March 12, 2008

John Hagee spoke in Los Angeles last night, and my colleague, Danielle Berrin, reports that, as far as controversial speakers go, he was no Karl Rove. Despite receiving a lot of press during the past few weeks for his history of incendiary comments, Hagee, Danielle writes, “was quite boring.”

Here are the verbal highlights from a night that sounded more like a bible recitation than a discussion:

  “I’d rather talk to G-d for 30 seconds than to George [W.] Bush all night.”

“Granting forgiveness without demanding a change in conduct is to make the grace of G-d an accomplice to evil.”

“Jesus, who was a reform rabbi…”

On Jews bringing the bible to the world:

“We, as Christians have a bible mandate to help you. If we have benefited from Jewish spiritual things, than we have an obligation to help Jews with material things.”

On he and his rabbi friend:

“When we’re standing in the streets of Jerusalem together and the Messiah comes, one of us has a great theological adjustment to make.”

On the Crusaders:

“They were thieves, liars, robbers and rapists.”

Well, Samantha Power flamed out last week when she was asked to resign as an adviser to Barack Obama. Turned out her views of Hillary Clinton were similar to the worst held by some evangelicals. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was that she was a bit too candid in sharing it.

Still, I’m enjoying the Pulitzer Prize-winning book she wrote a few years back, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” A central character of this story is Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who fled Poland for the United States, losing most his family in the process, and dedicated his life to fighting “genocide,” a word that he created.

History has remembered Lemkin well, even if his contemporaries found him an obsessive annoyance. But of the Lemkin remembrances, I like Abe Rosenthal’s best.

The story in the paper reported that after 40 years of consideration the U.S. Senate voted last Friday to make it a Federal offense to commit genocide. That is the crime of acting with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

The story did not mention a man called Lemkin.

Raphael Lemkin pokes his head into a newspaper office in the headquarters of the United Nations in the village of Lake Success on Long Island.

‘‘Here is that pest, that Lemkin,’’ he says. ‘‘I have a genocide story for you.’‘

Everybody groans; Oh, Lemkin again? He makes a funny face, folds his hands in begging gestures. The reporters gather around for a few minutes. He gets his little story about the genocide convention, usually tucked away in the paper on a Sunday.

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish professor of law, a distinguished academician who spoke nine languages. He was a Jew. During the Holocaust the Germans murdered 49 members of his family; see how few words it takes to tell the whole story.

He escaped to Sweden, reached the United States, found good positions at Duke and Yale. He left them and gave himself over to his life’s work.

His work was to convince the nations of the world that they must make it a crime to plan or carry out another Holocaust of any people. He coined ‘‘genocide’’ from the Greek word for race and the Latin for killing. He wrote a convention, a treaty for the nations to sign.

Then he walked the corridors of the U.N. He stopped journalists, took junior delegates by the arm and hung on until they listened, at least a moment. To see an ambassador, he would plan and plot for weeks and sit for days in reception rooms.

He had no money, no office, no assistants. He had no U.N. status or papers, but the guards always let him pass. He carried a black briefcase stuffed with documents and his daily sandwich.

He knew that when he opened the door people would say: What, Lemkin, you here again? Sometimes it was said affectionately, sometimes with distaste. Then he would pretend he did not care. But there were many days when he sat slumped in the cafeteria over a cup of coffee, barely able to lift it for the weariness in him and the rebuff.

But if he had to wheedle and plead he did. If he met an arrogant delegate who had influence, he made himself small and fawned. Then he would turn away and make the small smacking noises of a man trying to get a bad taste out of his mouth.

He would bluff a little sometimes about pulling political levers, but he had none. All he had was himself, his briefcase and the conviction burning in him. We would say to him: Lemkin, what good will it do to write mass murder down as a crime; will a piece of paper stop a new Hitler or Stalin?

Then he put aside cajolery and his face stiffened.

‘‘Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law!’‘

He walked the halls every day from the spring of 1946 until Dec. 9, 1948, when the General Assembly, in Paris, adopted a resolution approving his convention. That day reporters went looking for him to rejoice in his triumph. But we could not find him until, hours later, we thought to look into the darkened Assembly hall. He sat there weeping as if his heart would break. He asked please to be left in solitude. Then this Lemkin came back to the corridors for years, pleading with delegation after delegation to follow through on the U.N. resolution by getting their countries to sign the treaty. There was a time when he was considered for the Nobel Peace Prize; Winston Churchill backed him.

But he died alone on Aug. 28, 1959, without medals or prizes, in a hotel in New York. There were seven people at the graveside when Raphael Lemkin was buried.

Surprising maybe only because it took two days, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned this morning. He was brought down by a sexual liaison with an odd Israeli angle, just as former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey was four years ago.

A fast-rising Democratic governor, an out of control sex drive and an Israeli enabler — it feels like deja vu all over again on the Hudson.

Unlike McGreevey, who was accused of a homosexual affair with his Israeli-born former homeland security chief, Spitzer stands accused of utilizing the services of Mark Brener, an Israeli who allegedly pimped high-class hookers.

Not much seems to be known about Brener. He has lived in the United States for 20 years, most recently in a posh Manhattan apartment, where federal agents reportedly found $600,000 in a safe.

In The Forward, Alan Dershowitz argues that, as I mentioned Monday, though without legitimizing prostitution, our endless appetite for the failings of public figures is the bigger problem behind the Spitzer scandal.

Throughout our history, men in high places have engaged in low sexual activities. From Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton, great political figures have behaved like adolescent boys in private, while at the same time brilliantly and effectively leading our nation in public.

The laws criminalizing adult consensual prostitution — especially with $5,000-an-hour call girls — are as anachronistic as the old laws that used to criminalize adultery, fornication, homosexuality and even masturbation. These may be sins, but there are no real victims, except for family members.

Our nation, unique among Western democracies, is obsessed with the private lives of public figures. Whether it be Larry Craig soliciting favors in an airport bathroom or Rush Limbaugh getting illegal pharmaceuticals in a parking lot, this obsessive focus on the private imperfections of public figures threatens to drive many good men — and soon, good women — out of public life for fear that they will be brought down by their private peccadilloes.

Case in point, check out Slate‘s “Map of Shame” guide to trysts within the Beltway.

I came across this video a few days ago, and it has no religious hook. But it’s too funny not to share and it reflects my sentiments for USC.

The killing of eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva last week, the first terror attack in the Holy City in four years, broke the hearts of Jews around the world. Here in Los Angeles, their were vigils and peace rallies and very shaken Jewish teenagers like Aaron Begin.

“Rabbi, I have a question,” he says to his principal, Rabbi Heshy Glass, who is standing with him. “Doesn’t it say you can’t die while you’re learning Torah?”

Glass tells him the story of the Mishnaic sage Rabbi Akiva, who was taken by the Romans while he studied. Like these boys, he tells Begin, he was a Jewish hero, remembered for the ages.

Glass doesn’t try to make sense of the tragedy, just to continue the conversation about what is so troubling to Begin and other boys at YULA, many of whom plan to study in Israeli yeshivas when they graduate.

“You hear about tragedies in Israel, but it hits so close to home because this is us next year. Next year we’re going to yeshiva,” said Chaim Gamzo, a 17-year-old senior. “These guys had their whole lives ahead of them—like me. I hope to go to yeshiva, to go to college, to have a normal successful life, but they didn’t have the opportunity to do that.”

On Sunday, a peace rally packed Young Israel of Century City and L.A. Councilman Jack Weiss said the massacre at Mercaz Harav was not an attack on a seminary affiliated with the settler movement.

“Judaism is about Torah and the transmission of Torah. The essence of Judaism is Torah, and its transfar from one generation to the next, “Medor le’dor.” And that’s what Mercaz HaRav does, all day and all night, year in and year out.

“The attack on the students of Yeshiva Mercaz Harav had absolutely nothing to do with politics. The terrorist was not acting because of national grievances, it was not a dispute about territory—as if that would excuse such an atrocity—for it wouldn’t.

“No, the terrorist was attacking Judaism.

“By murdering these eight pure students the terrorist was trying to eradicate the core of Judaism: Torah and the transmission of Torah.

“In addition, the rockets that fly from Gaza into S’derot may appear as if they are connected to a dispute about land, but that’s a lie.

“The rockets are also an attack on Judaism. The rockets are an attack on Jews in Israel and on Jews in every corner of the world.

“The battle that Israel wages against the Muslim jihadists is not a local conflict, but just one front in a world-wide jihad.

“Make no doubt about it, this war is a genocidal attack against all Jews.

“The goal of the Islamic jihadists is to eradicate Judaism from the face of the earth.

“And that’s why the eight Torah students were chosen for slaughter.

“If you don’t understand this simple calculus, then you have no understanding of the true nature of the enemy.”

Tied to the Mercaz Harav attack, I have a short piece in tomorrow’s Jewish Journal, online now, about a protest against the Jewish state that was held outside the Israeli consulate in L.A. while officials inside mourned the deaths that occurred only the day before. The protest was organized by the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine in response to the IDF’s entry into Gaza the weekend before, which left 100 Palestinians dead, and among the speakers was Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who referred to Zionists as “the new Nazis.”