Stella Paul
Boston is famous for Harvard, Paul Revere, and now for 70 loony liberal rabbis, each blessed with an ego bigger than the Green Monster at Fenway Park, and wisdom smaller than a baked bean.
Already, their noxious stunt of June 10 is legend, astounding Jews from Boston to San Francisco, Israel and beyond. For on that day, the rabbis finally managed to bestir themselves about the notorious, Saudi-funded mega-mosque in Roxbury. Its founder, MIT graduate Abdurahman Alamoudi, is currently serving a 23-year sentence for al-Qaeda-linked terrorist pranks. Its trust president, Osama Kandil, is the director of an Islamic charity designated as terrorist by the U.S. government. Its trustee, Jamal Badawi, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.
So what did these genius rabbis do? Did they demand an investigation into why Mayor Thomas Menino gave away $2 million of precious public land to the Islamic Society of Boston on which to build the mosque? Did they launch a public awareness campaign of the mosque’s terrifying link with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the wart-faced “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood who’s banned from the U.S. but served as the mosque’s trustee? Did they picket outside the home of Governor Deval Patrick, singing rousing protest songs and demanding he give back a $50,000 check he publicly accepted from a jihad-spouting imam for the purpose of training Massachusetts police in “Muslim cultural sensitivities”?
Of course not! These are far-left Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis we’re talking about and they worship only the progressive creed: putting barbarians first.
Instead, what these wise and wonderful rabbis chose to do was issue a public “Jewish fatwa” against Dr. Charles Jacobs, Boston’s heroic one-man truth squad about the mosque’s radical leadership. Yes, the Saintly Seventy all loudly signed their names to “An Open Letter to the Jewish Community,” published in the Jewish Advocate, in which they demanded that “Mr. Jacobs discontinue his destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community, which is based on innuendo, half-truths and unproven conspiracy theories. We call upon members of our community to reject the dangerous politics of division that Mr. Jacobs fosters.”
The rabbis then applauded their own “commitment to interfaith dialogue and cooperation. We stand together in our commitment to a community in which neighbors seek to know one another and join together for the common good.”
Finally, they closed with a reference to the Torah portion in which Israelite scouts are struck by fear: “Because they succumbed to their fears, God condemned this generation to die in the wilderness. We refuse to allow Mr. Jacobs to spread his calumnies and paralyze our community in fear.”
I’ll pause a moment to let the fumes of the rabbis’ galloping smug-itis clear the room.
Dr. Charles Jacobs is a morally serious man. We’re talking about a man who was given the Boston Freedom Award by Coretta Scott King for helping to emancipate enslaved black Africans in Sudan, in his work as founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group.
In 2007, Jacobs was named by The Forward as one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders. He not only co-founded Boston’s branch of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), to expose media bias against Israel, he also founded The David Project in 2002. This powerhouse organization trains college students to advocate for Israel and fight back against the demonization of Israel on campus.
Today, Dr. Jacobs heads Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group he started in 2008 to safeguard American values from attack by radical Islamists and to support moderate Muslims.
This is the fine, brave man that 70 Boston rabbis defamed and tossed in the trash — and even potentially endangered by targeting him and his family for attack by vengeful Islamists.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the trashcan. It turns out Boston’s Jews did not relish the discovery that their spiritual leaders are preening ignoramuses.
Confounding the rabbis’ expectations, they did not weep with gratitude and say, “Thank you, O Great Ones, for inspiring us to reach out to the homicidal other. You know that sweet, misunderstood young man from Sudbury, Tarek Mehanna, who was arrested for planning to machine gun shoppers in New England malls? Yeah, the one the feds just linked to al-Qaeda. Well, in the spirit of dialogue you always talk about, we’re inviting him to Zoe’s bat mitzvah. He’s seated next to Aunt Ida.”
Alas for the rabbis, this tender vision did not come to pass. Instead, the good people of Boston were upset, appalled, and outraged by the saintly seventy’s collective attack on Charles Jacobs. They wrote letters to the editor, emailed articles, and, in the case of the Russian Jews, organized a take-no-prisoners response.
“Just look at the vicious ad hominem attack unleashed by self-selected community leadership on Charles Jacobs,” wrote 90 prominent Russian Jews:
Our Jewish leaders who were tame as lambs in front of Islamists, roared as lions against this brave and lonely voice of dissent. … Back in the Soviet Union authorities would put a man like Jacobs behind bars for anti-Soviet propaganda. In the United States we are dismayed by attempts to ostracize and silence him. Unable to handle the message, Jewish community leadership decided to attack the messenger. But this shall not pass.
As for Charles Jacobs, he did not slink into a corner, ashen-faced, and tape his mouth shut, despite the progressive rabbis’ fervent prayers. Instead, he issued a public challenge to the rabbis to “break the silence” about threats posed to the Boston Jewish community by radicalized Muslims.
And when he convened a public forum to discuss the controversy, 400 people showed up, hungry to learn more. “The cars lined the streets of the residential neighborhood for blocks. … Inside, several hundred people packed the spacious social hall. The draw: Charles Jacobs,” reported the Jewish Advocate.
These anxious Bostonians wanted to know it all: Who was the money behind the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, as the mega-mosque in Roxbury is officially known? What does it mean that the Muslim American Society of (MAS) controls the mosque, and that federal prosecutors have named MAS the “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood”? Why was the MAS inviting Holocaust denier Yasir Qadhi to give intensive four-day seminars at the mosque?
Charles Jacobs was in his element. After five long years of struggling to get out the facts about Boston’s radical Muslim leadership, the city was finally listening.
Seventy progressive rabbis, strutting like peacocks showing off their moral finery, versus one lonely truth-teller?
I like the odds.
Stella Paul blogs at StellaPundit and can be reached at StellaPundit@aol.com
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