1.Tablet(http://www.tabletmag.com)
Yale Chaplain Who Wrote Controversial NYT Letter Resigns, 8 Septemebr 2014
Claimed ‘best antidote’ to anti-Semitism was for Jews to pressure Israel
by Yair Rosenberg
Rev. Bruce Shipman, the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, has resigned in the wake of controversy over a New York Times letter he wrote suggesting Jews were collectively culpable for Israel’s actions and for subsequent rises in global anti-Semitism. “The Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, on his own initiative, has resigned as Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, effective immediately,” said a statement released by the Episcopal Church at Yale. “It is our belief that the dynamics between the Board of Governors and the Priest-in-Charge occasioned the resignation of the Rev. Shipman.”
In his letter to the Times, written in response to Deborah Lipstadt’s op-ed about rising European anti-Semitism, Shipman claimed that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” Many readers expressed outrage at what they deemed Shipman’s exercise in victim-blaming, and an attempt to hold all Jews across the globe responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. As Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead put it,
No, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be a realization among cretins that “the Jews” are a group of people with very different opinions and desires, that they do not act in concert, and that individual Yale students, for example, of Jewish descent who are American citizens have zero responsibility for any policies of the government of Israel. Anti-Semitism is like racism: most racists don’t think of themselves as racists and most anti-Semites similarly don’t recognize their own twisted prejudice. Perhaps the chaplain at Yale should reflect on the passage in which a well known first century Jewish rabbi urged his followers to take the log out of their own eye before trying to take the splinter out of someone else’s.
Our own editor Mark Oppenheimer also questioned Shipman’s moral calculus:
By your reasoning, why wouldn’t one write, “The best antidote to stop-and-frisk policing would be for black men everywhere to press other black men to stop shooting each other”? Why wouldn’t one write—perhaps after a Muslim was beaten up by white-supremacist thugs—“The best antidote to Islamophobia would be for radical Islam’s patrons abroad to press ISIS and Al Qaeda to just cut it out”?
“Institutional Christianity continues to display its unrivaled expertise in the field” of “combating anti-Semitism,” quipped Berkeley’s David Schraub. In a later post, Schraub observed that someone like Shipman who insists that Jews behave in gentile-approved ways in order to live unmolested is perpetuating a world governed by anti-Semitic assumptions:
[I]t probably is the case that a non-Jew is less likely to punch a Jew in the face if he perceives Jews (as a group) as largely behaving in ways he sees as salutary. But that does not mean there is necessarily less anti-Semitism in such a state of affairs, if this view is transformed into an entitlement to such agreeability from Jews. That’s just anti-Semitism in a different form; the “safety” it provides to Jews [is] purchased at the price of their independence. Anyone can have positive attitudes towards groups who behave in ways they like; the true test of egalitarianism is respecting the minority when it behaves differently than how you’d want it to.
It seems the Episcopal Church at Yale agreed–or at least felt that someone who harbored Shipman’s views would not be the best face to represent their organization on campus. Hopefully, this episode will serve as a reminder that the “best antidote” to bigotry is always to fight the bigotry, not call on its victims to somehow attempt to appease their despisers.
2.Algemeiner (http://www.algemeiner.com)
Revealed: Hamas-Backing Qatar, Also Funding Brookings Institute, Home of Former U.S. MidEast Envoy Indyk, 7 September 2014
by Dave Bender
Questions are emerging over possible conflicts-of-interest after The New York Times highlighted Qatari funding for U.S. think tanks, including the Brookings Institute, employer of former U.S. envoy Martin Indyk, who was directly involved in recent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Qatar, the small but wealthy Middle East nation, agreed last year to make a $14.8 million, four-year donation to Brookings, which has helped fund a Brookings affiliate in Qatar and a project on United States relations with the Islamic world,” according to The Times.
The report comes just weeks after Israel vociferously voiced objection to Qatar’s funding of its major adversary, terror group Hamas.
In July, then Israeli President Shimon Peres told United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was visiting the region, that Israel would not stand by while Qatar continued to finance Hamas militants.
In his last full day in office, Peres, a historically dovish leader, struck a defiant tone in a statement delivered to the media after meeting Ban at the President’s Residence, in Jerusalem.
“Qatar does not have the right to send money for rockets and tunnels which are fired at innocent civilians,” Peres said. “Their funding of terror the must stop.”
Newsweek‘s Benny Avni reported that the Qatari government also paid for the UN Secretary-General’s flight through the Middle East at the time, where his first stop was Doha, where he denounced Israel’s Operation Protective Edge.
While Brookings said its personnel were “not influenced by the views of our funders,” in 2012, The Times noted, the Qatari foreign ministry said that – thanks to a new accord with the institute, “the center will assume its role in reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.”
Additionally, in a recent report appearing in the UK-based Telegraph, both Qatar and Kuwait were singled out for openly, and even avidly, aiding fundraising efforts for Islamic State/ISIS terrorists who are currently engaged in fierce clashes with the Syrian army alongside Israel on the Golan Heights.
Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, who lives in the Qatari capital, Doha, said on Aug 21, that “Our relationship with Qatar is not new… We appreciate Qatar’s stand, the brave political stand of its government and people,” after a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Qatar’s support is not just for Hamas movement, the country extends its support to all the Palestinian people,” Meshaal said, according to local media.
In comment over the figures in The Times’ report, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of Jerusalem-based funding watchdog, NGO-Monitor, told The Algemeiner that, “Indyk’s Brookings activities have been a part of the focus of this article, and the fact that Qatar is a primary funder of Brookings and that Qatar is also a major funder of Hamas are very clear conflicts of interest that Indyk never acknowledged, which makes all of the activities even more problematic than before.”
“Indyk was never forthcoming about that issue, and that’s the overall criticism that he’s faced,” Steinberg said.
Steinberg says that the report exposes a wider issue of NGO influence on U.S. and Israeli politics.
“This is a problem that Israel has faced for 20 years, and now it’s clear that this is something that the Americans are waking up to,” he noted.
“This isn’t just about Qatar,” he said. “It’s about Norway, it’s about the European Union. What the article didn’t say, for instance, was that the European Union provides money to political groups, NGOs, and think tanks, to lobby against the death penalty.”
“And, of course, they’re heavily manipulating Israeli politics in a much more intensive effort, basically to control the Israeli democratic process on issues like war and peace, and boundaries.”
Steinberg said that such issues “…have to be addressed just like funding for academic programs that specialize in the Middle East and are funded by Saudi Arabia, or another oil-rich countries; all are problematic because they inevitably have the spin the donor puts on them.”
On Facebook, commentator Rabbi Shmuley Boteach termed the article, a “devastating expose” of the Brookings Institute as an “agent of Qatar.”
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