When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM (PT. 2)
caust is probably related to the disproportionate numbers of American Jews
who join various cults.” [DANZER p. 289] “Other Jewish critics,’ says Charles
Selengut, “assert that it is the psychologically maladjusted who join new religious
movements and describe Jewish converts as people who are ‘selling their
souls for the security of slavery.’” [SELENGUT, p. 95]
Margaret Brearly goes so far as to proclaim that “New Age” movements in
general “could pose as serious a medium- and long-term threat to Jewish identity
as Nazism did in the 1920s and 1930s “[and] it … could eventually lead to
the destruction of many Jews and all Jewish identity.” [BREARLY, p. 269] Ms.
Brearly’s brush is broad for New Age Nazis. Innately antisemitic New Age movements
listed included the Unification Church (moonies), Scientologists, Zen
Buddhists, New Age “travelers,” modern pagans, Wiccan witches, “post-Christian”
feminists, occultists, the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement,
and EST followers. [BREARLY, p. 258-259] “At a deep, esoteric level,” worries
Brearly, “New Age ideology is Aryan and racist…” [BREARLY, p. 260] although,
oddly enough, “a significant number of New Age leaders and their followers are
themselves Jewish in origin.” [BREARLY, p. 259] (In 1987 the Israeli government
even published a 500-page report “on the threat posed by mystic sects to
Israeli society.” [JW, 3-13-87] According to the document, 5,000 Israelis were
members of groups like Scientology, Transcendental Mediation, Bhagwan
Rajneesh, EST, and others.) When Jewish American Phillip Gordon decided to
join the Hare Krishnas and become Kurma Dasa, his parents sent him to a psychiatrist.
[COLLINS, E., 2000, p. 31]
Hannah Newman’s online web site (originally posted by the Jewish Student
Union at the University of Colorado) highlights “camoflauged anti-Semitism in
an enlightened global society.” Her article, The Rainbow Swastika (http://jewishtribalreview.org/rainbow.htm),
indicts the entire “New Age” movement as
anti-Semitic, a world view that seeks to destroy Jews and Judaism. Alleged anti-
Semitic individuals and organizations include Buckminster Fuller, Maharishi
Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation organization, Greenpeace, Planned
Parenthood, Bread for the World, Bahais and Sufis, Unesco, Scientology, the
Theosophical Society, “pop singers John Denver and Judy Collins,” the Hunger
Project, “most health food stores,” and many, many more. Newman’s list of such
people who espouse such anti-Semitic currents even includes Jews like Erich
Fromm, science fiction author Isaac Isamov, Alvin Toffler, and Theodore
Rozak. [NEWMAN, H., 2001]
How about vegetarianism as an expression of anti-Semitism? Hitler, and
other anti-Semites, have toyed with it, after all. In 2001, Pat Sloane became confused
at the online discussion of mostly fellow Jewish scholars at the discussion
group H-Antisemitism (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~antis/):
“Contrary to what you [Simon Weil] say, it’s not unusual for vegetarians
to feel compassion for animals, or to disapprove of cruelty to animals.
An example is Leonardo da Vinci, who not only was a vegetarian
but also purchased cage birds in the marketplace in order to set them
free. I regard these as admirable attitudes that can be defended on either
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