from discrimination and intimidation?

If history is any indication, there is plenty of room for concern. The Aksa Brigades who commandeered Manger Square last week had no qualms, a few years ago, about turning Beit Jala’s Christian residents into virtual human shields by firing from their homes into Jerusalem’s nearby Gilo neighborhood. In the spring of 2002, they also overran and occupied the Church of the Nativity for a month.

Paradoxically, many Christians outside the region worry that if they publicly criticize the powers that be in the Palestinian Authority, they will only be making things worse for their brethren who live there.

The situation is further complicated by those Palestinian Christians who associate themselves with fading Arab nationalism in general and the Palestinian national struggle in particular. Conveniently, key PA spokespeople such as Hanan Ashrawi are Christian. And it is in their obvious interest to spotlight Israel’s missteps vis-à-vis Arab Christians in the Holy Land even as they do their best to shield PA wrongdoing.

Yet it is not enough, particularly on this day, to point to PA transgressions. Inside Israel, Christian Arabs sometimes find themselves wedged between an indifferent Jewish majority and an increasingly assertive Muslim minority.

Though 80 percent of the approximately 150,000 Christians across the Holy Land are Arab, the community is heterogeneous. For instance, the Copt, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syrian denominations are non-Arab. And Israel’s failure to recognize Christian diversity and make affirmative efforts to reach out to non-Arab Christians remains an appalling failure.

On the bright side, Israel is one of the few countries in the region where Christian communities have grown and thrived in recent decades. Israel’s Arab Christians maintain among the highest matriculation scores of any population; proportionally, Arab Christians also produce very high numbers of university graduates.

On the other hand, across the denominational and ethnic divide, Christian leaders complain – some irately, others with understanding of our security dilemmas – that the Jewish state does not always treat them with respect or sensitivity.

Even as we express disquiet for the well-being of Christians under Palestinian jurisdiction, we must not lose sight of our own shortcomings. It is in Israel’s interest to foster the natural alliance with Christendom. But more importantly still, Judaism demands we respect the “stranger among us.”

We wish our Christian readers marking the festival of Christ’s birth (and those in the eastern tradition who observe the holiday on January 6) a Merry Christmas and a peaceful 2006.

– The Jerusalem Post Christmas Day Editorial, December 25, 2005

Ahmadinejad & Hate

Normal and abnormal hatred

The hater suffers from a pathological, obsessive, preoccupation with the object of disdain

• By ELLIOT JAGER


Here’s what I hate (in no particular order): computer spam, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jerusalem taxi drivers, a persistently annoying colleague, and the NIS 417,900 Hummer now being advertised in the newspapers.

I tried turning to the Bible for solace. But last week’s Torah portion had Simeon and Levi slaughtering every newly circumcised male in Shechem. And this week, Joseph’s brothers, seeing that Jacob loves him the most, hate him so passionately that – as the narrative begins – they can’t even bring themselves to greet him.

There’s no ignoring hate, but do we understand it?

Our sages were aware of the problem. They surmised that the uneducated riffraff hated the scholarly class even more than the gentiles hated the Jews. Just as the Eskimos have a nomenclature for snow, Jewish tradition categorizes all sorts of hatreds: hidden hate, hatred of justice, gratuitous hatred, and the particularly despised – self-hatred.

Maariv reported last week on a survey which found, not surprisingly after five gruesome years of Palestinian Arab belligerence, that topping the “most hated” list for nearly all Israelis were Palestinians. But 67 percent of leftists hated “settlers” even more than Palestinians.

Besides settlers, the Orthodox, haredim, leftists and Arab Israelis also scored high on being despised.

William Hazlitt, in an irreverent homage to the subject, The Pleasure of Hating (1826), says that “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.”
For Hazlitt the pleasure of hating eats into everything. “Nature seems made up of antipathies: Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.”

The contemporary Romanian-born French philosopher E.M. Cioram agrees: “You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving, but stop hating. Hatred preserves; in it, in its chemistry, resides the ‘mystery’ of life. Not for nothing is hatred still the best tonic ever discovered, for which any organism, however feeble, has tolerance.”

And for the writer Minna Antrim “To be loved is to be fortunate, but to be hated is to achieve distinction.”


THEN THERE is hatred of an entirely different order. Psychiatrist Willard Gaylin, in Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence, posits that the truly hazardous variety is not “normal to the human condition.”

Laypeople often confuse rage, prejudice or bigotry with authentic hatred. A key criteria, Gaylin says, is whether the hater suffers from a pathological, obsessive, preoccupation with the object of disdain.

Hatred is more than an emotion. Gaylin believes that most of us have never really experienced genuine clinical hatred. “We are not one with the terrorists. We do not experience that which they feel, nor are we likely to do what they do. The hatred that requires a defined enemy – the hatred that seeks the humiliation and destruction of that enemy and takes joy in it – is blessedly a rare phenomenon.”

For Gaylin, genuine hatred is a quasi-delusional condition, a mental disease. It’s the sick flip-side of love in that it, too, requires an object of attachment. “Obsessive hatred is by definition irrational. The choice of the victim is more often dictated by the unconscious needs and personal history of the hater than by the nature, or even the actions, of the hated.”

So, by Gaylin’s criteria, the intense dislike I have toward Jerusalem taxi drivers, or – I’d like to believe – the disdain some haredim feel toward Reform Jews, or the revulsion many American Reform Jews feel toward George W. Bush are unlikely to inspire real trouble. These “hatreds” are too mild, too ephemeral.

Ahmadinejad’s hatred, in contrast, is durable and relentless.

By claiming that the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II was a “myth,” by urging European countries who “claim that they have killed Jews in World War II” to “provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe,” and by advocating that Israel be “wiped off the map” – I’d diagnose him a genuine malevolent, obsessive, quasi-delusional hater.

In Iran, as in the dysfunctional Palestinian territories, hatred appears to be the societal norm. Ahmadinejad’s hatred needs a self-reinforcing cultural milieu in which to incubate. Teheran’s ruling circle presumably provides that environment just as Palestinian society has long nurtured the pathological, self-defeating, hate manifested by the various Fatah groupings, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

It’s no accident that Ahmadinejad spent part of last week conferring with Hamas’s politburo chief, Khaled Mashal and heard that “The Palestinian nation, Hamas movement and the Islamic world appreciate the stands adopted by the Islamic Republic of Iran against the usurper regime of Israel.”

Nor does it surprise that left to their democratic druthers, Palestinians gave a landslide victory to Hamas in Thursday’s municipal elections, or that Farhat Abu Nidal, proud mother of two shahids (martyrs) is number 22 on the Hamas list for the Palestinian general elections.
Instances of profound hatred occurring among normal individuals or societies are regulated – by super-egos, parents and police. Civilized societies remove individuals whose pathological hatred can be certified as posing a danger.

But what do you do about entire polities mobilized by hate?

You start by recognizing their abnormality, and then you quarantine the madmen who rule them.

– From a December 19 Jerusalem Post column

CHABAD THEOLOGY & DAVID BERGER

Q&A with Historian David Berger

Veteran Brooklyn College History Professor David Berger has a reputation for being both a scholar and an outstanding lecturer. A kippa-wearing Orthodox Jew, Berger received rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University. Despite his soft-spoken scholarly demeanor, Berger is passionate about his expose of Chabad. It is, he says, of 'transcendent importance.'

Q) Does mainstream Chabad really believe that the Lubavitcher Rebbe is a Jesus-like diety?

A) Religious mentors in the major yeshivas of Chabad in both Israel and the United States, publications issued by mainstream Chabad, and influential, highly educated Lubavitch laymen, take the following assertions literally: The supremely righteous, of whom the Rebbe and Moses are the chief exemplars, annul their own essence to the point where their entire Essence is that of God. It is permissible to bow to them with this understanding. For this reason, the Rebbe is omniscient, omnipotent, and entirely without limits. He is 'indistinguishable' from God.

Q) Because he is a transparent window for pure divinity, a 'man-God,' 'when you speak to him, you speak to God.'

A) There are Chabad hasidim who reject such formulations but there is no question that these beliefs are well represented in the mainstream.

Q) Nevertheless, what about those who insist that Chabad's messianist camp is a minority faction? Regrettably, this assertion is pure propaganda. In Crown Heights, the main synagogue at Lubavitch headquarters is a messianist stronghold where the Rebbe's messiahship is proclaimed at every prayer service.

The Rabbinic court is messianist; the largest men's school (Oholei Torah/Oholei Menachem), the women's seminary Machon Chanah, and other educational institutions are shot through with messianism; the messianist slogan is on a banner posted on the headquarters of the Chabad Women's Organization; and much more.

In Israel, the rabbi of Kfar Chabad signed a rabbinic ruling that Jewish law requires belief in the Rebbe's Messiahship, and the major columnist of the journal Beis Moshiach is a mentor in Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim there.

The large Chabad school system in Safed teaches the Rebbe's Messiahship.

Over 60 Israeli rabbis, including chief rabbis of several towns, signed the messianist ruling.

The situation among emissaries is somewhat better, but that ruling was signed by many of them, including the Chief Rabbi of the former Soviet Union and 16 of the major emissaries there. There are indeed non-messianists in Chabad, but they are clearly outnumbered.

Q) People joke that 'Chabad is the religion closest to Judaism.' Why take their theology so seriously?

The inclination to joke about this development is one of many reasons for the failure of mainstream Orthodoxy to act. In fact, Chabad is a movement of monumental importance. Observant Jews are profoundly dependent on its emissaries all over the world, it plays a major role in kosher food preparation and supervision worldwide, its rabbis dominate or are poised to dominate Jewish communities in a startling number of countries.

While your question reflects a widely held perception, that perception is so off the mark as to be the near opposite of the truth.

It will be exceedingly difficult to save Judaism from this catastrophe precisely because of the central role of Chabad in Jewish life.

Q) If that's the case, why don't Orthodox authorities speak out? Have any disassociated themselves from Chabad?

A) I devote an entire chapter - 'Explaining the Inexplicable' - to this question, and the forthcoming issue of Modern Judaism will publish a somewhat elaborated version entitled 'The Fragility of Religious Doctrine: Accounting for Orthodox Acquiescence in the Belief in a Second Coming.'

Among the reasons for this acquiescence are: The 'good things' done by the movement, the desire for unity, the dependence on Chabad, the conviction that this is a transient insanity, a blinkered concern with one's own subgroup, and the instinct that people who look and behave like hassidim must be Orthodox Jews. Moreover, Orthodox education no longer focuses on polemical literature against messianic Christianity. There is a startling degree of theological relativism among even very Orthodox Jews.

'Judaism,' I write in the book 'which was once a great faith, is now an agglomeration of dress, deportment and ritual.' Add to all this the financial and political influence of Chabad, and the difficulty of waging this battle is thrown into even bolder relief.

Q) Nevertheless, don't you agree that bringing lost soul's to Chabad's brand of Judaism is better than having them lost to Judaism altogether?

A) A reasonable question. One of the major obstacles I face is the need to convince people that it's the wrong question.

The answer to this question is 'yes,' though the answer becomes less unequivocal if we are speaking about belief in the Rebbe as divine. In fact, we face a very different question.

Is it acceptable to smash the boundaries of the faith to pieces if doing this will attract thousands or even hundreds of thousands of irreligious Jews to the transformed religion?

Recognizing Chabad messianists as Orthodox rabbis in good standing abolishes Judaism's criteria for identifying the Messiah and awards victory to Christianity on a key issue in the historic Jewish-Christian debate.

One does not undermine Judaism in order to save it.

[Berger was my professor at Brooklyn College back in the 1970s]

VENICE, THE JEWS & CHABAD

Back to the ghetto

• By ELLIOT JAGER


A recent visit to Venice tells me that, for many Jews, ritual and a sense of connection to Jewish civilization override theology.

I had heard that Venice was a place of romance; a magical city built on canals. But once there, we also discovered Venice's 'Jewish problem.' Two factions - one foreign, small and missionizing, the other indigenous, threatened and struggling - are engaged in a love-hate relationship.

Jews began to settle in the area in the 13th century. Venice's economic elite needed them; the Church despised them. Which is how it came to be that on March 29, 1516 the Venetian Council of Ten established the world's first ghetto for their 700 Jews:

'The Jews must all live together... in order to prevent their roaming about at night: Let there be built two Gates... which ...shall be opened in the morning... and closed at midnight by four Christian guards appointed and paid by the Jews....'

Predictably, it was to this ghetto to which we were drawn for our 'getaway' from the pressures of life in Israel. We checked into the Locanda del Ghetto Hotel. Outside our window was the ghetto courtyard where today the frailties of, and contending hopes for Jewish life in Venice play themselves out. Here is the center of the established community, whose religious life is led by Chief Rabbi Elia Richetti, as well as the power base of Chabad-Lubavitch's Rami Banin.

Both are sympathetic characters; both Italian-born, both Orthodox.

But Richetti is the conservative. He wants to preserve the local community and minister to its 300 faithful. The 300,000 Jewish tourists who visit the ghetto annually interest him only mildly.

For Banin those tourists are everything. The Chabad emissary has flawless Hebrew and American-accented English. He's singularly dedicated to spreading the rebbe's message.

The official community or kehilla 'shares' the courtyard and its environs with Lubavitch. Its Jewish museum daily draws scores of visitors - Jewish and non-Jewish alike - and is a gateway to the ghetto's five historic synagogues. There are also an old age home, art galleries, tourist shops and a kosher bakery/grocery. There's an eruv and even a mikve.

But it is Chabad's in-your-face presence that appropriates the limelight: A storefront yeshiva for a dozen American and Israeli rabbinical students, an outreach center, and the strategically located Lubavitch-run Gam-Gam restaurant.

I davened several mornings with Chabad, praying opposite a picture of the rebbe and a wall adorned with the messianic catchphrase: Yehi adoneinu moreinu v'rabbeinu melech ha'moshiah l'olam vaed! (Long live our master, teacher, and rabbi, the King Messiah, for ever and ever.)

The official community distances itself from Chabad, though Richetti sometimes turns to the yeshiva boys for a minyan and certifies Gam-Gam's kashrut. As both pulpit rabbi and neighborhood coordinator, he's proud that some 20 families order meat and other kosher provisions from Milan.

The kehilla stays afloat thanks to a combination of state aid, a communal tax, and property revenue - not to mention tourism.


MEANWHILE, SLOWLY, methodically, Chabad appears committed to usurping Judaism in Venice. But this is not Bangkok; there's an indigenous community that won't roll over and die.

Chabad appears to have deep pockets. It set up shop 12 years ago and now plans to open a kindergarten (to compete with the kehilla's kindergarten attended by 12 youngsters). Richetti notes that no Jewish child has been born in Venice in three years, and is suspicious of Chabad's intentions.

But to this outsider, the competition seems like a plus.

I came to Venice with grudging admiration for Chabad. Yes, I know it's a cult dependent on the charismatic 'presence' of the rebbe, but I'd rather see Jews hook up with Chabad than with Hare Krishna. If the alternative is nihilism and alienation, I can live with Chabad's remedy. At the same time, I'm intolerant of Chabad's ability to get away with promulgating the heresy that the rebbe, who died in 1994, is the Living Messiah.

But that's theology. Let's talk supper.

After Friday night prayers in one of the historic but melancholy-looking synagogues, we went off to Gam-Gam (with its Crown Heights decor), where we experienced an evening of charm, warmth, and song. Maybe you have to be a member of the tribe to appreciate how good it feels to be gazing at a Venetian canal while singing Friday-night zemirot in the company of 150 Jews of all stripes, lands, and levels of affiliation, enjoying a free, bountiful meal waited upon by rabbis-in-training.

You'd have to be an ingrate not to appreciate Chabad's presence in Venice. I'm told that in the summer, tables are set up along the adjacent canal front to accommodate the hundreds of visiting Jews, some experiencing their first-ever Shabbat meal.

Yet I doubt Chabad is converting very many to their schismatic brand of Judaism. Eating with Lubavitch in Venice highlighted for me that what people are looking for is not theology, but ritual and Jewish camaraderie.

Travelers ready to embrace a Jewish experience don't want to think about the relationship between the Creator and the universe. What they want is an exotic synagogue service, a touch of history, and afterwards cholent, song, and companionship.

There's an outreach lesson here other streams of Judaism may want to emulate.

– From a November 15 Jerusalem Post column