A long time ago, in his column in The Nation, the atheist, Marxist commentator and sometimes not that bad journalist Alexander Cockburn asked the kind of provocative question he often would ask. Noting that someone in the New York based media had recently said, in public, for publication "fuck the Pope" to the approval of many and the condemnation of practically no one, Cockburn asked what would happen if someone in the same milieu had said "fuck the Lubovitcher Rebbe," the then still living, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the central figure of a fascistic, Kabbalistic cult with enormous influence in the United States, even more in Israel and elsewhere. I admit that the sheer novelty of "fuck the Lubovitcher Rebbe" as opposed to the common as dirt "fuck the Pope" did kind of jar me. I was vaguely aware of Schneerson's existence as the center of a Jewish cult that I'd read sometimes engaged in small local riots with a smaller "fundamentalist"* Jewish cult in which women shaved their heads and wore wigs but I didn't know much about it. I figured people had a right to their own ideas, presented in the American media in rather innocuous terms.
As I recall Cockburn's transgression did get a reaction, not the same one that saying "fuck the Pope" would get and decidedly not uniformly or mostly positive. Though it was a good question. I, by the way, have no problem with someone who was angry at John Paul II who would have been Pope when I read that saying "fuck the Pope" though it is a rather stupid thing to say when you could be pointing out some of the very many things that were truly bad about his long papacy, one of the worst in the modern period. Pointing some of the worst of those out was to say far worse about him than dropping the common as dirt and so impotent, "f" bomb.
The extent to which JPII may have played an important role in bringing down the Soviet stranglehold on many Eastern European countries and,so, the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, was mitigated by his many other grotesque faults, such as his and his appointees (such as the putrid Bernard Law) support for fascism in the West. I still expect that someday the documents identifying him as a CIA asset may surface.
I don't believe he should have been canonized a saint. I don't find his saintliness in evidence, though the grotesque cult of personality he mounted with its many vulgar and repulsive spectacles with him at the center (it's a mistake to elect a pope who spent time in the theater) may have hidden some of that from me. I will note that though I thoroughly dislike much about him, as I have found out more about Pius XII, cutting through the smears of him, many of them flowing from Stalin and then Khrushchev's gangster regime through the Western "left", my opinion of him has risen.
But as I read more about him in the intervening years, Schneerson was a pretty awful figure too, as is his cult, behind the well constructed PR facade. His racism was florid and often expressed in what can be best understood as inverted Nazism or some of the worst excesses of Louis Farrakhan. Like the Nazis, he held that Jews were a different species from non-Jews, and in the mirror image of Nazism, that Jewish souls were superior and different than the souls of gentiles.
As some of his critics have pointed out, what made him merely a huge asshole in the United States where his cult had some influence but was only one among many influential cults in largely gentile America. In Israel where his fanatical cult holds more influence, his racism, often sanitized when his rants were translated, was far less diluted and it had real life consequences for Palestinians. And after his death and his failure to rise from the dead as, reportedly, some of his cult members expected, his racist and violent legacy lives on in his continuing cult. Since I mentioned the worst mass murder in the history of Canada, done in the name of male supremacy, I can mention the mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims in cold blood is venerated by that cult and one of its major figures, Yitzchak Ginsburgh, has lavished praise on the man and his mass murders on the basis of one of the things Schneerson taught, that gentiles are not really human and that it is permissible to murder them. In some of his Nazi-like declarations, he even claimed that gentiles were there to serve Jews, sounding like the Nazi intentions of how they were going to enslave the slavic people they didn't murder.
I'm all for calling a jerk a jerk no matter who they are and no matter what their identity is. And I'm also in favor of not smearing people who don't praise and worship jerks with people who are total assholes entirely independent of the innocent. The Lubavitcher cult isn't Judaism, it's a racist, violent despicable cult just as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ are cults and what seems to have devolved into another cult of personality, the Catholic League. I will note, as an aside, the Catholic League that its logo is a sword against a shield, so no "those who live by the sword shall die by the sword," for them. NO ALLEGEDLY CHRISTIAN GROUP THAT WIELDS A SWORD OR HAS ONE AS ITS LOGO SHOULD BE TAKEN AS OTHER THAN PSEUDO-CHRISTIAN. It was also, reportedly, modeled by its founder on the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League, two groups with a rather mixed, record, as well. All of those groups together don't represent Catholics anymore than Scheerson or Ginsburgh do Jews.
* I don't think the word "fundamentalist" really works for anything except the American neo-confederate pseudo-Christian group and their cohort that self-consciously wrote and adopted The Fundamentals. That group shares a lot of the racism, potential and actual violence and reactionary gangsterism as other groups mis-called "fundamentalist" but the temptation for the ignorant is to associate the claims and ideologies of such groups as, somehow, representative of authenticity within whatever religious group they claim to represent the authentic version of. I know and have known Jews who tried to follow the commandments of Judaism and they're nothing like Schneerson's cult, a lot of them are opponents of the fascist political movement that flows from such sources and the Israeli fascism that it supports.
I think "fascist cult" is a better term for them, or cutting to the real center of it, "gang mob". I think a lot of the "orthodox" followers of a number of religious identities are actually covers for gangsters, the Catholic, the Jewish, a number of Protestant identities, Islamic, Orthodox Christian (mixing nationalism and religion will almost always produce gangster activity) Hindu, Buddhist (as will be in evidence as the Buddhist genocide against Muslims in Burma is defended at the UN this week) and atheist (Marxists, anarchists, etc). Once you drop the identity bull shit and call gangster activity what it is, it's a lot easier to see how what we're supposed to consider and treat with such piety can produce the mafia or the Kushner family or Sheldon Adelson or Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell jr. or the stuff that Tim Busch supports.
When you drop the false-front, "gangster" would seem to almost always fully explain things.
Update: By now you know I wouldn't say something like that without having the backup for it.
Among the religious settlers in the Occupied territories the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them (Goldstein will be discussed in Chapter 6.) Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter of a book in praise of Goldstein and what he did, is another member of their group. Ginsburgh is the former head of the Yoseph Tomb Yeshiva, located on the outskirts of Nablus. Rabbi Ginsburgh, who originally came to Israel from the United States and had good connection to the Lubovitcher community in the United States, has often expressed his views in English in American Jewish publications. The following appeared in an April 26, 1996 Jewish Week (New York) article that contained an interview with Rabbi Ginsburgh:
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Regarded as one of the Lubovitcher sect's leading authorities on Jewish mysticism, the St. Louis born rabbi, who also has a graduate degree in mathematics, speaks freely of Jew's genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of the Torah. "If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you sa e the Jewish life first," Rabbi Ginsburgh told the Jewish Week "If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA." Later, Rabbi Ginsburgh asked rhetorically; "If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value," he explained. "There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life."
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Changing the words "Jewish" to "German" or "Aryan" and "non-Jewish" to "Jewish" turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past. To a considerable extent the German Nazi success depended upon that ideology and upon its implications not being widely known early. Disregarding even on a limited scale the potential effects of messianic, Lubovitch and other ideologies could prove to be calamitous.
From: Jewish Fundamentalism In Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky
I will point out that Israel Shahak was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and death camps who was an Israeli citizen and an eminent organic chemist as well as a long time campaigner for equality and democracy who was despised and attacked for speaking out for minority rights. His writing has been largely disappeared from the American media in the typical way when someone mentions inconvenient truths.
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