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Walter Watts
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be prepared for nausea....
« on: 2008-12-24 17:45:23 » |
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Breaking New Ground in Whiney Bullshit
--Walter
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December 24, 2008
In Madoff Scandal, Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal
By ROBIN POGREBIN
There is a teaching in the Talmud that says an individual who comes before God after death will be asked a series of questions, the first one of which is, “Were you honest in your business dealings?” But it is the Ten Commandments that have weighed most heavily on the mind of Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in light of the sins for which Bernard L. Madoff stands accused.
“You shouldn’t steal,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “And this is theft on a global scale.”
The full scope of the misdeeds to which Mr. Madoff has confessed in swindling individuals and charitable groups has yet to be calculated, and he is far from being convicted. But Jews all over the country are already sending up something of a communal cry over a cost they say goes beyond the financial to the theological and the personal.
Here is a Jew accused of cheating Jewish organizations trying to help other Jews, they say, and of betraying the trust of Jews and violating the basic tenets of Jewish law. A Jew, they say, who seemed to exemplify the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the thieving Jewish banker.
So in synagogues and community centers, on blogs and in countless conversations, many Jews are beating their chests — not out of contrition, as they do on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but because they say Mr. Madoff has brought shame on their people in addition to financial ruin and shaken the bonds of trust that bind Jewish communities.
“Jews have these familial ties,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “It’s not solely a shared belief; it’s a sense of close communal bonds, and in the same way that your family can embarrass you as no one else can, when a Jew does this, Jews feel ashamed by proxy. I’d like to believe someone raised in our community, imbued with Jewish values, would be better than this.”
Among the apparent victims of Mr. Madoff were many Jewish educational institutions and charitable causes that lost fortunes in his investments; they include Yeshiva University, Hadassah, the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. The Chais Family Foundation, which worked on educational projects in Israel, was recently forced to shut down because of losses in Madoff investments. Many of Mr. Madoff’s individual investors were Jewish and supported Jewish causes, apparently drawn to him precisely because of his own communal involvement and because he radiated the comfortable sense of being one of them.
“The Jewish world is not going to be the same for a while,” said Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York.
Jews are also grappling with the implications of Mr. Madoff’s deeds for their public image, what one rabbi referred to as the “shanda factor,” using the Yiddish term for an embarrassing shame or disgrace. As Bradley Burston, a columnist for haaretz.com, the English-language Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote on Dec. 17: “The anti-Semite’s new Santa is Bernard Madoff. The answer to every Jew-hater’s wish list. The Aryan Nation at its most delusional couldn’t have come up with anything to rival this.”
The Anti-Defamation League said in a statement that Mr. Madoff’s arrest had prompted an outpouring of anti-Semitic comments on Web sites around the world, most repeating familiar tropes about Jews and money. Abraham H. Foxman, the group’s national director, said that canard went back hundreds of years, but he noted that anti-Semites did not need facts to be anti-Semitic.
“We’re not immune from having thieves and people who engage in fraud,” Mr. Foxman said in an interview, disputing any notion that Mr. Madoff should be seen as emblematic. “Why, because he happens to be Jewish, he should have a conscience?”
He added that Mr. Madoff’s victims extended well beyond the Jewish community.
In addition to theft, the Torah discusses another kind of stealing, geneivat da’at, the Hebrew term for deception or stealing someone’s mind. “In the rabbinic mind-set, he’s guilty of two sins: one is theft, and the other is deception,” said Burton L. Visotzky, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“The fact that he stole from Jewish charities puts him in a special circle of hell,” Rabbi Visotzky added. “He really undermined the fabric of the Jewish community, because it’s built on trust. There is a wonderful rabbinic saying — often misapplied — that all Jews are sureties for one another, which means, for instance, that if a Jew takes a loan out, in some ways the whole Jewish community guarantees it.”
Several rabbis said they were reminded of Esau, a figure of mistrust in the Bible. According to a rabbinic interpretation, Esau, upon embracing his brother Jacob after 20 years apart, was actually frisking him to see what he could steal. “The saying goes that, when Esau kisses you,” Rabbi Visotzky said, “check to make sure your teeth are still there.”
Rabbi Kalmanofsky said he was struck by reports that Mr. Madoff had tried to give bonus payments to his employees just before he was arrested, that he was moved to do something right even as he was about to be charged with doing so much wrong. “The small-scale thought for people who work for him amidst this large-scale fraud — what is the dissonance between that sense of responsibility and the gross sense of irresponsibility?” he said.
In a recent sermon, Rabbi Kalmanofsky described Mr. Madoff as the antithesis of true piety.
“I said, what it means to be a religious person is to be terrified of the possibility that you’re going to harm someone else,” he said.
Rabbi Kalmanofsky said Judaism had highly developed mechanisms for not letting people control money without ample checks and balances. When tzedakah, or charity, is collected, it must be done so in pairs. “These things are supposed to be done in the public eye,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said, “so there is a high degree of confidence that people are behaving in honorable ways.”
While the Madoff affair has resonated powerfully among Jews, some say it actually stands for a broader dysfunction in the business world. “The Bernie Madoff story has become a Jewish story,” said Rabbi Jennifer Krause, the author of “The Answer: Making Sense of Life, One Question at a Time,” “but I do see it in the much greater context of a human drama that is playing out in sensationally terrible ways in America right now.”
“The Talmud teaches that a person who only looks out for himself and his own interests will eventually be brought to poverty,” Rabbi Krause added. “Unfortunately, this is the metadrama of what’s happening in our country right now. When you have too many people who are only looking out for themselves and they forget the other piece, which is to look out for others, we’re brought to poverty.”
According to Jewish tradition, the last question people are asked when they meet God after dying is, “Did you hope for redemption?”
Rabbi Wolpe said he did not believe Mr. Madoff could ever make amends.
“It is not possible for him to atone for all the damage he did,” the rabbi said, “and I don’t even think that there is a punishment that is commensurate with the crime, for the wreckage of lives that he’s left behind. The only thing he could do, for the rest of his life, is work for redemption that he would never achieve.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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MoEnzyme
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Re:be prepared for nausea....
« Reply #1 on: 2008-12-26 09:44:58 » |
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I suppose it makes sense that because the largest contingent of Madoff victims were Jews, therefore perhaps there would inevitably be a Jewish take on it - perhaps a mention, but certainly not a whole article like this one. Before anyone gets carried away by all this Jewish handwringing, it's appropriate to note that most crimes are committed on people of the perpetrator's own ethnic kind, more especially in the case of con jobs. After all a con artist must gain the confidence of a mark, and this is best achieved by someone of the mark's own cultural in-group . . . one of "us". We are much less likely to trust one of "them" to the extent necessary to be defrauded this way. With that in mind this isn't a particularly Jewish story, and so on that count like Walter I'm prone to file this particular article under "whiney bullshit." The only interesting thing about this one man con job compared to others is its magnitude and duration. "Acute betrayals" of members of one's own ethnic ingroup are among the more banal examples of evil, hardly worth more than the usual mention - they are mere trivia and are most reasonably treated as such. If he had singlehandedly defrauded a bunch of Islamists, or some major Christian fundamentalist organizations, that would be noteworthy, but not this. This article only counts for whiney ingroup angst that no one else would reasonable care about. To that ingroup I say feel free to agonize within your own synagogues, that may be actually worth something, but outside that context I doubt anyone else really cares and nausea or even crocodile tears are much more likely.
-Mo
Church of Virus FAQ about UTism
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=31;action=display;threadid=11539;start=0
A lot of the discussion tends towards the topic of xenophobia, but the flipside of the dynamic manifests in unreasonably trusting members of one's own in-group. In any case it certainly isn't an exclusively Jewish phenomenon.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Mermaid
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Re:be prepared for nausea....
« Reply #2 on: 2008-12-26 14:37:18 » |
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are you joking..just do a google search on madoff in the news.
the jewish charities have lost about 1 billion. that leaves 49 billion dollars in loss for the other victims. we havent heard from them. the adl is already monitoring blogs and websites looking for antisemitism.
on another note, ...the last ones to join a ponzi scheme are the ones who are the real victims. i'd like to know who bailed out/consolidated their losses before the last several victims(mostly banks from europe who were indirectly recruited for the madoff funds..some knew they were investing with madoff..most didnt) were recruited to join the fund.
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Hermit
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Re:be prepared for nausea....
« Reply #3 on: 2008-12-26 18:49:20 » |
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The rest of the world has not developed victimhood to an artform as the Zionists have done.
Given that some "victims" were Zionists (of the same sort of thugs and their fellow travelers as populates the ADL and is implementing and supporting ethnic cleansing in the Palestine), if things were to continue to their programs, as they have for the past 30 years or so, they would be the only ones whose voices would be heard. Ordinary people, even those who are Jewish, would not get a look in. Unfortunately for these brutal racists, their actions are coming under increasing scrutiny. The mask is slipping in the face of the holocaust being inflicted on ordinary Palestinians, and their whiny complaints are seen, at least by some, in the context of the impoverishment and genocide of an entire nation - on semitic lines.
Given the terrorism being perpetrated by Zionists on Palestinians, it is perhaps more than time that these whining tax-deductible Zionist charities be investigated with all the fervidity and presumptions of guilt that the US has attached to Islamic charities. Maybe Madoff will be a trigger for this. Certainly that, rather than mere evidence of widespread tax evasion which is bound to be one result of an investigation, explains the degree of panic emanating from wealthy Zionist enclaves.
Meanwhile I am going to hold-off judgement on Madoff until some actual evidence arises that tends to suggest that he was not merely engaged in pretty much the same schemes as everyone else in the US financial services industries - and simply felt guiltier about it. After all, we are rewarding some 30 years of economic rape with the kind of largess that the common or garden con-artist can only dream of. From a merely inequitable world to one where 80% of global wealth is in the USA, and 90% of the wealth in the USA resides in the hands of less than 1% of the population, despite collapsing production, living standards and exports, but where the masses borrow more and more money and even press on the less than one percent group to accept their futures in pawn, in the forlorn hope that this might keep the wheels turning, what kind of scam is required to perpetrate this?
Kind Regards
Hermit
*Meanwhile Homeland Insecurity is predicting attacks on the US by Hezbollah (for the first time since the US invaded the Lebanon on Israel's behalf during the 1980s) in response to an unspecified “triggering event.” In my opinion this is most likely projected to be a retaliation for attacks on the Lebanon, Palestinians and or Iran. If the US is certain enough about this to report it, it strongly implies bipartisan support for more Israeli excesses.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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MoEnzyme
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Re:be prepared for nausea....
« Reply #4 on: 2008-12-29 09:33:42 » |
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OMG!! If you weren't yet nauseated about Madoff stabbing his Jewish family in the heart, now we've got Jewish Holocaust survivors fabricating concentration camp love stories to deal with! How deep the betrayal!!!!!! Add to that those fireworks the kids in Gaza keep firing towards them, even though most of them fail to cause injury, think of all the vandalism, interrupted prayers, frayed nerves, the poor Jews must suffer in addition to occasional death and injury! Its truly a horribly painful chapter in the story of the Chosen People. Oh the shadenfreude  I sure hope things get better for those poor people. Why are all those terrorists so mean to them, anyway?
False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/books/29hoax.html?bl&ex=1230699600&en=711c10f3322bb17f&ei=5087%0A
By MOTOKO RICH and JOSEPH BERGER
Published: December 28, 2008
short intro:
Quote:A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.
A bound proof of “Angel at the Fence” circulated in advance of the publication date. And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.
This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.
Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr. Rosenblat return his advance. |
Two page full article complete and replete with much Jewish handwringing at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/books/29hoax.html?bl&ex=1230699600&en=711c10f3322bb17f&ei=5087%0A
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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