'Anti-Israel' group praises 'our rabbi Alinsky'

[Confederate Kahanist]

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=124234


PHILADELPHIA – Paying tribute to "our rabbi" – the radical 1960s theorist Saul Alinsky – leaders of the left-wing Jewish lobby J Street launched what they hope will be a national mobilization, before an audience of about 175 people at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel center last night.

After he "conferred" rabbinical ordination on Alinsky, Temple University professor Elliot A. Ratzman used rhetoric from the late father of community organizing about "organizing people and mobilizing resources" to inspire conference attendees, which included many veteran activists of the Jewish left.

Ratzman, it was announced, will head the new "Philadelphia local" of J Street, along with well-known Jewish "peace" organizer, attorney Steven Masters.

In his own remarks, Masters said J Street had already amassed a war chest of $4 million to promote its agenda.

Masters also announced he was formally merging the peace group he founded in the mid-1990s, Brit Zedek V'Shalom, or Covenant of Justice and Peace, into the J Street organization. In past publications, Masters claimed Brit Zedek had the support of 1,000 rabbis and 40,000 lay members.

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J Street's founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has acknowledged receiving seed money from left-wing billionaire activist George Soros. J Street has also come under fire for accepting funds from numerous Arab sources as well as pro-Arab organizations.

Yesterday's event took place in the facilities of Hillel, which promotes itself as the largest Jewish campus organization in the world and is known as the center of mainstream Jewish life on campuses across the U.S. J Street conference leaders said they were simulcasting the keynote speech of Ben-Ami to 20 remote locations, including 400 in attendance in New York and "over 200" in Boston.

In his broadcast remarks, Ben-Ami struck a moderate tone, telling activists to engage in a "respectful dialogue" with mainstream Jewish groups. He said J Street wants to pressure Congress and the Obama administration to pursue "a two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this is a position the mainstream Jewish community, President Obama and successive Israeli governments already embrace.

Nonetheless, "this administration came into office promising to make a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict its first priority, and we intend to hold them to that promise," Ben-Ami declared.

In a question-and-answer session following the broadcast, Ben-Ami acknowledged a lack of student turnout for the kick-off event. But he stressed the importance of student and faculty involvement and said J Street had already launched a campus program it is calling "J Street U."

All three speakers were enthusiastic about using the Alinskyian tactic of "mobilizing" clergy and religious congregations, in this case rabbis and synagogues, to promote their political agenda, which they vociferously insist is pro-Israel.

J Street brands itself as pro-Israel. It states on its website it seeks to "promote meaningful American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically."

But the group also supports talks with Hamas, a terrorist group whose charter seeks the destruction of Israel. The group opposes sanctions against Iran and is harshly critical of Israel's anti-terror military offensives.

A group opposing J Street called Z Street staged a simultaneous counter-program at Penn Hillel, which organizers said attracted about 100 people, including about 20 students. Penn is home to a large and active Jewish student population. There were no public confrontations at last night's conference between the two groups.

Alinsky is widely regarded as the founder of modern community organizing. He founded and trained community organizations to follow his methods, including organizations in South Chicago, where President Obama credits his political beginnings. The Washington Post reported Obama was hired shortly after graduating from college by a group of Alinsky's disciples to be a community organizer on Chicago's South Side.

Former 1960s radical and FrontPageMagazine Editor David Horowitz describes Alinsky as the "Communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States."

Horowitz writes in his 2009 pamphlet, "Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution. The Alinsky Model":

    "The strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was what sixties radicals called 'boring from within.'.... Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse."

As WND reported, Obama approached Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight – a loyal student of Alinsky's radical tactics – to pen a letter of recommendation for him when he applied to Harvard Law School. Under the tutelage of McKnight and other hardcore students of Alinsky, Obama said he got the "best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School."

In a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, Alinsky's son praised Obama for stirring up the masses at the Democratic National Convention "Saul Alinsky style," saying, "Obama learned his lesson well."

The letter signed L. David Alinsky closed by saying, "I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully."