Friday Afternoon, November 3, 2023

ADMIRATION AND SUPPORT POUR IN

FOR MIKEY WEINSTEIN’S OP-ED ON

THE RISING ANTISEMITISM INCITED

BY THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR

“I would be hard-pressed to even imagine a single person in the United States for whom antisemitism is more quotidian than 

Mikey Weinstein. He and his family are routinely attacked for

being Jewish and have been for years, if not decades. ...

“... So I pay attention when Weinstein writes, as he did on

Thursday, ‘This time it just feels very different.

The anti-Jewish hatred, I mean.’”

— TYT Managing Editor Jonathan Larsen,

The Young Turks “Progress Report,”

on Mikey Weinstein's Daily Kos op-ed

“Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?”

COVERS MRFF

Regular Anti-Semitism Target

Says It’s Different Now

By: Jonathan Larsen, Managing Editor, The Young Turks

Friday, November 3, 2023

I would be hard-pressed to even imagine a single person in the United States for whom antisemitism is more quotidian than Mikey Weinstein. He and his family are routinely attacked for being Jewish and have been for years, if not decades.

Weinstein is a former Reagan administration official and a former JAG officer in the US Air Force. So what makes him America’s single biggest antisemitism target?

Well, for almost 20 years now, he’s been running the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Which means all he does every day is stop (overwhelmingly Christian) members of the U.S. military from jamming their (overwhelmingly Christian) religion down the throats of America’s armed forces, be they atheist, agnostic, Wiccan, Jewish, Muslim, or merely insufficiently Christian.

Weinstein first crossed my radar quite a while ago, and the MRFF has been a valuable resource for me as a journalist, whether I was reporting or producing TV news. So I’ve seen at least some of the (many) times when the MRFF has posted about an antisemitic attack on Weinstein. Hate messages and threats. Yet another swastika at his home.

So I pay attention when Weinstein writes, as he did on Thursday, “This time it just feels very different. The anti-Jewish hatred, I mean.”

To Weinstein’s immense credit, he makes no special pleading. He doesn’t even offer a theory about why it’s different now. And he speaks out for Palestinians – again.

But if anyone is qualified to make an anecdotal argument that the antisemitism this time is different, it’s Mikey Weinstein.

To his credit, again, Weinstein concludes that “ANY ‘anti’ that is needless, bigoted, harmful, stupid, unlawful, or demeaning of our fellow human beings, is a damn nail in our eventual coffin.” And he’s right.

“Please take a moment to remember that there are many more people like me, who will appreciate you for the work you do, the person you are, and not give the proverbial rat’s behind about your ethnicity or religion.”

— MRFF Supporter

“Mikey Weinstein Breaks Silence on Israel-Hamas War: ‘Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?’”

From: (MRFF supporter's name withheld)

Subject: Re: Mikey Weinstein Breaks Silence on Israel-Hamas War: “Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?”

Date: November 2, 2023 at 11:38:09 PM MDT

To: info@militaryreligiousfreedom.org

Dear Mikey and other MRFF friends,

I'm your classic US White person, now 64, Californian, Christian parents from the Midwest, etc. I know many people who will say that some "they" are all horrible people, usually describing a racial/ethnic group that the speaker is not a member of. This is part of who we USians, collectively, are, and that is a sad commentary on us.

That Hamas has misbehaved brutally is not justification for destroying Palestinian lives. That Israel has misbehaved brutally is not justification for destroying Israeli lives. But we are talking political entities here. Governments. I get that there is a long history now of flowing blood in that part of the Middle East, and a lot of people with axes to grind. But hatred directed at a US Jew, or a US Muslim, is an artifact of the general hatred that some of us USians seem determined to spew at whatever target is most convenient. 

I'm very saddened that you and your family Mikey, are targets of that spew, and I'm certain that there a whole lot of other people in our country who are also targets. Please take a moment to remember that there are many more people like me, who will appreciate you for the work you do, the person you are, and not give the proverbial rat's behind about your ethnicity or religion.

Everyone at MRFF absolutely rocks, and you all are making our country a better place.

(MRFF supporter's name withheld)

“As a Muslim Combat Veteran and the hardship that

I personal endure during the war zone within and

in civilian world I will never forget that help

and support received from you Mikey.”

— MRFF Muslim Military Combat Veteran Client

“Mikey Weinstein Breaks Silence on Israel-Hamas War: ‘Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?’”

From: (MRFF Muslim Military Combat Veteran Client's name withheld)

Subject: Mikey Weinstein Breaks Silence on Israel-Hamas War: “Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?”

Date: November 2, 2023 at 9:10:42 PM MDT

To: Michael L Weinstein <mikeyw4444@icloud.com>

Hi Mikey - 

As a Muslim Combat Veteran and the hardship that I personal endure during the war zone within and in civilian world I will never forget that help and support received from you Mikey. You have been there for me when I was helpless and will never forget that. Mikey you have always been looking at people as human. It won’t matter which religion, skin, gender what you have always been fighting for is an equality, respect and dignity. 

Thank you for all the help and the support you have been proving for our Armed force. 

(MRFF Muslim Military Combat Veteran Client's name withheld)

“I am so proud to be associated with such a terrific

civil rights-defending organization as MRFF and

stand in solidarity with you, Mikey”

— MRFF Advisory Board Member Col. James T. Currie, USA (Ret.)

“Mikey Weinstein Breaks Silence on Israel-Hamas War: ‘Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?’”

From: James Currie

Subject: Re: Mikey Weinstein Breaks Silence on Israel-Hamas War: “Jews, Jews Jews; How Do We Choose?”

Date: November 2, 2023 at 4:19:40 PM MDT

To: info@militaryreligiousfreedom.org

So well said, Mikey. I am so proud to be associated with such a terrific civil rights-defending organization as MRFF and stand in solidarity with you, Mikey, and all others who defend our Constitution and the men and women who pledge to defend it. Terrorists are terrorists, and I stand against them, no matter where they live. I cannot understand the young people who embrace a group like Hamas as if it is nothing more than a Middle Eastern version of a Rotary Club. Hamas kills Jews because they are Jews, just like World War II Nazis–which many of our fathers fought against–killed Jews just because they were Jews. Israel exists because the Holocaust happened, and those who would deny Israel’s existence are the same who deny the Holocaust. As a historian, I embrace the truth of history, though I fear that too few people learn from it. Jews certainly did, and that is why there is an Israel today: a place where Jews know that their own government will never knock on their door in the middle of the night and hustle them away to oblivion. The “Christian nationalists” who think the United States was founded as a Christian country have not learned our own history. The US was purposely not founded as a Christian country because our country’s founders did not want all the problems that would come with such. They had seen–and their ancestors had often been a part of–the religious wars that so devastated Europe, and our Founders wanted nothing like that in our country. Hence our Constitution was written as a secular document, with guarantees against any religious test for holding office. Then those same men added the First Amendment, which is the foundation of what MRFF stands for. I am proud to stand with you and other supporters of MRFF, Mikey, and I assure you I will do so for as long as I draw a breath.

Col. James T. Currie, USA (Ret.), Ph.D. (historian)

The Op-Ed from Mikey Weinstein that is eliciting

so many supportive responses like those above

MRFF OP-ED

ON DAILY KOS

#1 Trending story on Daily Kos

Jews, Jews, Jews; How Do We Choose?

By: MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein

Thursday, November 2, 2023

This time it just feels very different. The anti-Jewish hatred, I mean. 

I just can’t stay mute on this any longer. I have even been asked by Jewish and non-Jewish DoD leaders to end my “loud silence” and to “say something NOW” given the bully pulpit that I have. 

I have started and stopped this short piece a hundred times. It is both wrenching and emotional for me to write this.

It's time for me as a Jewish American to talk about the current unprecedented explosion in Jewish hatred.

The first time I felt it I was only five years old when my “friend” in kindergarten told me that I had “Killed God.” I never really felt it significantly again until I became a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy in the summer of 1973. In my very first few days there during BCT (“Basic Cadet Training”), I got my next repulsive stench of genuine antisemitism from the upper-class cadre of training cadets. This consistent abuse included the forced singing of a brazenly antisemitic trope-chant during mandatory “training runs.” It only got worse from there and then was cruelly visited upon my own children decades later when they became U.S. Air Force Academy cadets.

Look, I’m a public figure and I know the hell that comes with that. I’m a civil rights advocate as the leader of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Being in the public eye constantly, especially in such a bitterly divided country like today’s America, is often lonely, dangerous, brutal, and expensive. My family and I are no strangers to being recipients of the most vile and hateful antisemitism extant on a regular basis. We employ many countermeasures to try to protect against it but we never really get used to it. 

But after the unspeakable war crime horrors and grotesque bloodbath perpetrated by the terrorists of Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, the tsunami of ubiquitous antisemitism has been unleashed in ALL directions, irrespective of any of the Jewish targets’ own political views or related opinions on Palestinian civil and human rights. 

For many years, I have advocated for a two-state solution and full recognition of both Israel's right to thrive and exist within safe and secure borders as well as, concomitantly, for the human rights of Palestinians. Why the latter? Because Palestinians are FREAKING human beings, THAT’S why! Multitudes of Jews have done the very same thing in the U.S. and abroad, especially in Israel itself. MRFF currently represents over 85,000 military members and veterans (about 95% of whom are practicing Christians), including, by our best estimates, a little more than 18% of all Muslims in today's U.S. military. MRFF has long advocated for religious freedom for Islamic (including Palestinian) United States sailors, soldiers, airmen, Marines, guardians, Coast Guard personnel, cadets and midshipmen, active and reserve components, as well as for hundreds of Jewish military members and veterans.

Notwithstanding this well-established support for Muslims, generally, and Palestinians, specifically, innumerable Jews, myself and much of my family included, have not been spared as targets from the filthy, vicious miasma of antisemitism.

You see, now it doesn’t matter who you are or even what you believe and do anymore. Merely identifying as a Jew qualifies you enough for this Old School spewing of hatred, bigotry, and prejudice. I’m sure you are all reading about how the FBI and other well-respected organizations are now reporting on the suddenly explosively precipitous rise of antisemitism everywhere in America.

I have spoken recently about how it PERSONALLY feels to experience these evil anti-Jewish attacks. If you’ve never been the target of something like this it’s hard to put into words how it makes you feel. When you’ve had Nazi swastikas and Christian crosses painted on your front door and bullets blasting the windows out of your house, how do you translate that shock to another human being who has not experienced it? It’s next to impossible to explain to non-Jews or those who have never felt the nauseating insecurity of not being safely in the “majority.”

I am surprised by people I haven’t heard from in years suddenly reaching out to me to see if I and my family “are OK”? I’ve hardly heard a peep from most of them over the last 20 years of our highly visible civil rights activism to protect the wall separating church and state in the U.S. armed forces. Why all of the sudden now? Why is it different this time? WHY?!

I don’t have any good answers; just painful questions. It seems that many are searching for “which Jews to hate” whilst others paint ALL of us with one stroke of searing hatred as we are ALL apparently complicit in either (1) the Roman execution of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago and/or, (2) the present day plight of the Palestinians. Choose one, or the other, or both.

There are some straightforward words of another man that make my point succinctly:

“The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges.

The anti-Semite simply has to make them.”

And, one last, very serious thought. Today’s America is fraught with disastrous troubles — not unlike the times of the 1850s when the blight of slavery lay upon the land and had to be excoriated in blood. Daily, we are at one another’s throats, figuratively, rhetorically, and, too often, actually. Too realistically, we could fly apart, as in 1860, at any moment. Now is not the time to denigrate any of us because we need all of us to make it through this perilously taxing, dangerous period. Antisemitism — indeed, ANY “anti” that is needless, bigoted, harmful, stupid, unlawful, or demeaning of our fellow human beings, is a damn nail in our eventual coffin. We must do better and before it’s too late.

“PRAYING FOR ARMAGEDDON”

Chilling new documentary 

features Mikey Weinstein and 

MRFF Advisory Board member 

Col. (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson

"Praying for Armageddon is a political thriller that investigates

the dangerous consequences of the fusion between

Evangelical Christianity and American politics"

— UpNorth Film

(WATCH!) PRAYING FOR ARMAGEDDON |

Official Trailer | UpNorth Film (2023)

MIKEY WEINSTEIN FEATURED IN

 DOCUMENTARY PROMO EXCERPT

"Reporter Lee Fang talks to Mikey Weinstein, MRFF about the significance of the 7 Mountains Mandate and the New Apostolic Reformation, 'Their job is to transform the military, and the militaries of the world, into this version of weaponized Christianity. Jerry Boykin, a former 3-star general, made it clear that when Jesus comes back, he'll be carrying an AR-15.'" — UpNorth Film

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