Carol Platt Liebau: Lapin Sets Foxman Straight

Monday, November 28, 2005

Lapin Sets Foxman Straight

We covered Abe Foxman's plans to lead the Anti-Defamation League into irrelevance here.

Thankfully, Rabbi Daniel Lapin has emerged to set him straight.

It does seem amazing that, with anti-Semitism flourishing all across Europe and the Democratic Party's long-time love affair with Yasser Arafat (Bill Clinton's most frequent White House guest; Jesse Jackson's compatriot) that Foxman would take issue with Christian conservatives, doesn't it?

1 Comments:

Blogger Matt Brinkman said...

It does seem amazing that, with anti-Semitism flourishing all across Europe and the Democratic Party's long-time love affair with Yasser Arafat (Bill Clinton's most frequent White House guest; Jesse Jackson's compatriot) that Foxman would take issue with Christian conservatives, doesn't it?

Not all that amazing, Carol. Let me see if I can explain.

Thomas Jefferson noted, "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." Although I am not sure I agree with the absolute nature of Jefferson's claim, the fact is that historically state churches have been incubators of anti-Semitism.

The majority of European countries have either official state churches (e.g., Norway) or have churches that are so entangled with the government that they are quasi-official state churches (e.g., Catholicism and France). The United States of America, on the other hand, has a constitutional separation of curch and state.

If Jefferson is corect, it is not surprising that Europe, with its greater degree of church/state entanglements, is more susceptible to anti-Semitic sentiment. The fact that the Christian Conservatives are seeking exactly the same sort of church-state admixture in the US as found in Europe should seem troubling to the ADL.

9:35 PM  

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