Rabbi Lerner responds

Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of today's op-ed about Israel and Gaza, has kindly replied at length to my query this morning about his views on 9/11 and homeland security. He's given me permission to publish it, provided I do so in full, and of course I'm glad to do so. Here is his letter:

Nothing in my current thinking is tied to agnosticism about 9/11. I do not doubt that the official story is possible, and so, after reading the evidence amassed by 9/11 doubters, is their alternative story. But in thinking about the Middle East, I assume the worst case scenario, namely that 9/11 was in fact a strike by anti-imperialist Muslims who had worked carefully for years to pull off an amazing venture requiring a group of suicide bombers who simultaneously hi-jacked airplanes and caused incredible suffering and murder. I do know that on 9/11 some 20,000-30,000 children under the age of five died of malnutrition and inadequate health care around the world, because every day the global economic system we set up and from which we benefit results in that many dead, or about twelve million children a year!

In my view, the best way to combat the terrorists is a Global Marshall Plan that is implemented in a spirit of generosity and caring for others, as more fully articulated in our detailed plan at www.spiritualprogressives.org. I believe that if the U.S. were to adjust its military plans to purely defensive operations on our actual physical borders, and use a major part of our defense budget to end both domestic and global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, inadequate health care and to repair the global environment (a task that would eventually need the equal participation of the UK and the other G-8 countries, and a goal that has already been endorsed by UK prime minister Gordon Brown), we would achieve a much higher level of security within twenty years than we will by continuing the aggressive militarist stances that led the US to war in Iraq or to threaten war with Iran.

I do not believe that the extremist jihaddis who were engaged in 9/11 will have their hearts melted by this kind of generosity. Their actions should be treated the way other international criminals should be treated--with protections for our populations, and with aggressive action to arrest and imprison them. But their support and their ability to recruit people willing to give up their lives out of hatred for the destructive consequences the West's economic and political systems have wrought in their world will be greatly reduced should the West appear to genuinely care about ordinary people around the world. Similarly, the appeal of Hamas would be greatly reduced were Israel (with the help of the UK and the US) willing to engage in a massive Marshall Plan to provide sanitary and sound housing, jobs, and adequate food for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would still need a good police force on its borders with a Palestinian state, and I've called for an international force to provide protection for both Israel and Palestine. A balance between military strength used defensively plus an aggressive generosity and caring for others (aggressive in the sense that we actively seek ways to promote the well-being of everyone on the planet) is the path to homeland security that is most realistic and most likely to create safety for our citizens.

Rabbi Michael Lerner - Editor, Tikkun www.tikkun.org

P.S. Please don't quote from this letter--print it in full on your blog space before arguing against it. I can see that you might wish to reject everything I say based on my agnosticism on 9/11. But agnosticism does not mean that I reject the mainsteam account, only that I believe that there are big holes in that account that need to be filled (but I'm perfectly able to imagine that they could be filled--I'm not a conspiracy buff).

Rabbi Lerner's apprehension that I might wish to reject everything he says because of his "agnosticism on 9/11" is unfounded. What he says about the conflict in Gaza stands or falls on its own merits, and I agree with him on the need for a negotiated settlement whereby Israel will be secure and a Palestinian state will be sovereign.

But Rabbi Lerner's "agnosticism" on whether the US government conspired to murder thousands of civilians on US soil on 9/11 consigns him immediately to an extreme and irrationalist fringe. Christopher Hitchens received criticism when he pointed out, after the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, that (and I paraphrase) it doesn't matter how nutty or malign your opinions, if you have a title as minister of religion, you'll be treated with unmerited seriousness. I fear he was right, but I will do what I can to erode this lamentable state of affairs.

Comments

[Gil]

Oliver, Lerner comes across as utterly confused and unfocused. In his first sentence he says: 'nothing is agnostic in my current thinking about 9/11' and in his last paragraph he contradicts himself on this.

Also, he calls the terrorists (if he isn't agnostic...) 'anti-imperialist Muslims' and then goes off on a tangent. He could have done with some good editing.

[Matthew]

No Gil you've misread that. He says 'nothing in my current thinking is tied to agnosticism', which is different.

[Tony Francis]

Mohammed Atta was the son of a lawyer. Atta, the son and terrorist, was educated in construction engineering. The other 9/11 terrorists were educated. So how do we get from these facts to "funding a Marshall Plan to educate the people of the Middle East", to remedy hatred as the Rabbi suggests? Rather, isn't it really about a culture and religion of pusillanimity which mires in self-pity, blame and conspiracy theories? A religious philosophy which selects psychopathic personalities who are killers and want to be killed- and glorifies them? What if these educated men had applied themselves to the development of a new building project or a new company? Instead they flew airplanes into buildings in the name of a brand of religion that would have us live in caves and beat our women folk. The streets of the Middle East cheered at their glory and "defeat' of the west. Hardly rational, nor a good advertisement for their line of thinking.

I fail to see how blaming the west and pouring money into "schools and education" is ever going to change that. At some point, the people of the Middle East are going to have to wake up and realize the philosophy of ignorance and backwardness lead to nothing but destruction. Until that happens, there is nothing much the West can do about it.

What makes the leaders of Gaza think they can willy-nilly fire rockets into Israel without retribution? What do they think they will accomplish? What is the military plan behind such an action? Ignorance and backwardness is more like it. Once again, not much of an inducement to their way of life or thinking.

What the Rabbi Lerner and his opinions, have to do with Hitchins and Jerry Falwell remains to be demonstrated.

[Red]

Thank you for highlighting some of Rabbi Lerner's more worrying views on world affairs. I am not sure a man who entertains such crackpot theories should write for a paper like the Times, particularly if we are not warned of his past eccentricities.

[Peter Tomlinson]

Maybe Rabbi Lerner could have done with some good editing, but so what? Engage him in a dialogue, that's what, so that he can refines his statements.
I cannot understand the condemnation of agnosticism about something that the observer cannot prove one way or another. Instead he tries hard to put a positive way forward - and that reminds me that one should read Gore Vidal and his belief that the USA has to be permanently at war - but why?

[Ollie]

I still think The Times should have warned us that the author of the piece was a 9/11 conspiracy nutter. It would have been of great help to put the rest of the article in context.

[T T Tsikas]

"Until that happens, there is nothing much the West can do about it" says Tony Francis.

I disagree, the West can do lots of things, starting with upholding international law and respecting decisions of the ICJ.

The people of Gaza should, of course, be allowed back home and not be forced to live in that concentration camp any more. The West can withhold co-operation with Israel until that happens.

[Michael Lewis]

This is a forum about "Rabbi" Lerner's theories, but I can't let the last comment by T T TSIKAS go without a question.

In his ICJ ( and UN?) solution, whose role is it to catch the rockets and stop them falling on Israel? Some umbrella organisation?

[JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO]

The Rabbi speaks reason, both about the current savage violence in Gaza and the history of 9/11, but I'm not sure you do, Mr. Kamm.

"Rabbi Lerner's apprehension that I might wish to reject everything he says because of his "agnosticism on 9/11" is unfounded."

What in God's name does 9/11 have to do with these matters? When you mentioned this the other day, I thought you were recovering from holiday excess.

The Rabbi is right to doubt the official version of 9/11. It is certainly incomplete, and I say this without believing that government was involved in plots.

There are clear bits of evidence. The flight over Pennsylvania was certainly shot down - just the extensive nature of the wreckage field says this to a certainty. So does a test of seat cloth - stolen during examination - showing the kind of nitrate residue we'd expect from a missile warhead.

Cheney undoubtedly ordered it shot down - he is a totally ruthless man - but they do not want to tell the world this ugly fact. So we get mythical nonsense about "Let's roll."

The towers‘ collapse is another unexplained matter: it resembled precisely the kind of controlled explosion and collapse used in tall-building demolition.

A number of engineers have also pointed out the melting point of the kind of steel used in construction: it is twice the temperature at which diesel fuel (aviation fuel is a refined diesel) burns.

It is likely then that the scheme was larger than just the 19 or 20 on the four planes. After all, there had been a previous attempt to bring down the Trade Center this very way.

The authorities do not want to acknowledge the size and success of the scheme. It is a confession of the utter incompetence of intelligence and police services.

There is also the documented matter of a group of Mossad agents, under cover of a moving (removal) firm, who were aware of these plotters and were following them around inside the U.S. Just the fact that there was a sizeable group of agents operating inside the U.S. and that this group was on to the plotters further emphasizes the complete incompetence of an American intelligence establishment chewing its way through tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.

Of course, the entire thing could not have happened had the simplest precautions been taken in aviation security, such as cockpit doors that lock securely from inside.
Upgrading of boarding procedures, too.

There had been years of skyjackings – many like that of D. B. Cooper still unsolved - and the U.S. Congress continued to refuse to spend this small amount of money on real security. It is only generous when it comes to bombing people in the colonies.

So now we suffer from a ridiculous degree of over-kill in American security. We all are paying a price for the incompetence of American government, and no government wants to be thought incompetent.

No, the Rabbi has many reasonable bases for doubt.

[Oliver Kamm]

Mr Chuckman, your comment has been posted in full and unedited, so that you do not feel you have been ill treated, let alone "censored". But I insist that nothing further along the lines of this pitiful contribution gets posted here or on the blogs of any of my colleagues. It won't get through comment-moderation, for reasons that ought to be obvious.

For the saner readers of this forum: I should be clear that I haven't called Rabbi Lerner a 9/11 "truther", nor is he one. I've carefully used his own term for himself, which is that he's an agnostic on 9/11. Is that enough to disqualify him from serious consideration as a commentator on public policy? It certainly is.

[Tony Francis]

What makes us believe, on the one hand, a government so incompetent it could not detect nor prevent a terrorist attack with hijacked airplanes, could then engineer a perfect demolition of the twin towers? The latter action would have involved days of detonation engineers placing dynamite in the building, while avoiding detection by the thousands of tenants of those buildings. So what if the Pennsylvania airliner was shot down? Anyone with a brain knows (or should know) this is an emergency backup plan by the US Air Force and Air National Guard to prevent airliners flying into buildings. We must go back to the mindset of the Clinton era. Then, we were told radical Muslims were just misunderstood creatures, who given half a chance would be just like everyone else in the West. We were told hatred and religious idolatry would dissipate in the "openness of the West".

Remember that Janet Reno and Clinton were more worried about Randy Weaver and the Christian nutters at Waco, than they were about Muslim attempts to destroy the World Trade Center. Hundreds of machine gun armed quasi-military agents abducted Elian Gonzales and sent him packing back to Cuba. In Clinton World, he was a greater threat than Muslim terrorists. White separatists and neo-Nazis were the focus of the US government in the 1990s. Radical Muslims were friends of the west in Clinton World. Really, just misunderstood juvenile delinquents who would grow up to be good citizens of the world, if we would just leave them alone and quit giving them reasons to hate us.

[Peter Koroly]

Rabbi Lerner has published an article of the Swedish-Russian antisemite Adam Ermash, who is using the penname Israel Shamir. A real Neonazi, friend of the German Neonazi Horst Mahler and other of this ilk

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/09/24/a-lot-to-lern-about-shamir/

[Putzi]

I disagree with most of what Mr Chuckman says, but I don't see the problem letting him say openly what he thinks. (Maybe I miss something here??)

Anyway, I think he has one very good point: aircraft-cockpits should always be locked for security reasons, I find.

(I mean, even in your London taxis, that is long been the case that the driver has a certain protection from violent passengers. But before 9/11, aircraft pilots had no kind of protection from passengers! Looking back, that seems crazy!)

[T T Tsikas]

"In his ICJ ( and UN?) solution, whose role is it to catch the rockets and stop them falling on Israel? Some umbrella organisation?" asks Michael Lewis.

It's not "my" solution, it's what all states have signed up to do when they joined the UN. You can argue that this or that solution is the right one. I don't mind, as long as at the end of the day you go to the ICJ and ask "did I do this correctly or did I break the law" and "if I broke the law what is my punishment". We are a million miles from that, currently.

I also would like to disagree with Oliver's suggestion that expression of agnosticism on some matter is enough to disqualify a person "from serious consideration as a commentator on public policy". Arguments should be treated on their merits, in my opinion. We simply can't expect anyone to get EVERYTHING right.

[Hugh]

Tony Francis,

the rationale for Hamas in firing rockets into Israel is to provoke a response that they expect will be immoderate and therefore garner sympathy throughout the world for them, and building political pressure against Israel. The cynicism here should be obvious: targetting innocent Israeli civilians for violent attack (a war crime by any definition), in the knowledge and expectation that innocent Palestinian civilians will be killed in Israel's response.

This is a standard mode of thought for many terrorist organisations. For example, PIRA planned, but then abandoned, a "Tet offensive"-style series of attacks in the 1980's in the hope that Britain would bring back internment, thus discrediting British rule in NI.

By provoking an overwhelming response from Israel, Hamas are also further entrenching their political control over Gaza. What room is there for criticism of Hamas by Gazans when Israeli soldiers are invading the territory? The political centre crumbles in the face of Hamas' violence, leaving the field clear for themselves. This is surely a factor in their thinking.

[Sigivald]

Tsikas: If that's the UN's job, then I reiterate my existing (utterly powerless) demand that the UN be dismantled, because the UN is neither competent nor capable of doing it, and the facade is more harmful than admitting the truth of the matter.

Back to the Rabbi, I find it interesting - if disheartening - that he said ... the global economic system we set up and from which we benefit results in that many dead, or about twelve million children a year!

Does he imagine that engineered famines in the third world, or even natural crop failures, are the result of "the global economic system", and that "we" are somehow especially morally culpable because we gain from economic exchange in general? Or, as importantly, that somehow the children of the world would be better off without "the global economic system"?

Or that throwing billions of dollars to "reduce poverty" will actually do so, rather than creating massive kleptocracy and a dependent state for the world? (Much as food aid to starving nations, if kept up beyond the immediate famine and bare subsistence, destroys local food production.)

The only way I can see to make the world wealthy - a goal I whole-heartedly support - is not to give out buckets of aid, but to support republican government and free trade.

(And I'd like to say that everything John Chuckman has said is not just false, but a damnable lie, in the truest theological sense.)

[Michel Moore]

Isn't it rather ironic that the rabbi's agnosticism extends only towards an exhaustively and empirically irrefutable documented event (9/11) and yet he has unshakeable faith in the existence of an unprovable deity and the ultimately benign character of Hamas and similar groups? Why does he require an unassailable level of proof for one event and then abdicates proof for comparably extraodinary claims?While I do not question the sincerity of the rabbi's intentions, I don't believe that his analysis or his suggestions advance the cause of a just resolution. A tempering of the Islamist exterminationist rhetoric and an accomodationist orientation towards Israel would reduce casualties far more than an unaccountable Marshall Plan-style infusion of cash into various Muslim territories. Saudi Arabian wealth and Iran's relative prosperity certained hasn't resulted in any abeyance of hostility towards the "Zionist entity." Isn't it time to recognize that the malign posturing of Islamist deed and language ultimately result in tragic events like the one currenty unfolding? By the way, where is the Rabbi's analagous voice from the Muslim side?

[Mark]

Our host's castigation of Mr Chuckman is over the top; it reads more like a secular excommunication order than criticism. Orwell's phrase from 'Inside the Whale'- 'orthodoxy-sniffing', seems very appropriate here.
This excerpt describes the 'orthodoxy-sniffing' mindset most aptly-
'By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had narrowed down to 'anti-Fascism', i.e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature directed against Germany and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never happened'.
The mental atmosphere descibed here has returned again in the aftermath of 9/11, and the 'Decent left' are once again among the worst offenders.

[Stu]

Oliver, why does it matter if Rabbi Lerner has eccentric views about 9/11 in this context? His essay was about a possible pathway to peace for the benighted peoples of Israel and the Palestinian territories. That proposal may be deeply flawed, it may be naive to the point of stupidity, or it may be a work of genius, but it has nothing to say about 9/11.

It seems almost ad hominem to bring it up now; almost like you want to disagree with him but lack the intellectual substance to debate him on the merits of his proposal.

[Mark]

Michel Moore- What Cheney may or may not have done on 9/11was most certainly not 'empirically irrefutable documented' in the official 9/11 Commission Report. Its conclusions are seriously at odds with some of the remarks Cheney himself uttered in his Meet The Press interview with Tim Russert on 16 September 2001.

[Mark]

Does anyone know what congregation this "Rabbi" serves and what they think of his views?

[Lorenzo]

T T TSIKAS: If the Gazans get to go "back home" then do all the Jews who fled Arab lands get to go too? And all the Germans expelled from Poland and what is now the Czech Republic? And ... And how does one have third generation "refugees"?

Gaza is a hell-hole because it has always been more important to various forms of Palestinian leadership to either milk the conflict or recruit for their ideology than nation-build.

[Mark]

Lorenzo- If the Germans repopulated East Prussia( now largely comprising the Kaliningrad oblast, and from which they were so effectively cleansed by the Red Army), you would at least have the comfort of knowing that the spastic 'missile defence shield' couldn't be checkmated by Mr Putin.

[Richard]

I believe Oliver is quite right to warn John Chuckman about repeating such posts. The problem with unrestricted free speech in such a place is that the louder and unreasonable voices tend to drown out any debate.
This is, in my opinion, a problem with Harry's Place (of which I remain inordinately fond) that there are almost resident Stalinist/Trot commentators, who tend to mess up every comments thread through a (probable) desire to "wind up" the "decents".
I'm probably misquoting Cicero but here goes: Too much liberty is the enemy of freedom.