Anti-Semitic rants too damn high-strung

Rick Sanchez is a bungler when it comes to anti-Semitic rantings, as compared to a New York gubernatorial hopeful, a Boston archbishop and a suburban Philadelphia English professor.

After the Cuban-American CNN anchor was fired over offensive comments, these professional anti-Semites shamed him with their anti-Jewish slurs. One blamed the Jews for slavery, another bashed Israel for oppressing Arabs and a third warned Jews that his Muslim siblings could demolish Israel - peacefully, if possible.

Sanchez was griping during an interview about the lack of diversity on cable channels and comedian Jon Stewart’s jabs at his anchoring style when, told that Stewart is Jewish, he blurted out that “everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”

As if Sanchez had thrown down a gauntlet, Jimmy McMillan must have felt challenged to prevail over him while running for governor of New York as founder of the Rent is Too Damn High Party. He had just upstaged Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican rival Carl Paladino during a debate on Monday, Oct. 18.

McMillan once accused Jewish landlords of inflating rents in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section. He apologized for this smear on his Web site and then dug a deeper hole by telling The New York Daily News: “Jews were slave masters. They enslaved my people. You can’t call me anti-Semitic.”

There were Jewish slave masters, but Christians obviously held most slave master roles. There were also Jewish abolitionists and later rabbis who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Nelson Mandela commended South African Jews for their efforts to end apartheid.

Slogging deeper into the anti-Semitic mud was Cyrille Salim Bustros, an archbishop in the Greek-Melkite church, an Eastern Rite church whose bishops attended the Vatican’s annual Middle East synod, according to The New York Times. He headed a committee of Middle East bishops that released a statement calling for a two-state solution so the Arabs in Israeli territories would have “an independent and sovereign homeland where they can live with dignity and security” and “the state of Israel will be able to enjoy peace and security within internationally recognized borders.”

The Oct. 23 statement also proclaimed that “recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.”

Bustros, whose church is in or near the heavily Jewish Boston suburb of Newton, Mass., injected his own comment: “The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians. Sacred scripture should not be used to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestine.”

Bustros has gall to lecture Jews when it was acceptable to use sacred scripture to accuse Jews of killing Jesus, massacring Jews and Muslims during the Crusades and murdering and torturing Jews and Muslims in Spain.

The bishops conveniently forget that the Arabs have no independent state because their so-called leaders - first Yasser Arafat in 2000 and more recently Mahmoud Abbas - have refused reasonable offers for such a state. Or that Israel was attacked from Gaza and southern Lebanon after evacuating those areas.

Israeli spokesman Yigal Palmor said in response, “I think this ambiguity should be lifted by authorized voices from the Vatican.”

Grand champion for anti-Semitic rants in recent weeks is Kaukab Siddique, a Muslim associate professor of English at Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His standout line at an anti-Israel rally on Labor Day in Washington, D.C.: “For the Jews, I would say, ‘See what could happen to you if the Muslims wake up.’ And I say to the Muslims, ‘Dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism.”

When The Philadelphia Daily News contacted him, he responded in an e-mail: “When I refer to the ‘Jews’ I am referring to the current leadership of the ‘state of Israel’ and to their major supporters, not to the Jewish race as a whole…I am not anti-Semitic…I am certainly not hostile to, nor do I discrimate against the Jewish people because of their lineage.”

That’s comforting, but as a professor who teaches English, shouldn’t he know from the outset that a speaker or writer must be clear in his/her communications? If he is speaking only about Israeli leaders, wouldn’t he limit his references to Israeli leaders?

If he is “not hostile to…the Jewish people,” then we must wonder why he once said: “Mohammed has taught us not to follow Jews but to go against them in all things. We are against the Jews because they have usurped Palestine and they take interest on loans and have built up the exploitative economic structure.”

This last quote was supplied by the Anti-Defamation League, which emphasizes that the Labor Day speech was nothing new for Siddique, who predictably denies that the Holocaust occurred.

Fortunately, the ADL is protesting the Vatican’s association with the Greek bishops’ statement, and Pennsylvania lawmakers and other state officials have been questioning Lincoln University officials as to whether the professor mixed his job with his anti-Israel politics; the university receives state funds.

That these bigots could go as far as they did is abhorrent. Talk about a race to the bottom.