Rabbi Moonbeam surfaces in Huffi-Post and should be ignored but is very good at PR.

The annual misrepresentation by a serial misrepresenter.
http://tinyurl.com/cmco67

http://tinyurl.com/da2ek8
Rabbi Moonbeam
...a wave of anti-Semitism among Jewish Leftists that has accompanied assaults against Israel. ...fig leafs for anti-Jewish ...and anti-Israel aggression...collaborators with anti-Semites. ... who essentially hate their own people and so support anti-Semitic bigotry and belligerence throughout the world, all in the name of promoting "peace and justice." ...better seen as a psychiatric phenomenon than a political one, ...the Israel-bashing media keep discovering the novelty of Jewish leftists who justify anti-Semitism and even Arab terrorism. ...After all, if even these "Jews" are convinced that the Jews are a greedy and evil people, surely it must be so. ...insist that they are ’only" anti-Zionist... just happens to include the total capitulation of Israel to Arab fascism....perhaps the best known in the United States is Michael Lerner. L...Hillary Clinton briefly considered promoting Lerner’s New Age "politics of meaning," a sort of generic liberation theology,...nothing more nor less than the advocacy of the left’s political agenda mixed with a shtikele of Hillarycare, superficially dressed up in religious slogans and symbols. Under the "politics of meaning," all prayer is replaced with ... repetitions of the mantra "loving and caring" ...all those who disagree with the Left are greedy and selfish.Within the Jewish world, Lerner is better known for serving as editor of the flaky Far-Left Tikkun magazine,..."Tikkun" is completely misrepresented by Lerner and his people....the pursuit of PC paganism a la Tikkun is the exact opposite of the traditional Judaic concept of "Tikkun."... every month with a roll call of shallow leftism, mixed with New Age touchy-feely recreational "compassion" and peace posturing. ... a nostalgic fossilization of Sixties counter-culture and New Left radicalism....Tikkun Magazine insisted that the US respond to the September 11 attacks (which it calls the September 11 "disturbances") by feeling Osama bin Laden’s pain. It has repeatedly advocated psychedelic drugs use and proposes transcendental meditation as the solution to Middle East strife....Lerner’s pseudo-Judaic cult... Tikkun Community... Lerner can be counted on to support the Arab position on the Middle East with perfect consistency, ... the darling of much of the anti-Israel liberal media. ... Naturally, Lerner sticks to the line that he is only opposed to Israel’s current policies, not to its existence, and if he happens to "understand" and rationalize the mass massacres of Israeli civilians by Arab terrorists, this has nothing to do with him wishing Jews harm. ****Lerner claimed that he was threatened but then had to admit that he had written the letters himself! *** Lerner routinely is introduced in his columns and at events as a Rabbi, ...virtually no one outside the Tikkun cult acknowledges him as being any sort of clergyman. ...no Rabbinic training ...never ordained as a Rabbi by any Rabbinic training seminary or institution. ...claims that he was "ordained" when three ..."Rabbis" placed their hands upon his head, while perhaps wishing for The Force to be with him, but no Rabbi and no one outside the Tikkun movement would recognize this "ordination" as kosher.
****Lerner received rabbinical ordination in 1995 through a Jewish Renewal beth din (rabbinical court) composed of three rabbis, "each of whom had received orthodox rabbinic ordination," headed by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi[1] and including Rabbi Phil Labowitz and Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank... "mainstream rabbinical leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements" have questioned private ordinations such as Lerner's, arguing that non-seminary ordinations risk producing poorly educated Rabbis.Rabbi Debora Kohn, ***Lerner's current wife***,...1997 she moved to California and worked as educational director at Beyt Tikkun synagogue ...She received rabbinical ordination in the summer of 2002***presumably via the same route as Lerner (perhaps including Lerner among the three)***.
Lerner began his political career back in Berkeley in the 1960s, ... In one of the finest reminiscences of the day, David Horowitz describes Lerner’s wedding, which he attended, in his book "Radical Son": "The cake at his wedding was inscribed with a Weatherman slogan: Smash Monogamy. Soon he and his wife had a child, and the young family went east. When the couple separated shortly thereafter, mother and son went to live in Boston. Lerner, however, returned to Berkeley. "Michael," I said, "how can you leave your son in the east to come to Berkeley? He needs you." Without hesitation, Lerner answered: "David, you don’t understand. I have to be here. Berkeley is the center of the world-historical spirit." Lerner also made me understand that drugs were central to the consciousness of the Movement. On discovering that I had never taken LSD, he was incredulous: "You have to take LSD. Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is."
****... (The classic and authoritative analysis of the Lerner career is still the book written by ...Alexander (The Jewish Wars: Reflections by One of the Belligerents, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996, especially pp. 141-51). Professor Alexander has described Lerner as "a kipah (skullcap)-wearing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely ’rabbinic’ appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel and not the Arabs for the absence of peace, and to liken Israeli defense against Palestinian Arab violence to medieval Christian mobs . . . organizing pogroms against the whole Jewish community."... views on Israel are indistinguishable from those of (the late) Edward Said. (Said ...more outspoken about his desire to see Israel destroyed.) Indeed, Said himself has been a featured speaker at some Tikkun events. When Commentary Magazine printed an expose of Said’s having fabricated his own autobiography, Lerner wrote, [Revealing Said’s background] "is as obscene as the attempts by various Holocaust revisionists to argue that many of the Jewish refugees were not really victims of the Holocaust but merely self-interestedly escaping a war zone."... He blamed the 2001 attacks on the US by bin Laden on American attempts to hoard the world’s resources and promote globalization...The Marxist Pacifica Foundation distributes tapes of his talks....Lerner has long cultivated a special close relationship with Cornell West,...they co-authored several books and articles, including "Blacks and Jews: Let the Healing Begin," and long ago agreed that anti-Semitism among black Americans was obviously all the fault of the Jews, and that most Jews are racists. ... Lerner has denounced the leaders of the American Jewish community as "fat cats and conformists." ... Tikkun magazine...create a counter-cultural anti-Commentary Magazine....Lerner’s views on the Middle East conflict differ little from those of the Hizbollah. His opinions of America resemble those of Noam Chomsky, another anti-Semitic leftist of Jewish ancestry. "Rabbi" Lerner’s attitude towards American Judaism may be summed up by his statement, "the synagogue as currently established will have to be smashed."...Steven Plaut
****
Rabbis of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Recall Lerner:"You have to take LSD. Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is."Lerner "ordained" by
Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalman_Schachter-Shalomi)..." initially sent out to speak on college campuses by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, but was expelled from Chabad for praising "the sacramental value of lysergic acid." "Shalomi associated with Richard Alpert (born April 6, 1931), also known as Baba Ram Dass...who wrote the 1971 bestseller Be Here Now. ...association with Timothy Leary ...flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico....in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of ergot wheat fungus called LSD. Alpert and Leary brought a test batch ... back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project and experimented with LSD ...later dismissed from the university in 1963;
Review of The Politics of Meaning
http://tinyurl.com/cmyebn
What Meaning Really Means
by David Gordon, Summer 1996
THE POLITICS OF MEANING: RESTORING HOPE AND POSSIBILITY IN AN AGE OF CYNICISM Michael Lerner 1996, xi + 355 pgs.
...Lerner fears ridicule, with good reason. His "politics of meaning" is a farrago of nonsense, one absurd assertion tumbling over another. But we dare not laugh too much: this man is dangerous. Hillary Clinton takes him seriously....In a speech delivered on April 6, 1993, Hillary sounded just like him. Lerner ... extravagant praise.......tripe being peddled in the talk could only have come from one...: Lerner is praising himself....what is the source of pain and suffering, and all our woe? It is (surprise!) the free market, especially powerful corporations that act selfishly. "[T]he ethos of selfishness sanctified by market-dominated societies soon yields deep unhappiness" (p. 60)....reference to the "brilliant account" of the rise of fascism in Germany by Wilhelm Reich ...combine psychoanalysis with Marxism...he claimed to have found a cure for cancer, the "orgone energy box." The FDA did not ...he died while serving a term in a federal penitentiary....If Lerners metaphysics is a prettified Reichianism, his economics is vulgar Marxism,... It does not reflect favorably on American higher education that Lerner holds a doctorate in philosophy....Of course Lerner has got Smith completely wrong.... Lerner manages to get Marxism wrong also.... Why should a majority (of people? "votes"?) be able to block others from obtaining satisfaction?...Lerner further claims that "a product that pours carcinogens into the air" will continue to be produced, even though the majority wishes to stop it, so long as some find it a source of profit. ...When Lerner informs us that economists ... 'externalities, and recognize that the market has no mechanism for dealing with them" (p. 133), one can only be astonished that even Lerner can be so ignorant. Why didnt his friends among Marxist economists, such as Herbert Gintis (p. x), inform him that market mechanisms to cope with externalities have been ...in the literature? I could easily go on, but ... Three hundred pages of buffoonery is too much.