Reform Rabbi Eric Yoffie and his Jew-Hating Friends

By Pamela Geller, INN

After the Jerusalem Post ran a vicious defamatory article by the uber-left Rabbi Yoffie,  President of the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ), I submitted a response to his unchallenged and unsubstantiated libel to Post Editor-in-Chief Steve Linde. Linde bounced me to Sara Miller, Managing Editor ofJPost.com, who procrastinated and thought that Yoffie saying that “Pamela Geller has no place in an American synagogue. She is a bigot and purveyor of hate” didn’t warrant any response from me.

Miller should be on the receiving end of ad hominem attacks and defamation, and sit quietly.

Yoffie wrote last week that “diversity of views should be welcome. Debate should be promoted and controversy encouraged.”

However, he said there were limits: “Pamela Geller has no place in an American synagogue. She is a bigot and purveyor of hate.” On the other hand, “Peter Beinart and speakers from J Street should be welcomed.”

This is what we have come to: a rabbi who smears and libels a fellow Jew who speaks against the ideology that drives adherents to hack men to death in the streets of London.
This is what we have come to: a rabbi who smears and libels a fellow Jew who speaks against the ideology that drives adherents to hack men to death in the streets of London.

And Yoffie meanwhile gives his sanction to the notoriously anti-Israel Jewish turncoat Peter Beinart and to J Street, which was unique among Jewish groups in being anti-Israel.

Isi Liebler, former chairman of the Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress, challenged J Street’s “duplicity in trying to masquerade as a Jewish mainstream ‘pro-Israel’ organisation while consistently campaigning against the Jewish state.”

Philip Klein, The American Spectator’s Washington correspondent, says that “while the group bills itself as the ‘pro Israel’ and ‘pro peace’ alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in reality it is a liberal organization actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Just how extreme and anti-Israel was J Street? According to Liebler, as of October 2009 “Arab and pro-Iranian elements were providing approximately 10% of J Street funding, a somewhat bizarre situation for a genuinely ‘pro-Israel’ organisation.” Federal Election Commission records showed that tens of thousands of dollars flowed in to J Street from Arabs and Muslims, including some donations from groups involved in agitating for the Palestinian cause.

In no other era would this radical group of self-hating Jewish sellouts have been anything but a fringe group. History is filled with Jewicidal Jews who side with those who would destroy them. But never have they been so mainstream as they are today – thanks to fellow Jews like Eric Yoffie.

When J Street held a convention in Washington in the summer of 2009, Rabbi Eric Yoffie was one of the featured speakers.

Yoffie is also quite friendly with officials of a Hamas-tied Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In 2007, the Justice Department named ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-funding trial in our nation’s history. The Holy Land Foundation, once America’s largest Muslim charity, was funneling charitable contributions to Hamas.

According to investigative journalist Joe Kaufman, “In July of 1981, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) was incorporated in the state of Indiana. At the time, it shared its incorporating address with the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a group created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in 1963, and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a Hamas financing center.”

The Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated in its own words, according to a captured internal document that was released during the Holy Land Foundation trial, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house” so that “Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions.”

These are Eric Yoffie’s friends. These Jew-haters are fine with him, but I am unacceptable. Why? Because I defend Israel against jihadist savagery? Because I stand against Islamic gender apartheid, creed apartheid, and religiously-sanctioned Jew-hatred?

In smearing me, Yoffie has joined a long line of Islamic supremacist Jew-haters. Telling the truth now is equated with ‘hate’ and ‘bigotry’ in an attempt to silence and demonize the truth-tellers.

Where was Rabbi Eric Yoffie countering ‘hate’ when the Fogel family was murdered in Israel? Or when the Chabad house was targeted for a bloody jihad attack in Mumbai? Or when Christians are persecuted on an increasingly frequent and violent basis in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere? Instead, he opposes me for standing up against this real hatred.

But Jews like Yoffe and Bernie Farber provide us with a much-needed reminder. So many of us question how something like the Holocaust could have happened. How could over six million Jews could have been murdered? Jews like Farber and Yoffee make it possible. Their sanction provides cover to our enemies and lures unsuspecting Jews to their deaths.

American’s Jewish lay leadership and Jewish Diaspora have a lot to answer for.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of the new book Freedom or Submission: On the Dangers of Islamic Extremism & American Complacency, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.