Christmas trees returned to Sea-Tac Airport

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

By JOHN IWASAKI
P-I REPORTER

[Editor's Note: Port Commissioner John Creighton's name was misspelled in the original version of this article.]

The Christmas spirit has returned to Sea-Tac Airport.

The Port of Seattle, which had been battered internationally for removing 14 Christmas trees last week in response to a rabbi's threat of a federal lawsuit, began reinstalling the displays Monday night.

	It was all smiles and cheers as Christmas trees were rolled into the terminal after being taken down due to the threat of a lawsuit at Sea-Tac Airport on Monday.

The decision came shortly after Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky told port officials that his organization would not file the suit to get an 8-foot menorah added to the public display, ending a flap that Port Commissioner Alec Fisken said made Seattle "an international joke."

Port Chairwoman Pat Davis expressed relief that the situation was resolved without Bogomilsky resorting to litigation.

"He pulled that stinger out, and it's wonderful," she said.

Davis said Bogomilsky never asked the port to remove the "holiday trees" -- the agency's staff does not refer to them as Christmas trees -- and expressed appreciation for the rabbi's willingness to work with the Port and other community and religious leaders to develop a plan for next year's holiday decorations at the airport.

Bogomilsky, director of Northwest Friends of Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic Orthodox group, reiterated Monday that he never asked the airport to remove the Christmas trees and had no intention of offending anyone. In withdrawing the threat of litigation, he said, "the word 'lawsuit' is a tremendously bad word."

"I think the whole thing is ridiculous and really out of proportion," Bogomilsky said shortly before the port made its announcement to reinstall the trees. "People should turn to the Port of Seattle and say, 'Wait a minute, what are you doing? Return the trees and give people the spirit of the holiday back.' Right now, nobody's happy."

Bogomilsky's day started at 5 a.m. Monday and lasted until the evening, with requests for interviews from CNN, Bill O'Reilly and virtually every local news outlet and talk show host. He sometimes held two phones to his ears at the same time.

The flap reverberated on simmering Internet forums, where irate observers labeled Bogomilsky a "grinch" and called the Port Commission "spineless," among other colorful adjectives.

Davis said the firestorm produced a public outcry from people of all faiths for the port to reinstall the trees. Some groups also said that if the port accommodated the rabbi's request, they also would expect "special treatment."

"I didn't want to set a precedent, frankly, that when anyone makes a threat, we fold," Davis said.

Bogomilsky said he raised the threat of a suit to get a menorah added, but only after getting "stonewalled" by the agency for weeks after a port consultant, Mitchell Stein, made an initial verbal request in mid-or late October. Port spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt said a formal request came in mid-November.

		Joshua Trujillo / P-I
	Employees applaud as Christmas trees are put back up at Sea-Tac on Monday.

But when Bogomilsky threatened to sue, the commission had only 18 hours to respond, Betancourt said, leading it to direct staff to remove the trees instead of simply adding a menorah as Bogomilsky had requested.

Fisken, who also is a strategic policy adviser for the city of Seattle, earlier Monday proposed a practical end to the brouhaha. His solution: "We ought to put up a tree, menorah and Kwanzaa display. That's what we've had in City Hall, and it doesn't cause a problem."

E-mail messages and other comments to the Port of Seattle were running 99 to 1 in opposition to the removal of the Christmas trees, Port Commissioner John Creighton said.

"As a public officials, we need to do the right thing, not the popular thing," he said. "In this case, I think the right thing is the popular thing."

The tree removal marked an unprecedented interruption to a longstanding holiday tradition at the airport. But the question of whether a menorah should be displayed publicly is hardly new to organizations of local Jews; neither is there agreement in the Jewish community over the practice.

Although some irate people criticized Jews in general for the actions of Bogomilsky, "most of the Jewish community does not really support the putting up of public menorahs," said Rabbi Anson Laytner, executive director of the greater Seattle chapter of the American Jewish Committee.

"It does raise, in spite of the Supreme Court ruling (allowing public displays of the Jewish candelabrum), significant church/ state issues in our minds," he said. "And in this case, it became a lightning rod for hostilities that otherwise would not be brought to the surface."

Several Jewish organizations said they had heard harsh reactions to Bogomilsky's requests, so much so that the Anti-Defamation League recommended that any concerned synagogues or groups hire extra security during Hanukkah events. The Jewish holiday starts at sundown Friday.

	adl
	Trees were put back up at Sea-Tac on Monday.

"The last thing we want is for the trees to taken down," said Robert Jacobs, director of the ADL's Pacific Northwest Region. "This is the time we should be celebrating that we're such a cosmopolitan community."

Bogomilsky said the response to his request has been staggering. "I've gotten thousands and thousands -- it's not an exaggeration -- of e-mails in the last 48 hours," he said. "Here and there, you get a lot of positive calls. Unfortunately, there's been a lot of negative responses -- 'the rabbi that ruined Christmas.' It's not our intention. It's not what our organization represents."

His branch of Judaism, Chabad-Lubavitch, has grown into a philosophy, movement and an organization since its inception about 250 years ago in Russia. The branch emphasizes "Jewish education, providing opportunities for Jewish people everywhere to celebrate the holidays, learning their heritage, reaching the unaffiliated and enriching the affiliated," said Rabbi Mordechai Farkash of Eastside Torah Center in Bellevue.

Chabad-Lubavitch is the Jewish group that has arranged for menorahs to be placed in public settings in at least 17 Western Washington sites, including Westlake Park, University Village, Seattle Center, Northgate Mall and seven places on the Eastside.

Decades ago, the local Jewish community held huge discussions on whether to support public menorahs, Laytner said, and most groups "agreed to disagree" with Chabad-Lubavitch. Laytner said most Jews see Christmas trees as a symbol of Christmas, but not explicitly religious.

A menorah, on the other hand, is associated with Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, a holiday that commemorates the miraculous supply of oil that kept the menorah burning in the temple of Jerusalem after its recapture from Syrian rulers in about 165 B.C.

Farkash said that in nation where Christians are the majority, "the menorah symbolizes the freedom of religion," and the opportunity for Jews to "publicize the miracle."

By contrast, the port staff's reluctance to use the word "Christmas" left Davis nonplussed.

"I'm telling everyone 'Merry Christmas,'" she said, "but I guess I'm politically incorrect."

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P-I reporter John Iwasaki can be reached at 206-448-8096 or johniwasaki@seattlepi.com.

© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Rabbi: Thank You, Jimmy Carter

Thank You, Jimmy Carter

Rabbi Michael Lerner

December 06, 2006

Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue, which meets in San Francisco and Berkeley, and national chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. He is the author of Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and of the national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (Harper San Francisco, 2006).

Jimmy Carter was the best friend the Jews ever had as president of the United States.

He is the only president to have actually delivered for the Jewish people an agreement (the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt) that has stood the test of time. Since the treaty, there have been bad vibes between Israel and Egypt, but never a return to war, once Israel fully withdrew from the territories it conquered in Egypt during the 1967 war.

To get that agreement, Carter had to twist the arms of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Sometimes that is what real friends do—they push you into a path that is really in your best interest at times when there is an emergency and you are acting self-destructively.

When the U.S. government is following a self-destructive policy, even a policy backed by people in both major political parties, its best friends are those who try to change its direction and are not afraid to offer intense critique. That’s why a majority of Americans, and 86 percent of American Jews, voted in the 2006 midterm elections to reject Bush’s war in Iraq and his policies suspending habeas corpus and legitimating wire-tapping and torture. Not because we were disloyal, but precisely because we love America enough to challenge its policies even when Vice President Cheney questions our loyalty. We know that critique is often an essential part of love and caring.

That is precisely what Jimmy Carter is trying to do for Israel and the Jewish people in his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

So it’s astounding to see the assault on Carter that has been launched by the ADL chair Abe Foxman, law professor Alan Dershowitz and a bevy of other representatives of the Jewish community. I recently received a mailing from our local Jewish Community Relations Council containing four such attacks on Carter, with zero representation of American Jews who support the Israeli peace movement.

Of course, any selection of facts is always going to be a choice, and those who buy the mainstream narrative of either the Palestinian or Israeli partisans are going to be unhappy with moments in which their narrative is not the dominant one in this book.

Carter recognizes the mistakes on both sides—precisely what the “You are either for us or against us” crowd in both camps cannot stand. Nuance, recognition that both sides have at times been insensitive to the legitimate needs of the other, insistence that both sides need to take steps that are currently rejected (by Hamas in the Palestinian world, by the Israeli government in the Jewish world—this is what makes for rational discussion.

Here’s an easy way to tell an extremist on Israel/Palestine issues: Just ask that person if he or she can list at least three terrible errors his/her side has made in this struggle, errors that deserve moral condemnation. If they can’t, chances are that no amount of evidence or moral reasoning is ever going to open their minds.

Instead, you’ll hear Palestinians who talk about their own refugee status but never acknowledge that, when Jews were refugees trying to escape the Holocaust in Europe, the Palestinian leadership convinced the British to not allow any Jews to come to Palestine. Nor will they talk about the human suffering that results when Palestinian terrorists explode bombs in cafes, movie theatres or dance halls in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Or you’ll hear the right-wingers in the Jewish crowd claiming, quite mistakenly as we’ve demonstrated in Tikkun, that Palestinians rejected a reasonable deal presented to them at Camp David in 2000. They’ll make the equally absurd claim that the Gaza pull-out of troops in 2005 “gave the Palestinians what they’ve been asking for and yet they continue to fight.” In fact, the Palestinian Authority had pleaded with Sharon not to pull out unilaterally but to negotiate an end to the occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, recognizing that negotiations would give credence to the Palestinian Authority for being able to deliver something in return for the nonviolent stance it had taken since the death of Arafat, while unilateral withdrawal would give Hamas an important chip (which it was able to use to parlay itself to electoral victory, claiming that it was their violence that had driven the Israelis out). Similarly, the apologists for the current policies of the State of Israel simply ignore the ongoing suffering that constitutes collective punishment for the entire population of Palestine when Israel cuts off food and funds and allows tens of thousands of people in the Occupied Territories to suffer from malnutrition. The partisans always have to see themselves as “righteous victims” and the other side as “the evil other.”

Carter does not claim that Israel is an apartheid state. What he does claim is that the West Bank will be a de facto apartheid situation if the current dynamics represented by the construction of the wall, by the passage of discriminatory legislation and by the inclusion of racists in the leadership—most recently that of pro-ethnic cleansing Israeli Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman—continue. The only way to avoid Israel turning into an apartheid state is a genuine peace accord.

In an interview that will appear in the January issue of Tikkun magazine, Carter points out that he is “not referring to racism as a basis for Israeli policy in the West Bank, but rather the desire of a minority of Israelis to occupy, confiscate and colonize Palestinian land.” To enforce that occupation of Palestinian land, Israel has built in the West Bank separate roads for Jewish settlers and Palestinians, built separate school systems, has totally different allocations of money, water, food and security for each population, wildly privileging the Jewish settlers and discriminating against the Palestinians whose families have lived there for centuries.

What Carter is arguing is that the best interests of Israel and the United States are not served by the current policies. Some still cling to the fantasy that holding on to land in the West Bank will improve Israeli security, but, as the recent war with Hezbollah conclusively showed, increasing sophistication of military technologies makes holding land no serious barrier for those who wish to send rockets and bombs hundreds of miles away.

The only real protection for a small country like Israel is to have good relations with its neighbors, and that is precisely what the occupation systematically undermines. The Geneva Accord provides a good foundation for the lasting peace both sides say they want. And it will eventually provide the foundations for any settlement: the creation of a Palestinian state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza, with full control of its own borders; full recognition and security agreements for Israel with all of its neighbors; joint coordination on security and anti-terrorism between Israeli and Palestinian police and military forces; reparations for Palestinian refugees; and a peace and reconciliation process that dispels the lies and propaganda that have become “accepted truths” in the diaspora communities of both Jewish and Arab worlds.

Jimmy Carter is speaking the truth as he knows it, and doing a great service to the Jews.

Unfortunately, this peace is impeded by the powerful voices of AIPAC and the mainstream of the organized Jewish community, who manage to terrify even the most liberal elected officials into blind support of whatever policy the current government of Israel advocates. Ironically, this blind support has had the consequence of pushing many morally sensitive Christians and Jews to distance themselves from the Jewish world, which makes blind support for Israeli policies the litmus test of anti-Semitism. Younger Jews cannot safely express criticisms of Israeli policy without being told that they are disloyal or “self-hating,” and elected officials tell me privately that they agree with Tikkun’s more balanced “progressive Middle Path” which is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. But we’ve found that even Jews in the mainstream media have ignored or condemned our new organization, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, which is, among other things, trying to be an interfaith alternative to AIPAC.

It’s time to create a new openness to criticism and a new debate. Jimmy Carter has shown courage in trying to open that kind of space with his new book, and he deserves our warm thanks and support.