One of the more amusing pastimes is watching how the myriad instruments of the Israel-bashing media keep discovering the novelty of Jewish leftists who justify anti-Semitism and even Arab terrorism. Their serendipity knows no boundaries when discovering Jews who justify PLO atrocities and insist that Israel is to blame for everything wrong with the world. In reality, self-hating Jews promoting a "Blame the Jews" ideology have been around for thousands of years and go back at least to the Hellenistic Age, and probably even earlier. Anti-Semites have always utilized them voraciously. After all, if even these "Jews" are convinced that the Jews are a greedy and evil people, surely it must be so. Jewish anti-Semites, like gentile anti-Semites, generally do not concede that they are bigots. They insist that they are ’only" anti-Zionist and really want only the best for the Jews, which just happens to include the total capitulation of Israel to Arab fascism.

Of the countless such Jewish Uncle Toms, "Tomming" it up for the Jew-bashers of the world, perhaps the best known in the United States is Michael Lerner. Lerner made the evening news early in the first Clinton Administration, when Hillary Clinton briefly considered promoting Lerner’s New Age "politics of meaning," a sort of generic liberation theology, whose deity is the Idol of political correctness. The "politics of meaning" was nothing more nor less than the advocacy of the left’s political agenda mixed with a shtikele of Hillarycare, superficially dressed up in religious slogans and symbols. Under the "politics of meaning," all prayer is replaced with self-indulgent endless repetitions of the mantra "loving and caring" and assertions that all those who disagree with the Left are greedy and selfish.

Within the Jewish world, Lerner is better known for serving as editor of the flaky Far-Left Tikkun magazine, a sort of a mix between a nominally-Jewish Rolling Stone and Z Magazine. "Tikkun" means "repair" and refers presumably to the concept in Judaism of "repairing the world." The only problem is that, characteristically, "Tikkun" is completely misrepresented by Lerner and his people. It has nothing to do with politically correct "social justice," as they insist, but rather with the battle against paganism and the submission of the world to God’s will. In other words, the pursuit of PC paganism a la Tikkun is the exact opposite of the traditional Judaic concept of "Tikkun."

Tikkun Magazine presents its readers every month with a roll call of shallow leftism, mixed with New Age touchy-feely recreational "compassion" and peace posturing. It uses the word "healing" the way most people use commas, usually in the sense of "spiritual healing" (whatever that is), but is not averse to offering pop medical tips without a license.

Tikkun seeks to serve as a nostalgic fossilization of Sixties counter-culture and New Left radicalism. Last fall Tikkun Magazine insisted that the US respond to the September 11 attacks (which it calls the September 11 "disturbances") by feeling Osama bin Laden’s pain. It has repeatedly advocated psychedelic drugs use and proposes transcendental meditation as the solution to Middle East strife.

The magazine serves as the flagship for Lerner’s pseudo-Judaic cult movement, calling itself the Tikkun Community, which has a handful of "synagogues," the largest located in San Francisco. Since Lerner can be counted on to support the Arab position on the Middle East with perfect consistency, he has become the darling of much of the anti-Israel liberal media. He regularly writes Israel-bashing Op-Eds for the Los Angeles Times and for other outlets and has appeared in the New York Times, where he complained about being victimized by a witch-hunting anti-progressive conformist Jewish community. Naturally, Lerner sticks to the line that he is only opposed to Israel’s current policies, not to its existence, and if he happens to "understand" and rationalize the mass massacres of Israeli civilians by Arab terrorists, this has nothing to do with him wishing Jews harm. The campus protesters who took to the streets to support bin Laden also claimed that they possessed not a smidgen of anti-Americanism.

Lerner’s op-ed piece claiming he had been subjected to threats of violence appeared in the Los Angeles Times (May 18, 2001), and was widely cited and reported. But Lerner’s word on the existence of such threats is not exactly ironclad or inscribed in stone tablets. The Philadelphia Inquirer a few years back reported that letters to the editor, in Tikkun, agreeing with Lerner’s articles, were in fact being written under false names by Lerner himself!

Lerner routinely is introduced in his columns and at events as a Rabbi, and he signs his columns and his electronic postings as "Rabbi Lerner." In fact, it should be emphasized up front that Lerner is not and never has been a Rabbi, and virtually no one outside the Tikkun cult acknowledges him as being any sort of clergyman. He did briefly take some courses in the 1960s to prepare him to be a Jewish Sunday School teacher. But he has no Rabbinic training and was never ordained as a Rabbi by any Rabbinic training seminary or institution. He claims that he was "ordained" when three mysterious unnamed "Rabbis" placed their hands upon his head, while perhaps wishing for The Force to be with him, but no Rabbi and no one outside the Tikkun movement would recognize this "ordination" as kosher.

Lerner began his political career back in Berkeley in the 1960s, where he was active in several leftist groups and in the "movement." In one of the finest reminiscences of the day, David Horowitz describes Lerner’s wedding, which he attended, in his book "Radical Son":

"The cake at his wedding was inscribed with a Weatherman slogan: Smash Monogamy. Soon he and his wife had a child, and the young family went east. When the couple separated shortly thereafter, mother and son went to live in Boston. Lerner, however, returned to Berkeley. "Michael," I said, "how can you leave your son in the east to come to Berkeley? He needs you." Without hesitation, Lerner answered: "David, you don’t understand. I have to be here. Berkeley is the center of the world-historical spirit." Lerner also made me understand that drugs were central to the consciousness of the Movement. On discovering that I had never taken LSD, he was incredulous: "You have to take LSD. Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is."

From Berkeley Lerner migrated to Seattle, where he served as commissar of the thuggish Far-Leftist Seattle Liberation Front (SLF). In a February 22, 1970 interview in the Seattle Times, Lerner predicted that he would be fired from his academic post (as visiting assistant professor) at the University of Washington because "I dig Marx," and that "three years from now I don’t expect to be alive. I’m too public a person." At least one of these predictions came true when, in March, the philosophy department voted against renewing Lerner’s appointment due to his lack of serious credentials, and so the university joined a long list of bogeymen whom Lerner claims have persecuted him because of his politics. Earlier, Lerner’s Seattle Liberation Front joined with the Black Student Union to invade six university buildings and brutally beat at least fourteen instructors and students who did not heed their "strike order." (Lerner, if we can judge from newspaper photos, remained at a safe distance, bullhorn in hand.) State Senator James Andersen, (later a state supreme court justice) described the firing of Lerner as being based on the fact that the taxpayers were "fed up to their ears with paying Lerner to teach violence."

It was at that time that Lerner began his lifelong habit of threatening to sue anyone and everyone who criticizes him or disagrees with him (and FrontPage expects to receive such a threat momentarily); all this from a person whose claim to fame began with membership in the Berkeley Free Speech movement. When Slade Gorton (then state attorney and later Senator from Washington) described Lerner’s Seattle Liberation Front as "totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism," Lerner threatened suit. When the New Republic revealed that Lerner’s sister had been placing personal ads in magazines to try to get her brother dates, Lerner and sister threatened to sue. (Lerner seems to have a long history of dating problems; in a letter widely circulated on the Internet, Lerner writes an appeal to friends to find him dates, but only with Ashkenazi or European women, a bit of racism he has yet to explain.

When Professor Edward Alexander from the University of Washington wrote an expose of Lerner, the latter sent threatening letters to numerous Jewish newspapers and magazines, warning they would be sued by him if they printed the piece. (The classic and authoritative analysis of the Lerner career is still the book written by the same Alexander (The Jewish Wars: Reflections by One of the Belligerents, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996, especially pp. 141-51). Professor Alexander has described Lerner as "a kipah (skullcap)-wearing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely ’rabbinic’ appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel and not the Arabs for the absence of peace, and to liken Israeli defense against Palestinian Arab violence to medieval Christian mobs . . . organizing pogroms against the whole Jewish community."

While insisting that all he wants is peace and justice in the Middle East, Lerner’s prescription for achieving such is essentially the same as Yasser Arafat’s. He demands that Israel return to its 1949 borders and forego all forms of self-defense. Even though the bulk of Palestinians have not lived under Israeli "occupation" for many years, such occupation is still the justification in his eyes of Palestinians perpetrating atrocities. The only permissible response by Israelis to being butchered by Palestinian terrorists is to offer them endless appeasements and make sure that Israeli soldiers refuse to serve their country. Lerner has never seen an act of Arab terrorism that he does not rationalize, nor an act of Jewish self-defense he is willing to justify.

In short, despite his protests that he just wants a secure Israel in a peaceful Middle East, when it comes to specifics Lerner’s views on Israel are indistinguishable from those of Edward Said. (Said is more outspoken about his desire to see Israel destroyed.) Indeed, Said himself has been a featured speaker at some Tikkun events. When Commentary Magazine printed an expose of Said’s having fabricated his own autobiography, Lerner wrote,

[Revealing Said’s background] "is as obscene as the attempts by various Holocaust revisionists to argue that many of the Jewish refugees were not really victims of the Holocaust but merely self-interestedly escaping a war zone."

As in all forms of anti-Semitism, Arab hatred of Jews is all the Jews’ fault according to Lerner, just as hatred of the US is all America’s fault. Lerner has suggested that all Jews spend Yom Kippur atoning for their mistreatment and oppression of Arabs. When the PLO lynched and mutilated two Israeli reservists, Lerner rationalized the Palestinian atrocity. He believes that the Jews "earned anti-Semitism" of the Arabs by "oppressing them."

When the US invaded Iraq, Lerner at first waffled, but eventually came out solidly against the US military campaign against Saddam and also opposed economic sanctions. Instead, he suggested resolving the Persian Gulf problems by forcing Israel to withdraw from all of its "occupied territories." He blamed the 2001 attacks on the US by bin Laden on American attempts to hoard the world’s resources and promote globalization. When the anti-globalization hooligans tore up Seattle, Lerner compared them with the Maccabee heroes of Hanukka.

He sees himself and his Tikkun cultsters as full-fledged participants in the anti-globalization, pro-communism, anti-WTO movement that regularly trashes Western cities. Lerner writes:

"The contemporary form of domination does not require colonial armies or imperialist interventions. The free market allows for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, and those few are in turn are able to dominate elections and dictate government policies around the world. Their allies in government created the World Trade Organization to extend their power further in countries whose democratic processes have put environmental, labor, and human rights constraints on the reckless pursuit of profits uber alles."

The Marxist Pacifica Foundation distributes tapes of his talks.

Lerner has organized support for and raised money for Israeli Marxists and fellow travelers organizing mutiny, insubordination and refusal to serve within the Israeli military, and has regularly granted them space in his magazine. As it turns out, his efforts failed. When Israel invaded the Palestinian terror strongholds in April 2002, Israeli reserve units had rates of soldiers reporting for duty of MORE than 100% (meaning people not even called up were showing for duty).

Lerner demanded this past Passover that all Jews devote their traditional Seder meal to bemoaning the oppression of the Palestinians by the Zionist "Pharaoh" (his term). The same Palestinians used the occasion to murder 28 people at a Seder in Israel.

From the comfort of his sofa in the yuppie bourgeois Berkeley Hills, he preaches to Israelis under attack that terror cannot be fought militarily, but rather only with Gandhian non-violence and the politics of meaning. He has long supported sanctions and boycotts against Israel to force it to capitulate to the Arabs. He considers Arab terrorists to be the "New Maccabis," and his writings are routinely carried by the publications and distribution lists of Islamic fundamentalists; the sorts of people who support bin Laden’s attacks on the US.

Lerner has long cultivated a special close relationship with Cornell West, who was until recently professor of Black Studies at Harvard before tangling with the current administration there. Together they co-authored several books and articles, including "Blacks and Jews: Let the Healing Begin," and long ago agreed that anti-Semitism among black Americans was obviously all the fault of the Jews, and that most Jews are racists. In his view, "The Jewish community is racist, internally corrupt, and an apologist for the worst aspects of American capitalism and imperialism."

Lerner has written, "Black anti-Semitism is a tremendous disgrace to Jews; for this is not an anti-Semitism rooted in hatred of the Christ-killers but rather one rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks in the ghetto…. An earned anti-Semitism." Who says there are no Jews that Louis Farrakhan likes? Lerner and West have in recent days been marching shoulder-to-shoulder in rallies in support of Palestinian terrorism, and if David Montgomery of the Washington Post (April 12, 2002) is to be believed, they even seem to make a habit of accompanying one another into the men’s room.

Since the 1960s Lerner has denounced the leaders of the American Jewish community as "fat cats and conformists." He originally launched his Tikkun magazine in an attempt to create a counter-cultural anti-Commentary Magazine.

In the 1960s, he participated in a symposium entitled "In All their Habitations" printed in Judaism Magazine (Fall of 1969), in which he said, "Shut down the synagogues so that Judaism may have a chance." In the same article, he denounced Zionists for being too friendly to the United States and not friendly enough towards the Soviet Union. He also compared Huey Newton to Moses, since "both justifiably killed an oppressor."

Lerner’s views on the Middle East conflict differ little from those of the Hizbollah. His opinions of America resemble those of Noam Chomsky, another anti-Semitic leftist of Jewish ancestry. "Rabbi" Lerner’s attitude towards American Judaism may be summed up by his statement, "the synagogue as currently established will have to be smashed."

I guess a bit like monogamy.