Foxman Uncovers Conspiracy to "Christianize" America
(Part 2) • Part 1
by Don Feder

The last time Foxman lost it was when Reverend Jerry Falwell distributed bumper stickers that proclaimed: "I Vote Christian." ("Directly at odds with the American ideal, and should be rejected," the ADL-ayatollah fumed.)

The poster boy for militant secularism never explained why it's legitimate for environmentalists to vote for environmental issues, for feminists to try to legislate the values of feminism, for Democrats to be guided by redistributionism, but ominous and intimidating for Christians to base their political choices on Christian values.

If there is a crusade here, it's Foxman and friends who are unfurling the banners. The ADL has been transformed from an organization working to combat anti-Semitism to just another leftist group bent on severing America from its religious roots.

For instance, in June, the ADL National Director wrote to the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy demanding an end to the practice of grace being offered before midshipmen take their lunch.

These are voluntary prayers, led on a rotating basis by one of the academy's Protestant, Catholic or Jewish chaplains. (Foxman called the invocations "coercive" and a violation of church-state separation.) If resistance to this demand reflects a desire to Christianize America, put me down as a Christianizer.

Where does Foxman think these Christianizers got their morality from anyway -- "The 700 Club," Dobson's daily broadcasts or the curriculum of Liberty University?

What's called Judeo-Christian morality comes from the Jewish Bible, as transmitted to the West by Christianity. It's the Torah that says "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination." The Torah tells us God commanded man to leave his father and his mother and "cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." (Anita Bryant used to famously quip that "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.")

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the world's largest Hasidic group, once expressed his support for a nondenominational school prayer by rhetorically asking what harm it did for students to begin the school day by affirming the existence of One to whom they are answerable?

The Alliance for Marriage, a group pushing a Federal Marriage Amendment, numbers among its advisors Rabbi Yoels Schonfeld of the Queens Board of Rabbis, Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition and Barry Freundel, rabbi of Kesher Israel, the most prominent Orthodox synagogue in our nation's capital.

On its website, Agudath Israel, lobbying arm of yeshiva Orthodoxy, reports that it "has urged the Supreme Court to reconsider its holdings in Roe v. Wade, and supports legislation that restricts abortion on demand." Agudath takes its marching orders not from Colorado Springs (headquarters of Focus on The Family) but from Sinai.

While there are plenty of organizations with the word Jewish in their titles on the other side, as commentator and Jewish scholar Dennis Prager notes, the more a Jew understands Jewish law and is committed to Torah values, the more apt he is to support social conservative positions. In other words, the more likely he is to find himself politically aligned with those Foxman calls Christianizers. Perhaps one should speak of Judeo-Christianizers.

While synagogues are attacked by Muslim rioters in France and Jewish students are harassed and assaulted on our college campuses, while Israel is slandered by vocal leftists like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan (who says the Iraq War was a Neo-Con conspiracy to aid Israel), Abe Foxman has located the real threat to Jews in a group of church ladies who want to erect a Nativity scene in the public park at Christmas.

There's no nation on earth where Jews have been more welcomed - no nation that has made a greater contribution to the survival of the Jewish people - than America.

It's no coincidence that America is also the only nation since ancient Israel specifically founded on a Biblical worldview. Does Foxman imagine that Jews will be safer in a secular America (one cut off from its spiritual roots)? Are the Jews of Europe safer on a continent that can't even acknowledge its Christian heritage?

Would Foxman feel safer walking the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi or one of those towns around Paris illuminated by the glow of burning Citroens?