For all his pretentious and affected learning Sacks was a racist, a homophobe and a supporter of Judeo-Nazi Settlers
Sacks was described by NPR as a ‘Towering Intellect Of Judaism’ which probably says more about the state of
modern Judaism than it does about Sacks.
The Times spoke
of the ‘
Charismatic Chief Rabbi who
was an eloquent, powerful advocate for the importance of all faiths and ‘made
his listeners feel clever’
The New York Times explained how
In writings and media
appearances, he took a universalist view of religion in a multicultural world —
a stance that could get him in hot water with conservatives.
 |
| Sacks good friend was a fellow religious bigot |
The
Church Times described
how Sacks was
prodigiously talented in two areas that only rarely
come together. He had a trained and sharply honed philosophical mind, and he
combined this with superb powers of storytelling and popular communication
There was a particular bond with George Carey,
because of their shared support for Arsenal….
Carey
it should be remembered covered up
child abuse in the Church of England leading to him being banned
from officiating at services. He was also a fellow Islamaphobe.
The
Independent recalled
how Sacks visited the United
States to visit his family and how he visited the Brooklyn-based
leader of the racist Lubavitch hasidic movement, Menachem Schneerson
We can get a flavour of Sack’s political orientation from the fact that in
2018 Sacks helped Mike Pence, the US Vice
President, write a speech to be delivered in the Knesset in which he announced
the date of Trump’s decision to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem. Sacks
thus demonstrated that when it comes to the Occupied Territories, of which
Jerusalem is a part, that he was signed up to a Greater Israel. Pence saw
Sack’s contribution as a “hugely critical
element in crafting the speech”.
Pence is an evangelical Christian and a reactionary on
all social issues from gay rights and abortion to demanding
that public funds for HIV/Aids be redirected to “conversion therapy” for LGBT people. Sacks had no problem in
working with such a vile creature.
However Sacks was anything
but righteous. He was a pretentious windbag who wrote over 20 books without
saying anything worthwhile. Sacks flattered to deceive and created an aura of
profundity. He was also apparently a
philosopher.
I must confess that I treat philosophy as a way of saying the same thing in different ways but maybe I’m being unfair. The greatest philosopher of the past century is acknowledged to be Martin Heidegger, the author of Being and Time which gave rise to existentialism and Sartre, phenomenology and Derrida’s notion of deconstruction.
Although I don’t believe
that you can simply write off art because it is produced by the politically
obnoxious or backward, an obvious example being Salvador Dalli, when it comes
to Philosophy we are dealing with political thought and ideas. Philosophy is a
study of life itself, our understanding of reality and the meaning of one’s
existence. If the greatest philosophical work in the last century was produced
by someone who went on to become a Nazi, what does it say about
his work? Or are we to accept that his personal political choices were separate
from the ideas that he sponsored? Even when given the chance, after the war
Heidegger refused to renounce his previous support for the Nazis.
The same is true of Sacks.
You can best judge his verbal and written output by the stance he took on the
various questions that confronted him and the choices he made. The Vatican and
Catholic theologians produced millions of words yet that didn’t prevent the Vatican
threatening to torture Galileo if he didn’t recant his bizarre ideas about the
planets revolving round the Sun!
It was Marx who put his
finger on the dilemma of philosophy in
his Theses on Feurbach, which was the
precursor of The
German Ideology in which he said that “Philosophers
have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.”
It is therefore worthwhile
pointing out the contrast between the erudite and learned Sacks from the common
and garden bigot he was in practice.
 |
| Sacks wasn't the only Chief Rabbi who was a reactionary |
Jonathan Sacks as Homophobe
Jonathan Sacks was a
homophobe, an anti-gay bigot. When the Home Office put out for consultation its proposals on gay
marriage the Beth Din, (a Jewish
religious court) which Sacks presided over, urged the government to reject any
proposals to legalise gay marriage. See Once, the chief rabbi represented all
British Jewry. No longer, by dissident Zionist Professor Geoffrey Alderman (13.7.13).
The Beth Din declared that
"Our understanding of marriage from time
immemorial has been that of a union between a man and a woman. Any attempt to
redefine this sacred institution would be to undermine the concept of
marriage."
Marriage has in fact not
been an institution ‘from time immemorial’. Marriage as we know it now is of
recent origin and has changed fundamentally over time as has the family itself.
It is a common fault to read back from today into ‘time immemorial’.
The Guardian, before it
was Freedlandised, was somewhat more critical of Sacks than before the
‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was underway. In Lord Sacks: the two sides of the
chief rabbi (25.8.13.) it wrote that ‘
Lord Sacks's mellifluous voice may have charmed
millions. But he was unable convincingly to explain why the dignity of
difference does not also mean the dignity of diversity.
In 1992 Sacks excluded the Jewish Lesbian
and Gay Helpline from a communal charity walkabout in Hyde Park which he had
organised. According to a spokesman for his office the helpline
“presented an alternative lifestyle which we don’t
accept. We know that some people feel that they are inclined that way but we
draw the line at institutionalising it.”
 |
| 'Words mean what I want them to mean' |
Jonathan Sacks and Universalism
In his Wiki entry Sacks is described as ‘paradoxically one of the most universalizing voices within
contemporary Judaism.’ I sometimes feel like Humpty Dumpty who remarked
that words mean what you want them to mean. The only question being who is the
master. To Sacks words lost any independent existence. They were merely weapons
of war.
Universalism means that
ideas, ethics and behaviour towards others have universal application. Sacks Zionism
stood for the complete opposite. What is good for the Jews is its first
question. Zionism is dedicated to creating and sustaining a Jewish state that
is as ethnically pure as is possible
Sacks was a vehement Zionist and opposed to
anything remotely approaching a universalist outlook. He used his academic
background in philosophy in order to legitimise Jewish chauvinism and
particularism. His academic learning was employed to defend Jewish
exceptionalism, muddying it with a commitment to interfaith ‘dialogue’.
When it comes to bourgeois philosophy, terms
such as ‘universalism’ mean anything you want them to mean. What his flatterers
meant was that he spoke the language of ‘interfaith’ whilst subscribing to the
idea that only the Jewish religion enables an acquaintanceship with god. The
getting together of Christians and Jewish religious leaders to pat each other
on the back, what is called interfaith ‘dialogue’, in practice meant Christian
clerics giving unstinting support to Israeli ethnic cleansing and its barbaric
occupation.
It says a lot about the intellectual poverty of
the organised, synagogue going British Jewish community around the United
Synagogue, that someone like Sacks was treated with veneration. Sacks was an
intellectual fraud posing as someone with deep insight into the human
condition.
When it came to the victims of Zionism, the
Palestinians, Sacks was anything but a universalist. He held his arms out to
the most murderous and racist settlers of all. Sacks was a bigot
who dressed up his prejudices in flowery language, sophistry and semantics. What
mattered was not how many philosophy books he wrote but how he interpreted
them.
When in his 2002 book The Dignity of Difference,
Sacks wrote
“God
has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to the Jews,
Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims. ... God is the god of all
humanity, but no single faith is or should be the faith of all humanity.”
he sparked a backlash amongst the ultra-Orthodox. What
was Sack’s reaction? Did he stand his ground? No, he amended his book so that
it read
"As
Jews, we believe that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that
does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures, and faiths finding
their own relationship with God."
 |
| Corbyn and the British irony meeting |
Sacks, Corbyn and Hypocrisy
Sacks’ hypocrisy
was on full display when he took advantage of the media chorus, fawning tabloid
headlines and vacuous pundits, to launch a vicious personal attack on Jeremy
Corbyn. In a New
Statesman interview, if you can call it that,
Sacks accusing Corbyn of having made the most racist
speech since Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Here was the ‘deep
thinker’ Sacks playing to a gallery of sycophants and reactionary press
clowns, offering a cheap quote in return for even cheaper applause. Sacks
demonstrated not only his own hypocrisy but his willingness to indulge in cheap
demagogy.
 |
| That well known anti-racist paper the Daily Mail, which in 1968 gushed over Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech |
Corbyn you will remember accused two Zionist thugs, Jonathan Hoffman and Richard Millett, who have a history of disrupting meetings that they disagree with, of failing to understand British irony. Corbyn’s comparison was with the Palestinian Ambassador Manuel Hassassian whose meeting they had tried to disrupt. Corbyn’s accusation was made against 2 particularly obnoxious Zionists, not Jews, although the media tripe treated ‘Zionist’ as equalling ‘Jew’. The contrast was between 2 individuals who were born in Britain but who lacked any sense of irony with the Palestinian Ambassador who wasn’t born in Britain. It was the exact opposite of Powellism. See You were never my Chief Rabbi, bruv
If Sacks had possessed any integrity, still less
irony, he might have kept his rabbinical trap firmly shut. However people like
Sacks tend to verbal incontinence. When asked to name his favourite book for
2017, Sacks volunteered Douglas Murray’s ‘Strange Death of
Europe’! It
is a book that not only praises Enoch Powell but it is the bible of the far-Right identitarian movement with its
replacement theory which argues that mass Muslim immigration is
part of a conspiracy to replace and eradicate White European identity.
 |
Below
is one of Murray’s tributes to
his hero, Enoch Powell:
“among the things most striking when reading his
[Powell’s] speech – and the reactions to it – today are the portions for which
he was lambasted that now seem almost understated… if anyone had suggested to
Powell in 1968 that he should use his Birmingham speech to predict that within
the lifespan of most people listening those who identified as ‘white British’
would be in a minority in their capital city, he would have dismissed such an
advisor as a maniac …even the
most famous prophet of immigration doom in fact underestimated and understated
the case.'….”
 |
| Enoch Powell - praised by Douglas Murray who was in turn praised by Sacks |
To criticise Corbyn, the opponent of White
Supremacy and Apartheid, for being a latter-day Enoch Powell when his own views
dovetailed with racists like Douglas Murray was the height of hypocrisy
Indeed the full blown version of identitarianism
has Jews as the masterminds of this immigration, financed of course by the ubiquitous
George Soros. So not only was Sacks signing up to a racist far-Right ideology
but he was giving sustenance to the very anti-Semitism that he accused Corbyn
of!
What is also clear is that Sacks himself didn’t understand
British (or any other) form of irony. On learning of Sacks death Murray paid him a heart felt tribute: ‘We have lost one of our
kindest, deepest, most thoughtful minds. A terrible loss.’
Heidegger was a far greater
philosopher than Sacks whose legacy consists of a few pious homilies.
Nonetheless, for all his erudition Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933
becoming Rector of Freiburg University. He distanced himself from fellow Jewish academics including his mentor Edmond
Husserl, a ‘Christian’ Jew. Heidegger signed the dismissal letters of Jewish
faculty, including Husserl. Even his lover Hannah Arendt accused him of
effectively killing Husserl. Some might suggest that there is a dichotomy
between a philosophy that critiques society and our place in it and a
philosophy which ends up in Nazi dictatorship and biological racism. The same
is equally true with Sacks. For all his fine, measured words, he lent his
weight to the sanitizing of bigotry and racism.
Jonathan Sacks, with his affected
profundity and learning, was an Establishment courier, flattering those with
privilege and power but with nothing to say to the dispossessed. He was a man
with little in the way of original thought. He simply repackaged the mundane.
Sacks, Israel and Zionism
Jonathan Sacks in a speech at a Solidarity
Rally for Israel on 23rd July 2006, during Israel’s attack on
Lebanon, including its slaughter of its civilian population, said that
“Today we stand in solidarity with Israel, and rarely
have I felt so proud of Anglo-Jewry as I have done these past few days.
Especially of our young people. Last week 1300 of them, from youth groups right
across the religious spectrum, went out to Israel. Every one of them, or their
families, might have said, ‘No, not now. It is too dangerous.’ Yet almost none
of them did. I want to say to every one of those young people: Kol hakavod. You
make us proud … And today I want a message to go forth from us to Israel to
say: Israel, you make us proud …”
Israel’s bombing of
Lebanon’s civilian population, including Western Beirut made Sacks proud. To
compound just how deceitful and treacherous he was. he proclaimed how he ‘wept’ for the people of Lebanon even as
the Israel he supported was bombing them! He was ‘proud’ of the murderers yet
expressed sympathy with the murdered.
This is the Israel
which committed the Qana massacre in Lebanon 10 years earlier, killing over 100
of the 800 refugees who had gathered there. Sacks said:
Does any of us, God forbid, take satisfaction at the
devastation of Lebanon? Is that who we are? Let me be clear and unambiguous. We
weep not just for Israel but for the people of Lebanon also …”
But of course all this
‘devastation’ was justified:
“And if we, if Israel, if Europe, if America do not
take a stand against terror, if we ignore it as the world ignored it for so
long, then it will leave a stain on the human future that no tears, no regrets,
will ever remove.
Presumably it didn’t
occur to this great philosopher and scholar that the terror the world was
ignoring was that committed by Israel. However Hezbollah ensured that Israel
was driven out of Lebanon in 2006. Its first defeat at the hands of an Arab army
since 1948. Israel has since, together with the United States, branded
Hezbollah a ‘terrorist’ group rather than a national liberation movement.
In 2012 during Israel’s Operation
Pillar of Defense in Gaza in November 2012, in which
174 Palestinians were killed and many hundreds wounded by Israeli bombing,
Sacks was asked
by presenter Evan Davis, after giving his usual homilies on Thought for the
Day, if he had ‘any thoughts on what’s
going on over in Israel and Gaza at the moment?’ Sacks sighed and said ‘I think it’s got to do with Iran actually.’
Co‑presenter Sarah Montague quickly whispered ‘we’re live.’ Sacks immediately reverted to his normal pious tone
offering a ‘continued prayer for peace,
not only in Gaza but the whole region.’” Sacks was brought up in the
tradition of the ‘left’ Zionists of ‘shooting and crying’. You weep, not for
your victims but because they forced you to kill them.
 |
| Israel's annual pogrom that Sacks supported |
Supporting Israel’s Judeo-Nazi Settlers’ Pogrom
Every June Israeli Jews celebrate
Jerusalem Day, marking the 1967 War when the city was captured. As part of the
celebrations, thousands of settlers take part in the “March of the Flags”.
This march includes a walk through
Arab East Jerusalem by young settlers who chant slogans such as ‘Death to the Arabs’ whilst banging on
the shuttered Arab shops. All under the gaze of the Israeli Police.
In 2017 Sacks extended a “personal invitation” to Diaspora Jews to join him on a trip to
Israel which included “leading” the
March of the Flags and “dancing with our
brave IDF soldiers” in the far-Right settler enclave inside Hebron.
Ha’aretz’s
correspondent Bradley Burston asked ‘Rabbi Sacks, Why Are You Cheerleading for
anti-Palestinian Provocateurs?’ Burston never received a reply. Burston described it as
“an annual, gender-segregated extreme-right, pro-occupation religious
carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel’s capture of Jerusalem by
humiliating the city’s Palestinian Muslims”, in which marchers have “vandalized
shops in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, chanted ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘The (Jewish)
Temple Will Be Built, the (Al Aqsa) Mosque will be Burned Down,’ shattered
windows and door locks, and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close
for fear of further damage.”
Ha’aretz’s Anna Roiser
pleaded
with Sacks not to attend, saying,
“one
of the world’s most respected rabbis sends a message of normalization and
acceptance of the occupation by the mainstream Jewish community. Many Jews in
the Diaspora work hard to emphasize that being Jewish is not synonymous with
supporting the Israeli government, and that supporting Israel’s right to exist
is not synonymous with supporting the occupation. Rabbi Sacks’ actions risk
undermining these messages.”
Not only did Sacks ignore all such requests but he
marched together with Ephraim Mirvis, another anti-Corbyn bigot. Like Sacks, Mirvis
found it difficult to oppose any other form of racism bar
‘anti-Semitism’. See Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march
Now if Jeremy
Corbyn or members of the Labour Party were to shout ‘Death to the Jews’ as they
did in pre-war Poland and Germany, then Mirvis might have something to complain
about. I sent an unpublished letter to the Guardian in the wake of Mirvis’s
outburst in The Times.
Dear Sir/Madam,
If there is one thing guaranteed to increase anti-Semitism in this country it is the sight of Jewish leaders attacking a Labour Party that represents the only hope for millions of British people. Britain’s Chief Rabbis have a habit of supporting the Conservative Party dating back to Immanuel Jakobovitz’s support for Margaret Thatcher but none have been this blatant.
Ephraim Mirvis’s attack on Corbyn has absolutely nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism. This is the same person who was singing the praise of Norman Tebbit’s cricket test not so long ago.
Nor is Mirvis’s instruction to Jews not to vote Labour about despair. ['It reflects the despair': chief rabbi's criticism of Labour strikes a chord] It is part of a well co-ordinated campaign to use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means to damage and destroy Labour’s electoral prospects.
This is the same Ephraim Mirvis who joined his predecessor Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and thousands of far-Right settlers on the 2017 Jerusalem Day ‘March of Flags’. The favourite chant of the settlers on these marches is ‘Death to the Arabs.’ Mirvis had no hesitation in joining those who desire nothing more than the expulsion of the Palestinians.
It is because Jeremy Corbyn bought into the myth that anti-Semitism was a problem in the Labour Party that he is now facing such problems. It is however curious that in the thousands of stories on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ there is a marked absence of evidence.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Greenstein
Sacks ignored all entreaties. Together with Ephraim Mirvis,
who was trained
in the West Bank yeshivah Har Etzion in the settlement of Alon Shvut, Sacks helped
lead the March of the Flags.
In a video
taken of the march several
youths spoke to Electronic Intifada’s Charlotte Silver. One said that they had
come to celebrate the “liberation of
Jerusalem from the Palestinians,” others chimed in with “may their memory be erased.”
“May they all die today, all together,” another interjected. A child
asserted repeatedly that Jerusalem was “liberated”
from “the donkeys.”
The curse calling for
someone’s name or memory to be erased was traditionally used for enemies of the
Jews as hated as Adolf Hitler or Haman. Its use by Jewish youths against
Palestinians indicates the level of genocidal hatred with which they are
brought up.
Members of the fascist anti-miscengenation group Lehava shouted “Arab
beware – my sister is not abandoned goods” They also chanted, “Girls of Israel, for the Nation of Israel [Jews].”
Israeli women are seen as the exclusive property of Israeli Jewish men. As in Nazi
Germany, where Rassenchande (racial
pollution) meant Jewish men having sexual relations with German women, not the
other way around, there were no equivalent slogans telling Arab women to beware
of mixing with Jewish men. See Israeli mobs celebrate “Jerusalem
Day” with anti-Palestinian rampage in Old City
None of this prevented the Guardian’s Jenni Frazer describing
Sacks as
a much admired figure in both the Jewish and
non-Jewish world…. Sacks won high praise and was generally acknowledged as one
of the most brilliant intellects of his generation. He was particularly lauded
for his ability to explain Jewish philosophy to the wider community, which he
did with great frequency on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day lecturing in
moral philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic, or as a visiting professor at Essex
University.
 |
| Rabbi Hugo Gryn |
Sacks
and the Funeral of Auschwitz Survivor Hugo Gryn
As Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue Sacks refused
to attend the funeral of Hugo Gryn in 1996. Gryn was a rabbi for 32 years at
the West London synagogue – one of the largest Reform congregations in Europe.
Gryn was a fellow panellist on The Moral Maze.
Gryn was also an Auschwitz survivor from Berehevo, which
was then in Czechoslovakia, today in Ukraine. His family arrived in Auschwitz
in 1944 when he was 14-year-old. His 10-year-old brother was gassed on arrival.
He and his mother survived. His father died a few days after liberation.
A massive row erupted after the Jewish Chronicle
published a leaked
letter which Sacks had written which described Gryn as part
of a “false grouping” which was “among those who destroy the faith”.
Sacks’ subsequent decision to attend a memorial service for Gryn did not
appease communal anger.
I know it’s not the done thing to speak ill of the
dead but that is no reason to lie about them either.
Tony Greenstein
See John Spencer’s An
existential threat?
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