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Yale Chaplain Ousted for Supporting Hamas, Hating Jews, Claims to Have “Jewish Soul”
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 18, 2014 @ 4:12 pm In The Point | 3 Comments
Mark Oppenheimer
The Tablet’s Mark Oppenheimer has a completely bizarre piece on ousted Hamas supporting Yale chaplain Bruce Shipman that whitewashes him.
The surreal nature of the piece begins with the headline, “Crucified by His Own Bishop”. It quotes Shipman as saying “I have a very deep identification with Israel. And I have in many ways a Jewish soul.”
Oppenheimer doesn’t bother informing Tablet readers that the Hebraically ensouled Shipman had written things like this, “Hamas’ continuation of the armed resistance is a way of telling Israel and the world that their spirit is not broken.”
He doesn’t even bother quoting the letter that Shipman wrote in which he justified anti-Semitism by demanding that, “As hope for a two-state solution fades and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.“
Instead Oppenheimer lies to his readers and provides Bruce Shipman with a forum for playing the victim. In a bizarre twist Oppenheimer presses Shipman to indict his Jewish critics for participating in a conspiracy of some sort against him.
There’s something seriously wrong when a Jewish outlet’s coverage of a story is not only driven to make a Hamas supporter who justified anti-Semitism look good, but when its writer actually comes off sounding uglier than his subject. The Tablet is occasionally iffy, but this kind of coverage would be too much even for Oppenheimer’s first home at the New York Times.
Oppenheimer’s deranged behavior becomes obvious when you compare the headline “Crucified by His Own Bishop” with what Shipman actually says about the Bishop. “He didn’t fire me. I offered my resignation. And he reluctantly accepted it.”
Mark Oppenheimer asks him, “So, whom do you hold, for lack of a better word, culpable? I mean, do we know what outside pressure was brought?”
This is the bizarre tenor of the interview as Mark Oppenheimer keeps blatantly fishing for some Jewish conspiracy from Shipman… and not getting it.
Toward the end Mark Oppenheimer stops even trying to pretend this is an interview and begins lecturing Shipman. While Shipman answers in curt phrases, the questions become mini-essays. At one point Oppenheimer tells Shipman that anti-Semitism was introduced to the Muslim world by Christians.
There’s something seriously wrong when an interview question runs two paragraphs and the response runs a sentence. There’s something even more wrong when the question consists of rants like this from Oppenheimer.
“I’m not someone who, I’m no AIPAC Jew. I’m the person who in many situations is the one saying, you know, there are Palestinians who were thrown out of their homes. And I read your letter and I thought to myself, “That’s not what you want to say.”
In court this is what is known as leading the witness. Also it’s known as the counsel having a mental breakdown. In this case the mental breakdown is caused by Oppenheimer’s pathological self-hatred. “I’m no AIPAC Jew” is a deeply telling phrase, not about AIPAC, but about Oppenheimer’s ghetto state of mind.
And then things get even weirder in an already weird interview.
Oppenheimer: I’ll say something very frank, because I appreciate your frankness. I once asked a friend of mine who is a Jew very much on the Left, substantially to the Left of me. You know, someone who favors boycott and divestment [from Israel], someone who favors a one-state solution without question, somebody who is, you know, deeply enmeshed in proudly anti-Israel politics.
Shipman: Is he for one-state solution?
Oppenheimer: I don’t know, I’m not entirely clear, but he could be. He runs with plenty of people who are. And he’s Jewish. And I said to him, “You spend so much time among anti-Zionists. How can you tell which ones, which minority, are anti-Semites?” And he said, “Well, that’s easy.” He said, “It’s the liberal Protestants. The Jews aren’t anti-Semitic, even if they’re called self-loathing. And the Muslims aren’t anti-Semitic, because they get us.” He said they understand everything about us, as we understand everything about them. He said it’s the well-meaning leftie Protestants. They profess a deep spiritual kinship with Jews, they’ve often lived in the Middle East, they’ve led tours there.
Shipman: He’s talking about me! [laughs]
Oppenheimer: He said, “But they fundamentally see Jews as, their image of the contemporary Jew is of a rich, crass, Zionist who distorts American politics and is bad for the idealized Jew whom they love. Whom they may or may not know any of anymore.”
And, I knew exactly what he was talking about. And I’m not saying that’s you. At all. I don’t know you. But I know people like that … And what I sometimes think is, about the philo-Semitic liberal Protestant experience, is that they don’t understand the why the contemporary liberal Jew might be a Zionist. That in their mind the last good Zionist went out sometime around the late 1960s, was a socialist on a kibbutz somewhere, was totally secular, and that they don’t actually get the lived experience of being, say, a religious Jew in Brussels today.
I think there’s a truth that one can deeply love Jews and have loved Jews, but feel that there are no good Jews left. Except the ones that are entirely secular and anti-Zionist. That there are no good Jews left like there once were.
Shipman: That’s not my experience.
This is no longer an interview. It’s a mental breakdown. And it’s not Shipman’s breakdown. Shipman is a bigot, but he isn’t neurotic about it. He is just savvy enough to try and back away from his views. It’s Oppenheimer who is obsessed with trying to redeem Shipman to save his own views, with trying to get Shipman to feel his own pain as a leftist committed to an anti-Semitic movement.
Oppenheimer’s behavior, the whole foul taste of the interview, reminds me of encounters between self-hating Jews and anti-Semites. You see this kind of thing with Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis pretending to be more mainstream interacting with Jewish sympathizers.
Shipman just hates Jews. Oppenheimer hates himself. And he hates that he hates himself. He wants Shipman to save him from his self-hatred. It’s a deeply disconcerting voyage into the twisted mind of the Jewish anti-Israel leftist.
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