The first link in my last post (GUEST, 30-Jun-02 - 06:56 AM) doesn't work. Here's the correct link for those excerpted paragraphs:

http://www.nimn.org/jewishper/re1.html

Here's some documentation on the coersive tactics and the smear tactics that are being used to silence dissent within the Jewish community. I have posted only part of the speach. The rest can be found at this site http://www.nimn.org/jewishper/me1.html

On The Rabbis and the Future of Jewish Life
by Marc H. Ellis

Marc H. Ellis is a Professor of American and Jewish Studies, and Director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University. This is a lecture he delivered at The Montague Centre, London to the Rabbinic Conference of the Union of Liberal & Progressive Synagogues on June 5, 2001.

...I wonder now whether these rabbis would protest today what is surely the swiftest and strangest inversion of position and power in history. Certainly the rabbis I encounter at home and on the road have little if anything to say about the current situation, except to be silent, to be in unity, to strike at anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who speaks out at the abuse of Israeli power. Perhaps the rabbis with whom I studied, now long retired, escaped the moment of decision when victimisation turned to oppression and the role reversal called for resistance to our own power rather than the power of others.

I think here of Abraham Heschel and Leo Baeck, in ability well beyond my local rabbis, who, having experienced the Nazi era, were spared, at least consciously and critically, these last decades of Israel's life. What would they say about helicopter gunships? What would they say to the displacement of Palestinians that has continued long after the emergency years of the Holocaust?

Would Heschel and Baeck have spoken out against the settlements that continue to expand and erode the possibility of self-determination for Palestinians, with sophisticated by-pass roads and checkpoints that isolate Jews from Palestinians, encircle and enclose Palestinian life and create what many call an apartheid reality? If they spoke out what would they say? Would they then be pursued, as many Jews are, by the local rabbis, the Jewish Federation, the Anti-Defamation League, and Hillel chapters on university campuses? Would they be called traitors, self-hating Jews, "unabashedly pro-Palestinian", and among those who "create the context for another Holocaust"?

While we do not know what Heschel and Baeck would say, or for that matter, the local rabbis of my youth, or what would be said about them if they did speak out, we do know that few Jews in public life speak out today against the injustice of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and that those who do are maligned and pursued. Death threats against dissenting Jews abound, but they are only the most extreme of the tactics used to silence Israel's critics.

What is more commonly used are visits to employers, statements in the press and gossip with local cultural and political elites about the authenticity and character of the Jewish dissenter. Ecumenical relationships that have been built up over many years are often used to signal a dissenting Jew as a troublemaker, one to be ostracised and even demeaned by religious leaders of another faith community...