Do you pay too much in taxes? Sure you do. Here’s a terrific way you can save a bundle, that’s perfectly legal.

First, figure out how much you pay in total expenses for housing – rent, mortgage, etc. Say it’s $20,000 a year, to pick a round number. Then, go to your employer and say “Instead of giving me $20,000 in something you call ‘salary,’ give me the same $20,000 in something you call a ‘housing allowance.’ That way, I won’t have to pay any taxes on that $20,000, which will save me many thousands of dollars a year!”

I know what you’re thinking: that’s too easy. The government would never let you get away with a scam like that, because it would say that being paid $20,000 of “housing allowance” is exactly the same as being paid $20,000 of “salary” – which it is. But the law is right there, in Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code. There’s only one catch: you have to be a “minister of the gospel”:

Internal Revenue Code Section 107. Rental value of parsonages

In the case of a minister of the gospel, gross income does not include –

(1) the rental value of a home furnished to him as part of his compensation; or

(2) the rental allowance paid to him as part of his compensation, to the extent used by him to rent or provide a home.

Here’s my first question: Why can’t rabbis get this? Or imams? Or Buddhist monks? Last time I checked, none of these guys had anything to do with the “gospel,” which is universally defined as the first four books of the New Testament. I guess this is what the fundamentalists are talking about when say America is a “Christian nation.”

Here’s my next question: Once I get ordained, can I get this boondoggle for more than one home? That’s an important issue, because these days with government promoting religion at every turn lots of God experts are making lots of money, and have homes all over the place. Recently the Tax Court came down with a definitive ruling: the sky’s the limit, and “ministers of the gospel” can get tax-free housing allowances for as many mansions as they can con their flocks into paying for. After all, reasoned the learned judges, when the tax code talks about exemptions for a “child” it allows the same exemption for multiple children; so when it allows an exemption for a “home,” it must mean multiple “homes.” The millions of Americans whose one and only home was lost through foreclosure in the past few years are free to go to church and be comforted by a God expert who has lots of homes, all provided tax-free.

The case is fascinating because of the taxpayer who was its subject. Phil Driscoll is a gifted trumpeter, who played with artists like Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, and Blood, Sweat & Tears in the 1970s and won a Grammy in 1984. Government taxes the hell out of entertainers, though, as the Beatles so eloquently described. [Do yourself a favor and clink on the link.] So Driscoll gravitated toward God, using his “Mighty Horn Ministries” not only to rake in bucks from believers but to do it in a way that supported a lavish lifestyle, all tax free. When he wasn’t flying his church airplane, he was driving his church Porsche, to and from his church homes at lake resorts. Unfortunately, he got a little carried away with the idea of following God’s law rather than man’s, and wound up getting convicted of conspiracy and tax evasion in 2006, and sentenced to a year in federal prison. (I’m not certain whether he tried to exclude the fair rental value of his cell from his income tax for that year.) When he got out, he still had all those homes, and our divinely inspired Tax Court now says he doesn’t have to pay tax on the “allowance” he receives for any of them.

Here’s my next question: Isn’t there a lot more than rental value involved in maintaining a home? “Minister of the gospel” Rick Warren, President Obama’s favorite pastor, knows there are lots of other costs, too. So a few years back he started excluding from his tax return items like insurance, repairs, utilities, new furniture, even his gardeners – gotta have gardeners, right? Not because he needed the money, mind you, but on behalf of all those other poorer pastors out there who couldn’t keep their heads above water if they had to pay taxes on the value of their own church-provided gardeners.

Rev. Warren won his case in Tax Court, jut like trumpeter Driscoll did. Then the IRS appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where a funny thing happened. IRS had no intention of questioning the constitutionality of Section 107, because that would step on way too many toes, and bring down the wrath of organized religion on the administration (at that time, headed by Bill Clinton). But the bad sports at the Ninth Circuit raised the constitutionality question on their own, as they have the power to do, and ordered both parties to write briefs on the issue. What’s more, since they (correctly) expected both parties to write briefs saying there was nothing at all wrong with Section 107, they appointed their own independent expert, a Southern Cal law professor, to prepare his own report on the issue. His conclusion: of course it’s unconstitutional! Slam dunk.

“Aaaack!” This was the official response of the IRS, by this point under control of the Bush administration. It was too late to withdraw the appeal, and they couldn’t stand by and let all those God experts start paying taxes the same way you and I do. So they went to Congress, where there is always tremendous bipartisan support for every penny doled out to politically influential clergy. With lightning speed, a law was enacted in 2002 letting Rev. Warren keep every penny of his prior tax-exempt income while clarifying that in the future only the “fair rental value” of the home (now “homes”) is tax-free. This took the case out of the hands of the court, and everyone (other than the rest of America’s taxpayers) breathed a sigh of relief.

The general counsel of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention tells us that for his 46,000 churches, “the housing allowance is critically important for making ends meet – it is not a luxury.” Besides, God experts provide an important service to their communities, so they deserve preferential treatment. That is a terrific argument. Let’s see: who else provides important services to their communities? Doctors? Yep. Nurses? Check. Teachers? Firefighters? Farmers? My personal vote would be for preferential tax treatment for plumbers, who solve more critical real-world problems every day than any black-robed charlatans ever have.

Rev. Warren still isn’t satisfied, though. Just a month ago he was in high dudgeon again, whining that “HALF of America pays NO taxes. Zero. So they’re happy for tax rates to be raised on the other half that DOES pay taxes.” I’m guessing he counts himself among the half that does pay taxes. I’m also guessing that his accuracy on the facts of what is happening in America today is about the same as his accuracy on the facts of what happened in Palestine 2000 years ago. Half of Americans don’t pay Social Security tax, Medicare tax, telephone tax, or tax on their beer? How can I get into that half?

Like clockwork, on August 11 the news agencies clicked on their coverage of the 10^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. What they’re skipping over, though, is the 10^th anniversary of an event that tells us far more about what’s truly wrong with Islam than what happened on September 11.

It is true, as Islam’s defenders maintain, that nothing in the Koran or the traditions of Muhammad sanctions the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, especially those Muslim civilians who died in the World Trade Center. There are concepts of holy war as part of a sustained campaign to spread Muslim rule over specific locations, but there is nothing to recommend killing thousands of innocent people outside the context of territorial conquest just to make a political point. This isn’t to say that religion can’t be blamed for the massacre; there are varieties of thought under the Islamic umbrella, some of them more violence-prone than others, and nearly all of them elevate doing the will of God (once you decide what that is) above mere laws designed by humans. Still, it is fair to conclude that the attacks fell outside the parameters of conventional, mainstream Islam.

Conventional, mainstream Islam, though, does quite explicitly provide for a death penalty for blasphemy. Muhammad himself authorized the execution of anyone “who reverts from Islam and leaves the Muslims.” Clearly this covers the offense of apostasy, i.e., deciding not to be a Muslim anymore. But Sharia experts over the centuries have concluded that the line between outright apostasy and blasphemy, normally defined as irreverent words or behavior, is too fuzzy to worry about, and thus in many jurisdictions extended Muhammad’s death penalty to blasphemy as well.

That’s certainly the view of the God experts who took over Pakistan in the late 1970s. Section 295 of the Pakistan Penal Code was amended to state that:

Whoever by words, either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.

Younus Shaikh was a medical doctor, teaching at a university in Islamabad. He had spent many years working in the United Kingdom, but returned home to give what he could to people who needed it most. He brought back with him UK Enlightenment ideas. After his return he founded a group fittingly called “Enlightenment,” affiliated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the international umbrella group to which the American Humanist Association belongs. As Dr. Shaikh put it, “One of my reasons for returning to Pakistan was to campaign for Human Rights and civil liberties in Pakistan: to work for the Pakistan-India peace movement, to struggle for liberalism, secularism and humanism, and to counter the forces of religious extremism and fundamentalism.”

He was particularly interested in urging a peaceful solution to the troubles between India and Pakistan, especially after the Kargil War of 1999 that had both countries brandishing their newly-minted nuclear weapons. Even aside from the threat of nuclear war, Dr. Shaikh knew that from the first day of its existence, Pakistan had devoted a staggering proportion of its government spending to the military – as much as 80% – while shortchanging critical needs like medical care.

In a meeting of the South Asia Union in October, 2000, Dr. Shaikh expressed the shocking view that the 50-year old conflict between India and Pakistan should end, that both sides should start treating the de facto Kashmiri border like the real border, and that if Pakistan kept supporting terrorists inside India then perhaps the Indians might start doing the same thing inside Pakistan. Apparently, a military intelligence officer was in the audience, who threatened to “crush the heads” of people who thought like that.

Next thing you know, Dr. Shaikh is fired from his job, then thrown in jail. Not for being a peacenik, which is not a crime in Pakistan, but for blasphemy, which is. Since nothing he had said about the conflict with India was blasphemous, it became necessary to invent something. Thus, a student was found to allege that Dr. Shaikh had mentioned in class that Muhammad was not a Muslim before his chats with God in the cave, and that he probably didn’t even shave his armpits before then, since that was not a custom of his tribe. Dr. Shaikh was confined without bail for nine months; then, on August 18, 2001, he was tried before a panel of God experts, convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to death (plus a fine of 100,000 rupees, so his family would suffer as well).

What’s puzzling is why they didn’t invent something a little juicier. If I were trying to frame someone for blasphemy, I’d have him calling Muhammad a liar, or a pervert, or a commie. Hairy armpits would be pretty far down on the list; I guess I’m just not cut out for this sort of thing.

Pending appeal, Dr. Shaikh was held in solitary confinement in a filthy, tiny death cell, without access to books, newspapers, exercise, medication, or treatment for his worsening diabetes. His first appeal, before two mullahs, resulted in a split decision, which got him nowhere. On his subsequent appeal to the High Court, he was unable to find a lawyer willing to buck the establishment, so he represented himself, with the aid of law books smuggled into his cell. He chose not to attack the stupidity or inhumanity of the blasphemy statute, as an ambitious lawyer might have, but instead relied on a simpler “I didn’t do it” strategy. In fact, the school schedule showed that he wasn’t even teaching a class at the time the crime was supposed to have been committed.

Showing some courage, the High Court agreed that there was no evidence against Dr. Shaikh, and reversed his conviction. So they all lived happily ever after. Not in Pakistan, though. Dr. Shaikh soon realized that his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel in a land where God experts don’t like being shown up by smartasses, and have plenty of power to do something about it. So he took his family and decamped for Switzerland, a civilized country.

Dr. Shaikh’s case is far from an isolated instance. It is Exhibit A for why President Obama was so wrong to go to al-Azhar University in 2009 and proclaim that: “America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” Tell that to Dr. Shaikh. Terrorist bombing may not be a central principle of Islam, but blasphemy law undoubtedly is, as Obama could have confirmed with his al-Azhar hosts. So is the symbiotic relationship between God experts and the state, which America has resisted throughout its history but which is rearing its ugly head again, thanks in no small part to Barack Obama’s political ambition. America and Islam had better be in competition – and we had better win.

Luis Granados

You remember Terry Jones, right? He’s the pastor who found his 15 minutes of fame by threatening to burn the Koran, backing down when the United States government called him “un-American” for expressing politically incorrect ideas, then pulling off a sneak incineration a few months later when no one was looking. If you followed the story closely, you will also remember the people who were killed when Muslims rioted about the mere thought-crime of prospective scripture burning, and the somewhat more rational response of the Pakistani Muslim who retaliated by destroying a Christian Bible.

Now another Bible has been burned, or at least parts of one. In a man-bites-dog twist, this one was torched by a Christian minister, Rev. Geraint ap Iorwerth of St Peter ad Vincula Church in Pennal, Wales. It seems Rev. ap Iorwerth is a true expert on what God really said, and thus decided to burn “all the nasty bits” that misrepresented what he knows God is really like. Presumably, he’s referring to the parts of the Old Testament where God endorses genocide and slavery. Or maybe he burnt the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus insists that every “jot and tittle” of the Jewish law shall remain in force until the end of time, specifically including animal sacrifice at the Temple, while declaring it a sin for anyone to marry a divorced woman. I can’t tell you exactly what he burnt, because the article doesn’t say. Besides, he’s the one who can read God’s mind, not me. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Last month, a national convention of the United Church of Christ voted to delete a reference to belief in the “Heavenly Father” from its constitutional definition of a local church. Instead of belief in a male God who produced offspring, local churches now need only express belief in a “triune God.”

This change in the direction of political correctness is less than it first appears. The concept of “triune God,” in every modern flavor of Christianity, involves a deity known as “God the Father,” generally pictured with a long white beard, who is said to have fathered out of wedlock “God the Son,” even though God the Son is said to have existed as long as God the Father has. It gets terribly confusing, and can only be ultimately sorted out by “It’s a mystery.” What’s clear is that if they’re keeping “triune God,” then they’re keeping a male God, or at least a God who is two parts out of three male – while at the same time, shamelessly making headlines about being more gender-neutral. This is not a mystery; it’s a shell game.

Pretending to be hip has not served the United Church of Christ well in recent decades. Its membership has declined by nearly 50% since the 1960s. One of its biggest recent defections was the Obama family, who jumped ship in 2008 when UCC pastor Jeremiah Wright went from being a political plus to a political minus.

A question more interesting than the future of this fading denomination is “How did we get a male God in the first place?” If some unseen force created and guides the universe, why does it have to be thought of as either male or female? In fact, how can it logically be characterized as male, unless there is a female deity to go along with it? There can be no “left” without a “right.”

Earlier ages solved this problem by having multiple Gods. Even the Jews gave Yahweh a Goddess wife, named Asherah. Inscriptions to “Yahweh and his Asherah” have been found at Israeli archeological sites, and the Jewish king Manasseh installed a statue of Asherah in the Jerusalem temple.

In fact, according to feminist historian Barbara Walker, in many Pagan societies the feminine Gods were more important than the masculine Gods. They were revered as the mother who infuses all creation with the vital blood of life. The Islamic name for God today bears a striking resemblance to that of the Arabian lunar Goddess, Al-Lat, who was worshipped at the Kaaba in Mecca, and whose crescent symbol appears today on Islamic flags. Pre-Christian forms of what the UCC now calls the “triune God” involved three female deities, in places as diverse as India, Ireland, Italy, and Mexico, where “three divine sisters” gave birth to the savior God Quetzalcoatl. In some earlier forms of the trinity among Arabian Christians, the Holy Ghost was Mary rather than a bird, thus neatly paralleling the Egyptian nuclear family divine trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

That trinity variant never caught on, but throughout Christian history there has been a tension between God experts who sought to elevate Mary to near-divine status and those who sought to pull her back down again. The 8^th century Patriarch of Constantinople taught that God obeys Mary “through and in all things, as his true mother.” This view was echoed by the 18^th century theologian who wrote that “At the command of Mary all obey, even God.” A 14^th century Franciscan taught that

When we have offended Christ, we should go first to the Queen of Heaven and offer her … prayers, fasting, vigils, and alms; then she, like a mother, will come between thee and Christ, the father who wishes to beat us, and she will throw the cloak of mercy between the rod of punishment and us, and soften the king’s anger against us.

Pope Pius XII himself proclaimed in 1950 that Mary was the only person other than Jesus who was born without the stain of original sin, and was “assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory.” Yet his successor Pope John XXIII, who had the power to read Mary’s mind, warned that: “The Madonna is not pleased when she is put above her Son.” The Arabian Christians who put Mary in the trinity were persecuted as heretics, and the 13^th century Pope Nicholas III ordered a friar to burn with his own hands a tract he had written that went too far in expressing devotion to Mary.

Mary’s doing pretty well today, though. There’s a major movement within the Catholic Church to elevate her to the status of “Co-redemptrix,” which would seem to put her right next to Jesus. I’m not sure what she did to deserve that other than to have a son, as billions of other non-Goddesses have done. Anyway, it’s now officially ok to refer to Mary as “Co-redemptrix,” and petitions and conferences of God experts are urging the Pope to go even further and make that status an official “dogma” of the Church, non-belief in which will result in excommunication and eternal hellfire.

The folks who are best positioned to capitalize on a feminist trend in godliness, though, are our friends the Mormons. Unlike the Catholics, who feel somewhat constrained in making sudden changes by the burden of appearing consistent with 2,000 years of precedent, the Mormons haven’t the slightest compunction about turning on a theological dime whenever it suits their political purposes. They did that on polygamy in 1890 (sort of), and again in 1978 on the in-born evil of black people (sort of). Better yet, they already have a Goddess – a “Heavenly Mother,” no less – backstage and ready to make her debut at the propitious moment.

Mormon theology teaches that there are millions of male Gods in the universe, each one associated with a particular star or planet, who have a physical body just like earthlings. A main function of each of them is to father new souls by having sex, in the normal physical manner. That requires, of course, the involvement of a female deity, at a minimum in “Lie back and think of England” mode. In fact, such a personage exists in Mormon theology – there’s even a hymn about her, written by one of Joseph Smith’s dozens of widows:

In the heavens are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare.
Truth is reason: truth eternal
tells me I’ve a mother there.

The men who ran the Church, though, took as dim a view of Goddess worship as did the Catholics who shut Mary out of the Trinity. Early apostle George Q. Cannon, sometimes called “the Mormon Richelieu,” cautioned that “To worship her would diminish from the worship of heavenly father.” Gordon Hinckley, Mormon President from 1995 to 2008, added that Jesus himself commanded prayer to “Our Father,” not to “our Mother.” A professor at Brigham Young University who suggested praying to Heavenly Mother was fired for her efforts.

The real problem here is that those who earn a living being God’s mouthpieces know that their paying customers subconsciously see them as God, to a small but significant extent. That’s certainly how the Catholics position their Pope, and how the Mormons position their President. Diluting the maleness of God distorts that picture. Secularism is going to have to expand a lot further than it already has before these guys get desperate enough to copy this particular page out of the Pagan playbook.

Luis Granados

In the debate on caste between the Untouchable Ambedkar and the Hindu God expert Mohandas Gandhi 75 years ago, Ambedkar reminded readers what caste distinction meant in practice:

The Untouchable was required to carry, strung from his waist, a broom to sweep away from behind the dust he treaded on lest a Hindu walking on the same should be polluted. In Poona, the untouchable was required to carry an earthen pot, hung in his neck wherever he went, for holding his spit lest his spit falling on earth should pollute a Hindu who might unknowingly happen to tread on it.

Gandhi’s reply did not belittle the degradation of the Untouchables, but did attempt to shift the blame away from the Hindu religion. Ambedkar had cited extensive passages in the Hindu sacred scriptures mandating the separation of Indians by caste. Since he couldn’t dispute their plain meaning, Gandhi simply asserted that these particular scriptures didn’t count: “The Smritis for instance contain much that can never be accepted as the Word of God. Thus many of the texts that Dr. Ambedkar quotes from the Smritis cannot be accepted as authentic.”

Thus, following in the footsteps of Christian God experts who pick and choose which Bible passages are divine and which are not, based on their own personal preferences, Gandhi elevated himself to God’s level by sorting out the true God commands from the fakes. He also took pains to shield against the danger that a scholar might establish that the oldest and most authentic parts of the scriptures were those that contained the most objectionable parts:

Who is the best interpreter ? Not learned men surely. Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.

Thus it is the whims of “sages and saints” we must listen to, and not the actual words of the allegedly sacred texts. Gandhi’s particular whim was that “Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” Then, having admitted that caste was harmful, he proceeded to defend it anyway.

The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful, and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahmin – spiritual teacher – and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God.

What Gandhi called “the law of Varna” was the essence of caste: that we have a duty to be locked within the same life our ancestors had. Otherwise, the whole law of karma – rebirth in a particular caste based on how good a past life you had led – wouldn’t work right.

What Gandhi called a “scavenger” was an Untouchable who was required to live on the undigested corn kernels he picked out of cow manure. But since that calling was equal in the eyes of God to that of a powerful Brahmin, that made everything ok.

Ambedkar then published a rebuttal to Gandhi’s response in which he pointed out that Gandhi himself was born into the “Bania” caste of grocers and traders. Why, he asked, didn’t the “law of Varna” apply to him? Gandhi never sold so much as a carrot, but instead waltzed about like a wannabe Brahmin, going to law school and lecturing others on what God did and did not want them to do. Gandhi’s case is a perfect example of the economic lunacy of caste. It is hard to picture Gandhi surviving as a grocer without going bankrupt; yet his brilliant organizational and communication skills made him a natural for the profession he entered. In all the millions of words Gandhi wrote and spoke over his career, I am not aware of any instance when he offered an explanation of this laughable hypocrisy.

For all his sanctimony, Gandhi’s true feelings about the Untouchables may have been revealed when he criticized Christian missionaries for trying to share the Gospel with them: “Would you preach the gospel to a cow? Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in understanding … they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.” In the midst of Gandhi’s “Be kind to Untouchables” campaign, a bill was introduced in the Indian parliament to allow Untouchables to enter Hindu temples. Gandhi had vigorously opposed this idea a few years earlier. He now gave it lip service, but not enough to move even his own Congress party, so it failed.

Ambedkar made good on this threat to abandon Hinduism in 1935. The question became, where would he land? The most politically significant move he could have made would have been to Islam, which was already a powerful and militant minority. Islam also preached, and in many countries practiced, the equality of all people before God. But Ambedkar despised the rigidity of Islam, especially its shabby treatment of women. He also knew that Muslims had ruled India for centuries before the British arrived, never lifting a finger toward the abolition of the caste system. Besides, as an Indian nationalist, he much preferred to adopt a religion that arose in India, which is also why he never gave Christianity a second thought.

Thus he was toyed at length with Sikhism, an Indian amalgam of Hinduism and Islam, that played a critical role in the Indian balance of political power. Sikhs, though, insisted that men wear beards, a practice that Ambedkar didn’t want to follow himself, and didn’t think he could sell to other Untouchable men. Besides, Gandhi kept insisting that Sikhs were actually just a subcategory of Hindus. Even though the Sikh leaders vigorously disagreed, Ambedkar wanted to get as far away from Gandhi as he could.

Some historians argue that what Ambedkar really wanted was not to leave Hinduism at all, but to use the constant threat that he might do so and take millions of Untouchables with him as a political club to bring about true reform inside Hinduism. This may explain why he took 20 years to make up his mind. Ultimately, he settled on Buddhism, which satisfied his requirement for a religion of Indian origin. At a ceremony in October, 1956, Ambedkar and 500,000 other Untouchables formally converted to Buddhism. The mass abandonment of Hinduism would have been even greater had not Ambedkar died in his sleep two months later.

What seems to have appealed to Ambedkar is that Buddhism is the most flexible and diverse of the major world religions. There is variety within Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, but not as much as within Buddhism. At one extreme is the “Imperial Way” Buddhism of the Japanese military dictatorship, and at the other a gentle philosophy that barely qualifies as a “religion” at all. Ambedkar chose that latter extreme; as one of his admirers put it:

Buddhism does not believe in revelation; does not depend on miracles; does not lay emphasis on mystic or metaphysical abstractions; does not hold out a promise of heaven; does not believe in coercion. It stands for equality and unity. It has no rituals, no ceremonies, no priests with hereditary rights, no glorification ceremonies, no Shankracharya to dogmatize. In place of fear of God, there is morality. It is based on purity of thought, deed and action, compassion and love, self-respect and self-help.

Re-read that paragraph, replacing the word “Buddhism” with the word “humanism.” Reads pretty well, doesn’t it? So why didn’t Ambedkar go one step further, and stand by his original prescription that “You must destroy the Religion”? The best explanation I can come up with is simply that everyone makes mistakes.

Seventy-five years ago this month occurred an extraordinary debate in an Indian newspaper that retains enormous resonance today. On the surface, the debate concerned India’s system of caste, regulating both employment opportunity and social standing based on the accident of birth. On a deeper level, the debate concerned the role religion should play in matters of governance.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born in 1891 into a family of Mahars, one of India’s “Untouchable” castes. That alone would have sealed his fate to a life of abject degradation (9 of his 13 brothers and sisters died in childhood), but for the fact that his father was employed by the British Army, and used the contacts he made there to secure his children an education denied to virtually every other Untouchable in the land. Young Ambedkar made the most of his opportunity, and wound up earning advanced degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

As one of the only well-educated Untouchables in all of India, Ambedkar rose to political prominence as the leading representative of his caste. Throughout the 1920s, he fought tenaciously for more equal treatment, and was rewarded with a seat at the table in 1931 when the British convened a “Round Table Conference” to move India closer to self-rule.

The star of that show, though, was not Ambedkar but Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi fused religion with politics; he led a campaign of civil disobedience in 1921 that brought India to the brink of independence, but suddenly called it off because a handful of followers were not conducting themselves as God intended. Again in 1930, Gandhi led a civil disobedience campaign, initially centered on opposition to the salt tax. India’s prisons overflowed with tens of thousands of protestors, rendering the country virtually ungovernable – until Gandhi agreed to a one-sided “compromise,” without consulting anyone, that didn’t even modify the salt tax. It did, though, lead to the Round Table Conference.

The Muslims who comprised a quarter of the population had supported Gandhi’s campaigns enthusiastically at first, but became disenchanted by his capriciousness and his insistence that his actions were dictated by the “Voice of God” he heard inside his head. At the Round Table Conference, they insisted on “separate electorates,” with Muslims given the right to elect a fixed proportion of the new Parliament, to protect themselves from being swamped by the Hindu majority. Gandhi was willing to accept that, because the Muslims were so politically powerful.

Ambedkar then made the case for similar treatment for India’s Untouchables, who were nearly as numerous as the Muslims. In fact, for anyone who believes in the equality of human worth, the argument for the Untouchables was far stronger than the argument for the Muslims. They had been oppressed so severely, for so many centuries, that the only way to begin to dig themselves out of their hole was to become a voting bloc in Parliament to be reckoned with.

Gandhi was fiercely opposed, because he could count. If you give away a quarter of the seats to the Muslims, and nearly a quarter to the Untouchables, then throw in the complication of the Sikhs and a smattering of Christians, then suddenly his upper caste Hindu working majority might not be a majority anymore. Besides, the Untouchables were Hindus, and he – Gandhi – was God’s choice to speak for the Hindus.

The more secular British listened to Gandhi, they listened to Ambedkar, and they made a decision: Ambedkar was right – the Untouchables should have a separate electorate just like Gandhi had agreed the Muslims could have. This would last for a period of 70 years, which was judged to be sufficient time for them to achieve equality.

Gandhi responded to not getting his way in a calm, mature, and sportsmanlike manner. He announced that he was going to kill himself. More than just announcing it, he started doing it, by means of a “Fast Unto Death” that he would maintain until the British agreed to reverse their position on political rights for the Untouchables.

Gandhi’s fast riveted the attention of the entire world, no one more than Ambedkar. He saw the riots breaking out across India, and he could picture the bloodbath that would ensue against the entire Untouchable population if it were blamed for murdering the revered Mahatma. As Gandhi lay on his suicide bed, Ambedkar reluctantly concluded that he had to surrender the only victory his people had ever won. The resulting compromise ended the dream of the separate electorate, in exchange for a promise that a fixed number of seats would be filled by Untouchables who had been hand-picked by their higher-caste superiors. Nothing, of course, prevented the selectors from filling the quota with Uncle Toms, which Ambedkar believed is exactly what ensued.

Realizing that he needed to shore up support, politician Gandhi then embarked on a campaign to urge upper caste Hindus to treat Untouchables more like human beings, even to go to the extreme of occasionally sitting at the same dinner table with them. The rhetoric was strikingly similar to that of American Protestants 80 years earlier, urging slaveholders to treat their property more humanely while preserving the institution of slavery itself. The results were pretty much the same as well: pious promises to do better, followed by nothing at all. Two years later Gandhi abandoned the campaign, after God sent him a message (by means of an earthquake in Bihar province) that he should be working on something else.

In 1936, a group of Hindu reformers sympathetic to Gandhi’s “Be kind to Untouchables” push invited Ambedkar to speak at their conference. They were aghast, though, when they received the text of what he proposed to say. The first ¾ of what Ambedkar called The Annihilation of Caste was bad enough, with Ambedkar’s devastating critique demanding not kinder treatment but the complete dismantling of the whole rotten structure. What pushed them over the edge, though, was the closing, where Ambedkar blamed caste on Hinduism itself and boldly announced his personal decision to abandon forever the religion of his ancestors.

The organizers neatly eliminated this headache by canceling the entire conference. Gandhi, though, realized he needed to do more than that. If Ambedkar led 50 million Untouchables out of the Hindu fold – especially if they landed (Rama forbid) in Islam – his claim to speak for the Indian majority would evaporate. He tossed Ambedkar a bone by allowing him to publish his undelivered speech in Gandhi’s own newspaper, where he could later publish his own rebuttal to calm the troubled waters.

So 75 years ago this week The Annihilation of Caste appeared in Gandhi’s newspaper. “Why is it that the large majority of Hindus do not inter-dine and do not inter-marry?” asked Ambedkar.

There can be only one answer to this question and it is that inter-dining and inter-marriage are repugnant to the beliefs and dogmas which the Hindus regard as sacred. … the Hindus observe Caste not because they are inhuman or wrong headed. They observe Caste because they are deeply religious. People are not wrong in observing Caste. In my view, what is wrong is their religion, which has inculcated this notion of Caste. If this is correct, then obviously the enemy you must grapple with, is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras [Hindu scriptures] which teach them this religion of Caste. … The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras. … You must destroy the Religion …

Reformers working for the removal of untouchability, including Mr. Gandhi, do not seem to realize that the acts of the people are merely the results of their beliefs inculcated upon their minds by the Shastras and that people will not change their conduct until they cease to believe in the sanctity of the Shastras on which their conduct is founded. No wonder that such efforts have not produced any results. … To agitate for and to organise inter-caste dinners and inter-caste marriages is like forced feeding brought about by artificial means. Make every man and woman free from the thraldom to the Shastras, cleanse their minds of the pernicious notions founded on the Shastras, and he or she will inter-dine and inter-marry, without your telling him or her to do so. …

You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak [founder of Sikhism]. You must have courage to tell the Hindus, that what is wrong with them is their religion—the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of Caste. Will you show that courage?

Next week: Gandhi’s reply

Luis Granados

Trend-setting San Francisco will vote this fall on an important child-protection referendum that ought to be a no-brainer. Sadly, thanks to the pervasive power of God experts, it will probably lose.

Circumcision is a procedure for cutting, and sometimes permanently removing, part of a person’s genital organs. Sound appealing? Something you’d rush to sign up for? Well, you can – and no one, in San Francisco or elsewhere, proposes to stop you. If you want to inflict this insanity on another person, though, that’s different – especially when the other person is a child entrusted to your protection. The San Francisco referendum would ban the circumcision only of minors, allowing adults to choose for themselves.

In fact, circumcision of children is already flatly banned by federal law in the United States, for half the population – the female half. Nonetheless, thousands of American girls have suffered through the procedure, as have 140 million women around the world. For boys, though, anything goes. Is this because boys are tougher? Is it because male circumcision is less severe than female circumcision? Not really. Just last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics approved, then quickly rescinded, a proposal by “moderate” Muslims to achieve the religious benefits of female circumcision by means of a small nick to a girl’s clitoris, that would quickly heal – a far less intrusive procedure than whacking off an entire part that will never grow back. In a burst of common sense, AAP said no, that’s still outrageous, and no doctor should ever do it. The whole idea that a particular variety of mutilation is ok because it is “less severe” than some other variety is ludicrous: punching a stranger is less severe than shooting him, but I still wouldn’t recommend it.

But what about the rights of parents? Those rights are broad, but not infinite – and they terminate abruptly when the physical well-being of children is involved. It is now well-settled in most jurisdictions, even Oregon, that religious parents may not rely on prayer rather than medicine when their children are sick. What, then, gives parents the right to slice off their children’s body parts? Nothing at all – other than a chorus of experts telling us all about God’s will. Circumcision, they say, is an ancient religious practice, mandated by the Book of Genesis itself.

Well, so is slavery. So is genocide. Humanist common sense prevailed against those barbarisms – now it’s circumcision’s turn.

Female circumcision is an ancient religious practice as well, mandated today by Al-Azhar University, the closest Muslim equivalent of the Vatican. If the law can protect girls from religious circumcision, why can’t it protect baby boys? I even dimly recall something or other in our Constitution using the phrase “equal protection of the laws.”

Other supports claim that circumcision is justified by health benefits, including reducing urinary tract infections, and can even help prevent the spread of AIDS. In fact, the health benefits of genital cutting are minuscule, and offset by the risk of infection – as medical organizations around the world agree.

Opposition to the referendum comes not just from Jews and Muslims. Catholics like the Archbishop of San Francisco and Protestants like the National Association of Evangelicals are in full howl – despite the fact that Saint Paul unambiguously warned that “if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.” One more case of “pick and choose” theology, where God experts plumb for the Bible commandments they agree with and ignore the ones they don’t.

For their efforts, San Francisco’s child protection advocates are being likened – naturally – to the Nazis of the 1930s. This is par for the course whenever someone challenges the prerogatives of Jewish God experts. Somehow, the desire to protect Jewish boys from irreversible harm strikes me as being the 180-degree opposite of anti-Semitic.

Where did the whole monstrosity of circumcision come from, anyway? If you guessed it came from Genesis, you’d be wrong. It was practiced by the Egyptians long before the Torah was dreamt of, and was one of many ideas (along with not eating pork) borrowed by the fertile minds who pasted together the Jewish religion. Some historians speculate that the original symbolic point of circumcision was a ritual castration to make boys more like girls, which seems a little farfetched. Others speculate that circumcision was intended to be a “less severe” substitute for human sacrifice. But Jews kept right on sacrificing humans long after circumcision was introduced, so that seems farfetched as well.

Maimonides, the 12^th century sage who imagined rationalizations for all 613 laws of Judaism, perhaps came closer to the truth:

With regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. … The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its coverings taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened.

Maimonides went on to address today’s issue in San Francisco, of why circumcision must be performed on infants rather than limiting it to persons old enough to make up their own minds:

If the child were let alone until he grew up, he would sometimes not perform it. … if it were left uncircumcised for two or three years, this would necessitate the abandonment of circumcision because of the father’s love and affection for it. At the time of its birth, on the other hand, this imaginative form is very weak, especially as far as concerns the father upon whom this commandment is imposed.

Jews have not always practiced circumcision. Around the turn of the 3^rd century BC, Israel was ruled by the secular Tobiad faction, that sought to bring society more in line with the humanist practices of the surrounding Mediterranean world. Circumcision, among other things, became verboten. One of the popular pastimes back then was to hang around naked in the public baths, where everyone could check out whether you were circumcised or not. Circumcision became so unfashionable that clever Jewish doctors developed a procedure to reverse it, to make it appear to your buddies that you were one of the cool modern guys rather than one of the circumcised hicks. Amazingly, this was even before the invention of duct tape. The Tobiads didn’t last, though; they were soon overthrown by the God expert Maccabees, who busied themselves whacking off every foreskin they could find.

My take is that circumcision isn’t really about demasculinization, human sacrifice, or libido repression. It’s about power. It’s about God experts permanently branding new members of the community, in the most intimate manner, with the message that “You count for nothing as an individual. You’re here to serve an invisible spirit, who communicates to you through me. So stay in line.”

This is why God’s commandment in Genesis was to circumcise not only your sons, but your slaves. This is why the Maccabees forced the circumcision of the neighboring Gentile peoples they conquered. It’s why Christian God experts, anxious to protect their own power against humanist common sense, are so quick to jump to the defense of a Jewish and Muslim practice. It’s why even in modern times, according to Israel Shahak, Israeli burial associations, who have a monopoly over the burial of all Jews except kibbutz members, circumcise the corpses of non-circumcised Jews before burying them (and without asking the family’s permission). And it explains the great romantic story of the book of Samuel, about how young David won the hand of the girl he loved:

And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies … Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

Back in college, many decades ago, I developed a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl, whose name now escapes me. What I do remember is that she only grudgingly acknowledged my existence. If only I had thought to read my Bible! If I had just brought her father a gift of two hundred enemy foreskins, she might not have loved me, but she surely would have noticed me.

Luis Granados

The New York Legislature has just approved a bill permitting same-sex marriage in the nation’s third most populous state. The hold-up for the past week was a debate over what is called the “religious exemptions,” granting special rights to people who, for ostensibly religious reasons, object to same-sex marriage. For example, will the Knights of Columbus be required to open its halls for same-sex weddings? Will Catholic adoption agencies be allowed to refuse to place children with same-sex married couples? Can a Muslim caterer or chauffeur lawfully refuse to serve a same-sex wedding?

The religious exemption push is a ploy for elevating God experts above the laws that apply to the rest of us. Suppose, for example, that a non-believer declines to photograph a same-sex wedding not for any religious reasons, but just because he finds the whole idea offensive – that “guys kissing guys” is really gross. Nothing in any of the proposed exemptions would cover that. But if it’s God telling him to stay away, that’s different.

The exemption finally adopted by the legislature Friday night does not go as far as the God experts wanted. It covers only religious organizations and clergy, not just individuals claiming religious belief. “Religious organizations,” though, covers a lot more than churches, including any affiliated group like the Knights of Columbus. Ordinary caterers and photographers are not exempted. It shouldn’t be a demanding legal challenge, though, for haters to affiliate themselves with some sort of church organization so they can thumb their nose at the law as well.

The new exemption for religious organizations covers a lot more than same sex marriage. “Nothing in this article shall limit …[any such religious organization] from taking such action as is calculated by such organization to promote the religious principles for which it is established or maintained.” I’m not a New York lawyer, but it looks to me like this guarantees the right of religious adoption agencies to refuse to serve legitimately married New York couples of whom they disapprove, such as couples belonging to the same sex.

What’s more, this new religious exemption is in no way limited to same sex marriage. It allows these organizations, most of which are tax exempt, to discriminate against anyone, at any time, for any reason that they allege will promote their religious principles. Historically, God-based discrimination in matters of marriage and family has centered far more on race than on sexual preference, so the legal door is now open to roll back 60 years of racial progress.

God’s disdain for sexual race-mixing goes all the way back to the Old Testament, which was as clear as it could be on the question of Jews marrying non-Jews: “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.” When Ezra returned to Jerusalem from Babylon he was shocked:

For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands: yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this trespass. And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down astonished.

God experts in the New World relied on these passages and others to persuade civil authorities to pass laws against miscegenation as early as 1660. Eventually, thirty different states banned interracial marriage. Six of them put the ban in their state constitutions; Mississippi made mixed-race marriage a felony punishable by life imprisonment. Just as with same-sex marriage today, the opposition to mixed-race marriage was overwhelmingly cast in religious terms – it had to be, because common-sense arguments were so unpersuasive. For example, Richmond’s Christian Herald explained in 1877 that “God has made the two races widely different not only in complexion, but in their instincts and social qualities. We take it for granted it was not the purpose of the Creator that they should be blended. Nature abhors the union.”

William M. Brown, bishop of the Episcopal Church of Arkansas warned that if the black race were “absorbed” and the white race “ruined as a result of intermarriage,” then

God’s plan in the creation of the two races, so far as America is concerned, would be defeated. … Inasmuch as God made yellow, black and white people, instead of only black or yellow, or white when He could have made all any one of these colors, it must be concluded that He had some great purpose to accomplish in doing so. Hence, the amalgamation of the races, or the aping of one by the other, must be wrong because it thwarts God’s plan.

In 1930, Senator Thomas Heflin used the Senate floor to propound God’s views on the marriage of a black man and white woman in New York City, which took place the previous fall:

God had a purpose in making four separate and distinct races. The white, the red, the yellow, and the black. God intended that each of the four races should preserve its blood free from mixture with other races and preserve race integrity and prove itself true to the purpose that God had in mind for each of them when He brought them into being. The great white race is the climax and crowning glory of God’s creation. … The fact that the Roman Catholic Church permits negroes and whites to belong to the same Catholic Church and to go to the same Catholic schools and permits and sanctions the marriage between whites and negroes in the United States is largely responsible for the loose, dangerous, and sickening conditions that exist in New York City and State today.

Even former President Harry Truman told a reporter in 1963 that mixed-race marriage “ran counter to the teachings of the Bible,” while evangelist Jerry Falwell warned that miscegenation would “destroy our [white] race eventually.”

A unanimous Supreme Court invalidated state laws against miscegenation in 1967, but it has taken a while to remove those laws from the statute books. When a referendum was held in 2000 to do so in Alabama, our second most religious state, over 40% of the electorate voted “No.” Those who have studied the data conclude that white voters split almost 50-50 on the question.

Then there are the Mormons, who teach that people are born non-white because their souls committed grievous sins back during their pre-birth period. According to the refreshingly blunt Brigham Young: “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.” Mormon children learned from their “Juvenile Instructor” manual that “In fact we believe it to be a great sin in the eyes of our Heavenly Father for a white person to marry a black one. And further, that it is a proof of the mercy of God that no such race appear able to continue for many generations.” The Mormons have allowed miscegenation since receiving a new revelation from one of their Gods in 1978. It’s interesting, though, that a certain presidential candidate chose to spend two years of his life as a missionary spreading the Mormon race message a decade before this change was made.

I’m not complaining about the New York legislators. The majority swallowed a distasteful compromise to achieve a greater goal, proving that the profoundly humanist ideal of democracy can actually work, at least in fits and starts. But once again, the 11^th Commandment prevails: Rules are for schmucks. God experts do what they want.

Luis Granados

Hitler’s 1919 letter urging “removal” of Jews from Germany, an original copy of which was unveiled last week by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, launched his rise to political prominence in Germany. His progress was monitored nervously by Jews, labor unions, and lovers of freedom throughout the West. When he won the chancellorship in 1933, movements were launched in the United States and elsewhere for a boycott of German goods. The idea was to mobilize international pressure either to soften his threatened actions or to force him from power – exactly as international boycotts helped crush South African apartheid 50 years later.

Not everyone supported the boycott, though. In fact, many Zionist Jews not only actively opposed it, but welcomed Hitler’s victory, because it would accelerate the removal of Jews from Germany to Palestine – and teach them a lesson. The Zionist newspaper Hapoel Hatsair described Nazi persecution of the Jews as God’s “punishment” for having tried to integrate into German society instead of leaving for Palestine while it was still possible to do so.

The Zionist Federation of Germany welcomed the new Führer with a warm address:

Zionism recognized decades ago that as a result of the assimilationist trend, symptoms of deterioration were bound to appear, which it seeks to overcome by carrying out its challenge to transform Jewish life completely … Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life.

In Palestine, the Zionist labor magazine Davar affirmed that:

However, even if we suppose a return to the status existing before the Hitler revolution to be within the realm of political possibility, even then the Jewish democrat, liberal, socialist, assimilationist may perhaps be satisfied with his reinstatement in equal rights, but a Zionist cannot rest content with this, since he has a special conception, since this is not the ideal of Zionism nor the altar for its sacrifices. … Now we have a new goal and no longer content ourselves with “arousing world opinion.” Our ideal is not the obtaining of rights, citizenship rights or minority rights, for the Jews of Germany, but the obtaining of a Palestine visa for them, in addition to all that is necessary for such a visa so that it, too, may not become a mere scrap of paper.

In the ultimate “politics makes strange bedfellows” arrangement, Zionists actively collaborated with Germany’s Nazis, developing a scheme called “haavara” to facilitate legal movement of German Jews and a portion of their capital to Palestine despite restrictions on currency transfer, by selling German manufactured goods in Palestine. Haavara neatly undercut the international boycott by opening new markets for Nazi products. Once goods entered Palestine, it was then a trivial matter to resell them elsewhere; one pro-boycott Jew disgustedly described Palestine as “the official scab-agent against the boycott in the Near-East.” Businessmen fought over who would have the rights to skim profits from all the money movement; the winning firm was represented in Berlin by future Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.

From 1933 through the early years of World War II, the Hitler regime favored and actively promoted Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine. Hitler cynically remarked that he’d be delighted to see the Jews leave “on luxury ships.” At one point, the Nazis even despatched future Final Solution organizer Adolf Eichmann on a mission to Palestine, to work out loose ends of the haavara scheme. Eichmann was impressed; he wrote that “Had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.” Propaganda minister Goebbels had a medal struck to celebrate the collaboration: on one side a swastika, on the other a Zionist star.

In 1938, President Roosevelt convened a meeting of the Western nations at Evian, France, to promote alternatives for Jews wishing to escape Hitler’s oppression. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion was deeply concerned, telling his colleagues that he did “not know if the conference will open the gates of other countries … But I am afraid [it] might cause tremendous harm to Eretz Israel and Zionism. … Our main task is to reduce the harm, the danger and the disaster … and the more we emphasize the terrible distress of the Jewish masses in Germany, Poland and Rumania, the more damage we shall cause.” With no public pressure from the people it was trying to help, the conference produced few concrete results, other than an easing of red tape for German Jewish emigration to the United States and an offer from the Dominican Republic to take in 100,000 refugees – which the Zionists never seriously pursued.

Shortly after Evian, the Kristallnacht pogroms exploded across Germany; Ben-Gurion worried that “the human conscience” might induce more countries to open their doors further to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: “Zionism is in danger!” While the Holocaust raged, Ben-Gurion wrote that “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.” He later blocked plans to transfer thousands of child Holocaust survivors in frail health from wretched camps for displaced persons to safe havens elsewhere in Europe, for fear that such resettlement “might weaken the struggle for free immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine.” Even the Final Solution had not altered his view from the time that Zionists opposed the boycott in the early 1930s: “The Zionist role is not to rescue the survivors in Europe, but to rescue Eretz Israel for the Jewish people.”

Despite Ben-Gurion’s intensive efforts, though, far more Jews who escaped Germany in the 1930s chose to live in the Americas rather than in Palestine. According to some Zionists, that’s because they were bad Jews. “There is something positive in their tragedy,” Menahem Ussishkin said at a meeting of the Zionist executive, “and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.”

Zionists not only talked the talk; some of them tried to walk the walk. In 1941, the Zionist “National Military Organization,” whose leadership included future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, delivered an astonishing offer to German diplomats in Vichy France:

It is often stated in the speeches and utterances of the leading statesmen of National Socialist Germany that a prerequisite of the New Order in Europe requires the radical solution of the Jewish question through evacuation (“Jew-free Europe”). The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic boundaries. … The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East. …

Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side. This offer by the NMO, covering activity in the military, political and information fields, in Palestine and, according to our determined preparations, outside Palestine, would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon. … The cooperation of the Israeli freedom movement would also be along the lines of one of the last speeches of the German Reich Chancellor, in which Herr Hitler emphasized that he would utilize every combination and coalition in order to isolate and defeat England.

The Nazis never replied. The founder of the NMO, Avraham Stern, was honored by an Israeli commemorative postage stamp in 1978.

Luis Granados

The Simon Wiesenthal Center put on display this week the first known anti-Semitic writing of Adolf Hitler, a letter he typed and quite legibly signed in 1919. Unfortunately, at the same time, they put a politically correct spin on what the letter actually says, while glossing over some inconvenient facts about people who were saying exactly the same thing as Hitler at exactly the same time.

As you can read here, the letter says nothing at all about exterminating, annihilating, or otherwise killing any Jews. In fact, Hitler pointedly rejects the whole idea of pogroms against the Jews, disdaining such violence as based on “emotional grounds,” in contrast to his own loftier “anti-Semitism based on reason.”

At the very moment Hitler was writing, pogroms were racking the nearby Ukraine, during which some 35,000 to 50,000 Jews were murdered. The Hitler of 1919 disdained that approach, championing instead the “systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.”

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, the rabbi who put the letter on display said that if people had taken bets in 1919, “they all would have bet this is a lot of nonsense, nothing would happen like this. And 22 years later, it happened exactly as he wrote it.” But it didn’t happen at all as Hitler wrote it. What happened 22 years later was the commencement of the “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of the Jews of Nazi-conquered territories. That’s not what the letter says – it says “removal,” an entirely different and not very novel idea.

The first “removal” of Jews was effected by the Roman Empire, back in the 2^nd century. After the second major rebellion in Palestine, which cost thousands of Roman lives and massive sums of Roman money to subdue, the frustrated Emperor Hadrian ordered the permanent removal of all Jews from Jerusalem, and even renamed the city.
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