Big Think

Michael Jackson Despised Hitler and Was Never an Anti-Semite

It was bizarre seeing this morning how hundreds of news sources on the Internet alleged that Michael Jackson admired Hitler and considered him a genius. Nothing could be further from the truth and these scandalous allegations are all based on a simple misrepresentation of a quote from Michael in my book The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Intimate Conversation. The book debuted only this morning on NBC's "Today" Show (scroll down to watch). But before I even had the chance to discuss it in the first TV interview, this serious mis-characterization of Michael was spreading everywhere unchecked. Here is what Michael actually said, as found in our conversations, which were recorded with Michael's enthusiastic consent for the express purpose of publication in this book: Hitler was a genius orator. He was [able] to make that many people turn and change and hate. He had to be a showman and he was. Before he would speak, he would pause, drink a bit of water, and then he would clear his throat, and look around. It was what an entertainer would do trying to work out how to play his audience. He would go into this fury of the first words he would say and he would hit them hard. But where did he come from? I know he failed school and he wanted to be an architect. He failed a lot of things. But I think it all happened in prison, the whole Mein Kampf thing, didn't it? Not only is there nothing controversial in what Michael is saying, but the point has been made by countless authoritative historians. Hitler was a master showman. He was indeed a brilliant orator who used his considerable charisma to stoke an inferno of hate. It is well known that he practiced his speeches in front of mirrors and had photographers take snapshots of him in different poses that he later studied to determine which were the most effective. He was an evil genius who employed every facet of a darkened soul to bring out the beast in man. And Michael is insightful in pointing out how Hitler studied his audience in order to gain mastery over them the way an entertainer would. It is very surprising that such a straightforward comment has become so controversial. Look, Michael had enough real flaws without people unfairly inventing new ones. I have already in the past written several columns refuting the idea that Michael was ever an anti-Semite. Indeed, I always considered him a loving friend of the Jewish people. In 2001 he came with me to meet Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and was honored to have all the photos released to the press, even though he was warned that this could provoke a serious boycott of his music in Arab countries that despised Sharon. Then, of course, there was the fact that Michael, for two years, trumpeted me, a Rabbi, as a mentor, hardly the stuff of anti-Semitism. And Michael loved coming to our home for the Friday night Sabbath dinner and told me that the night I took him to Synagogue to pray was the happiest of his life. I could go on, but the allegation that Michael could admire Hitler is so preposterous that it does not require any lengthy refutation. As far as Michael's contention in the book that he could have touched something inside of Hitler in a one-hour meeting, obviously this is ridiculous and I criticize the comment heavily in the book. Hitler was intrinsically evil and had utterly erased any trace of the image of G-d from his countenance. Touch Hitler and all you would have found is rancid bile and poison. But far from this being a demonstration that Michael excused Hitler's evil, it is rather a sad commentary on Michael's hopeless naïveté and growing Messiah complex. Michael hated Hitler and knew he was evil. But it was his mistaken belief that there was still something human in him that Michael could uniquely touch. In my book I discuss how one of the more corrosive elements of superstardom is the deification by fans that can lead the object of undo veneration to believe that he is possessed of special abilities. Michael deserves to be strongly criticized for believing too much in his own power to reform those who migrated irreversibly toward the dark side. But the suggestion that he had any sympathy for Hitler is grossly unfair and simply untrue. I have no reason to undeservingly defend Michael Jackson and indeed those who read my book will discover that I have bookended our more than two hundred pages of transcribed conversations with a moral overview of Michael's life and how his tragic existence and untimely demise can only be redeemed by serving as a morality tale for the rest of America. Michael was an American icon and embodied in his broken person so much of the excess that is coming to define a nation whose citizens increasingly seek fame at any cost. But that still does not give us the right to distort him in death on issues where he had no culpability. Michael wanted these conversations published and made available to the public. He felt that if people understood the extreme suffering he had endured and if he exposed his heart to what he knew to be a suspicious public, people might judge him more charitably. In the final analysis, this book is Michael in his own words and each person will make his own judgment. I am not asking you to make Michael into any kind of saint in death, any more of a man than he was in life. But let's not unfairly make him into the devil either. On "TODAY" Friday: Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's newest book, The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Intimate Conversation was released today by Vanguard Press. NBC Dateline will be airing a one hour special on the book tonight at 9pm.

September 25, 2009, 2:09 PM

Michael Jackson's and My Dream to Create a National Family Dinner Night

This coming Friday night, September 25th, NBC will air a one-hour, prime-time Dateline special hosted by Meredith Vieira, featuring a book I am publishing on the 30 hours of conversations that I conducted with Michael Jackson. The book, The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Private Conversation, contains the most of insightful, raw, painful, and authentic conversations for public distribution that Michael ever had. It was Michael's desperate wish that our conversations be produced and the book be published so that his heart might be known to a public he understood was greatly suspicious of him. He wanted to share a deeper side of himself that our friendship had begun to uncover. The depth and searing honesty of the conversations contained in the book are sure to change the public's perception of Michael forever. The choice to air the TV special launching the book on a Friday night, although it unavoidably demands that the normally live program will have to be prerecorded in deference to the laws of the Jewish Sabbath, goes hand-in-hand with a recurring theme in the book. Michael and I always dreamed of introducing a national family dinner night, an evening when parents would prioritize their children without distraction. Friday night was the natural choice since Michael, a non-Jew raised in the Jehovah's Witnesses Church, loved the Jewish Sabbath meals he ate at our home with his children. A superstar whose life was frenzied and harried, he welcomed the utter serenity of an evening where cell phones and TVs were off and the only sound was that of intimate conversation and gentle laughter. A year ago this dream became a reality when my organization, This World: The Values Network, unveiled "Turn Friday Night Into Family Night," a national initiative to have families of every denomination, ethnicity, and persuasion adopt Friday night as the time to turn off the noise that so invades the modern home and focus exclusively on their children. NBC kindly agreed to highlight our Friday Night National Family Dinner initiative as a central part of the program and further agreed to air our Public Service Announcements, featuring leading personalities like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Kathie Lee Gifford, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor Cory Booker, Rachel Hunter, and others who have recorded thirty-second advertisements promoting our family dinner initiative (the ads are available at our website www.FridayIsFamily.com) To be sure, Michael has strong critics and my book and our conversations do not in any way whitewash his shortcomings. But he was extraordinarily eloquent when speaking about how he was scarred by a childhood that, due to incessant touring and performances, lacked the basic staples of a nurturing upbringing like regular family dinners and quantity time with parents. He wanted to make sure that Moms and Dads understood the risks of shortchanging their children's natural right to be the center of their parent's world. In one moving comment, which will be played on the NBC special, he expressed to me just how badly he wanted to establish a regular holiday for kids: "I want the holiday so badly, that's my dream. We should mention it to the UN. To me, it is criminal not to acknowledge the children, our greatest asset. If there were Children's Day when I was little and I could look at my father, 'Okay, Daddy, Joseph, what are we going to do today?' Do you know what that would have meant for me? He'd go, 'Well, do you want to go to the movies?' That would have meant so much to me. You just need that one moment of attention." Michael, sadly, did not live to see the establishment of a regular day dedicated to parents prioritizing children. His tragic life, in which he medicated away his loneliness until it finally consumed him, serves as a morality tale to the rest of us. Our children do not need fame and fortune but love and attention. We can make a weekly children's holiday a reality in the lives of our children, today. The Jewish Sabbath leads the way. A day consecrated by the Bible to family and community, it ought to become a universal celebration of conversation, generosity, and togetherness. The recipe is simple. We call it "The Triple Two." Every Friday night give your kids two hours uninterrupted by television, movies or video games. Invite two guests, to teach your children hospitality. And prepare two substantive subjects for discussion in order to deepen the family's interests and awaken your child's intellectual curiosity. TIME magazine reports that the more families eat meals together, the less likely their children are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words, and know which fork to use. A 2005 study by Columbia University found that family dinners get better with practice. The less often a family eats together, the worse the experience is likely to be, the less healthy the food, and the more meager the talk. Among those families who eat together three or fewer times a week, a staggering forty-five percent say the TV is on during the meals. Just imagine how a child feels when parents sit down to eat dinner and the TV is blaring in the background. The message is clear. You're too boring for me to focus on you for half an hour a day. Studies show that such kids are also more than twice as likely as those who have frequent family meals to say there is a great deal of tension among family members. They are also much less likely to think their parents are proud of them. The pain of parental neglect affects so many today. This is the perfect time to rededicate ourselves to a campaign like "Turn Friday Night Into Family Night," that would be a step forward to healing the American family. It is my hope that the millions of people who will watch the NBC special will be inspired to join the millions of Jewish families who throughout the world and throughout time have always 'Turned Friday night into family night.' The Jewish Sabbath is our people's greatest treasure and it is a gift that should be shared with the world. Many will say that given the serious allegations against Michael Jackson he is a poor catalyst for the creation of a national family dinner night. Perhaps. But I have always been moved by the illuminating teaching of Judaism's greatest thinker, Maimonides, who said, "Embrace the truth regardless of its source." Rabbi Shmuley's Boteach's new book The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Intimate Conversation will be published this Friday, September 25th and will be available in all book stores and the Sony EBook store. www.shmuley.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - *Follow Shmuley on TWITTER! http://www.twitter.com/RabbiShmuley *Shmuley's on Facebook! http://tinyurl.com/facebook-shmuley *Buy Rabbi Shmuley's newest book THE KOSHER SUTRA at http://tinyurl.com/koshersutra *Join the national "Turn Friday Night Into Family Night" initiative. Go to www.FridayisFamily.com. *See Shmuley on the web at www.Shmuley.com

September 24, 2009, 12:10 PM

J Street's Shameful Attacks on Aipac

If J Street, the new left-wing Israel lobby, wants to be taken seriously by mainstream American Jewry, then I would suggest they immediately stop the patronizing argument that all those who disagree with them are ossified Jewish knuckledraggers who see an anti-Semite behind every corner. The New York Times magazine feature on J Street this past Sunday, which raised the group from near obscurity to high visibility, may have been off in its quotations of its director Jeremy Ben-Ami. But if accurate they represent a nauseating and patronizing position of breathtaking condescension toward ideological opponents that can only sow deep divisions within the Jewish community. Here are some choice morsels. On why most of the pro-Israel lobbying groups, whom J Street has come to 'balance,' support a hard-line against terror, Ben Ami says that they see "Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you." Ben-Ami added further that these groups stifle dissent because they argue that "we're still on too-shaky ground to permit public disagreement." In Ben-Ami's opinion Aipac is run by paranoid schizophrenics who fear another holocaust striking at any moment. On Israel's recent offensive against Hamas in Gaza, which J Street strongly criticized, the Times relates, "Ben-Ami... acknowledges that moments of crisis for Israel tap into the ancestral impulses... 'There's their grandmother's voice in their ear; it's the emotional side and the communal history, and it's the fear of not wanting in some way to be responsible for the next great tragedy that will befall the Jewish people.'" Get it. If you support Israel's right to defend itself against missiles raining down on its kindergartens and nursing homes it's not because you believe in a country's legitimate right to defend itself against attack but because you're reptilian Jewish brain has still not gotten over your great-grandmother being disemboweled by Chemielnitzki. Talk about delegitimizing the other side. And all this from a man who started J Street because right-wing Jews stifle debate! Is this the way to conduct an honest discussion about Israel's future, by painting those with whom you disagree as a bunch of loons who see Nazis about to storm Brooklyn? The truth, of course, is that many people, myself included, who support the organizations that J Street seeks to demonize -- AIPAC, the ADL, the ZOA, and others -- do so not because we fear the imminent mass extinction of all Jews but because we seek to prevent the cold-blooded murder of even one Jew. In the year 2009 there is no reason that we should have to put up with any anti-Semitic or anti-Israel prejudice, even if it doesn't lead to gas chambers. Israel shouldn't have to tolerate any bombs going off in its midst, even if they kill only a handful of Jews. And we support Israel not because it's the final bunker when the skinheads finally conquer Miami Beach but because, like all proud Americans, we love freedom and democracy and we're thrilled that the Jewish state is the bastion of those precious values in a region that utterly repudiates them. I am not one to get easily offended, but reading Ben-Ami's words, in the New York Times of all places, borders on the anti-Semitic. His caricature of leaders of major Jewish organizations -- heroes like Malcolm Hoenlein, Howard Kohr, and Morton Klein -- as mistrustful cranks who seek to hijack American foreign policy is deeply troubling, as is his contention that Jews who believe that a tough military posture, after all the terror Israel has experienced in response to two decades of land-for-peace-deals, are paranoid brutes stuck in the past. I am prepared to accord Ben-Ami the benefit of the doubt, that his left-wing posture on Israel and his strong support of President Obama's pressure on its government stems from a sincere desire to bring peace to the Jewish state. Ben-Ami is the scion of Israeli patriots and while I strongly disagree with his politics I do not question the nobility of his motivation. Will he not afford me the same benefit of the doubt? And I would ask Ben-Ami to at least be consistent. On the subject of Israel talking with Hamas, the Times reported that although the United States classifies the group as a terrorist organization, "J Street takes the cautious view that while we should not speak directly with officials, we should engage through intermediaries with the goal of finding interlocutors willing to live in peace with Israel." But surely Ben-Ami should then, at the very least, publicly advocate that the United States do the same with Al Qaida. Rather than hunt them down in Afghanistan we should be reaching out to them through the Swiss. I am not here to attack J Street but to make a point. We need many voices in the Jewish community and if J Street feels that left-wing Jews were not being heard in the halls of Congress then by all means let it be remedied by the establishment of an alternative lobby. That's what democracy is all about. But J Street's cheap tactics of creating its name by attacking Aipac, the ADL, and the ZOA is shameful. There is room in our community for many voices without creating a civil war. We can be a community of one heart even if we are not of one mind. Finally, amid Ben-Ami's cutting words about how we who are disturbed by Obama's unrelenting pressure on Israel are just a bunch of unreasonable fossils, will he really overlook those whose stated intention is indeed the destruction of Israel, like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ahmedenijad? Would he argue that the Iranian President's bark is worse than his bite even as he slaughters his own protesting countrymen in the streets? No doubt just seventy years after the start of World War II there are still Jews who have not forgotten that when dictators say they want to wipe a nation off the map, and build weapons with that very capability, they ought to be taken seriously. As the great baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, "Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of This World: The Values Network, has just published his newest book 'The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger,' a man selection of the Sony EBook Store. www.shmuley.com.

September 21, 2009, 10:30 AM

Obama Should Speak to Schoolkids About Studying

The recent controversy over President Obama's speech to schoolchildren demonstrates the capacity for Americans to generate controversy over the most inane matters. Does anyone really have a problem with the President encouraging kids to take school seriously, to do their homework, and to watch less TV? This is a message he has courageously brought to the African-American community on several occasions even as Jesse Jackson threatened to remove essential parts of his anatomy in doing so. It's about time he shared the same message with white America as well. I would suggest to those parents who are afraid that having their kids watching the President on TV is going to indoctrinate them to socialism that they instead concern themselves with all the rancid, mind-numbing, sex-and-violence laden TV that their kids are watching at night. That's a much bigger threat. In general, the loss of intellectual curiosity, and the death of reading, among our kids is a serious crisis as our children gravitate away from the written word and toward the visual image. The average child watches three hours of TV per day, but reads a book only when forced to by a teacher. What a loss. Reading electrifies the senses and fires the imagination. It makes children more creative and deepens their understanding of their own humanity. Few pleasures in life match the joy of a good read and a satisfying book. Watch any movie and it is still never as good as the book. Francis Ford Coppola may give you the best possible rendition of what Mario Puzo intended with The Godfather and Marlon Brando might bring the character to life. Still, it is their interpretation of the characters that prevails. But when you read the book, you are the director. It's your screenplay. While visual images make you into a passive participant, reading makes you into an active agent. While Patrick Henry declared, "Give me liberty or give me death," Thomas Jefferson said, "I cannot live without books." Indeed he regarded his library as his most cherished possession. The joys of reading were perhaps best captured by Jorge Luis Borges who wrote, "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." Even Madonna, who just visited Israel, is on record as saying that she finds reading a book in bed a lot more pleasurable than sex. As a father I have endeavored mightily to impart to my children the joys of reading. Every Friday night, when our Sabbath meal ends, we retire to the living room. The kids get blankets and pillows, lie on the floor, and everyone reads a book. The tradition of associating holy days with reading goes all the way back to the Bible where the prophet Isaiah says, "Seek ye out of the book of the Lord, and read." (34:16) People used to at least read on an airplane since there was scarcely anything else to do. But Jet Blue's TV's, now copied by most major carriers, has killed even that off. I used to drag a small sack of books a plane so that I can switch between them. My fellow passengers did not appreciate the burden. But the advent EBooks now allows a reader to bring hundreds of books in a tiny electronic volume. And the Sony EReader in particular is, remarkably, open format, allowing for the download of hundreds of thousands of books for free. You can even download books from lending libraries that live on your device for a few weeks before they are 'returned.' The open format has allowed me to connect with my children by introducing them to the world's classics. I told my son how worthwhile it would be to embark on the long journey through Tolstoy's War and Peace. He in turn found Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness online at Guttenberg.com and a few days later shared with me Kurtz's gradual descent from human to beast. I study Bible with my children most nights, and now often do it from an EReader. It has sparked important discussions. I asked my kids which they thought superior, the Bible's commandment not to take revenge, or Machiavelli's pronouncement that it was better to be feared than loved? Intrigued, two of my teenagers downloaded The Prince and had read it within a few days. I was so impressed with Sony making their device open format that, as a tireless campaigner for getting kids to read, I approached them to become a spokesman for the device. On September 8th, published my new book, The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger, exclusively on the Sony EReader as a sign of the power of the new technology. As an author you quickly learn the limitations of printed books, especially in the very long gestation period from completed manuscript to published work. If you want to react to a contemporary issue, then even if write your book quickly, you have to wait about a year for the book to appear in book stores. But with EBooks, an author can have a book available for download in about a month. This is exactly what happened when I sought to write a book on America's fallen economy. Few had the solution as to how it could be rescued but all agreed that its collapse was caused by greed. But what was the cure? I sat down and wrote a book on the antidote to American voraciousness, the insatiable consumer culture, and the spiritual remedy to our inner emptiness. Had I gone the traditional route of having it typeset, printed, bound and distributed, I would have missed the media window where the economy's downturn was still being discussed. I approached Sony with my manuscript and now, just a few weeks later it's being published on a prominent place on their website for download. The miracle of modern EBooks is a godsend to authors, allowing them to make their books truly timely, combining the short-lead time of a magazine article with the comprehensiveness of a book. I got all my kids EReaders. Using state-of-the-art technology is a powerful way to wean them off the coma-inducing effects of mind-numbing reality TV and to nurture a love for reading. Groucho Marx put it best. "I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book." Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international best-selling author of 21 books and has just written, "The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger," published September 8th exclusively on the Sony EReader. www.shmuley.com

September 8, 2009, 1:40 PM

Why We in Englewood Pushed Out Kaddafi

Remarks by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at the Rally at his home, immediately adjacent to the Libyan Compound in Englewood, NJ It's a great pleasure for our family to be hosting you all here today, from dignitaries like our esteemed governor Jon Corzine and our beloved Senator Frank Lautenberg to our Congressman Steve Rothman and our tireless mayor, Michael Wildes. Together with the elected officials I have just mentioned -- and, most importantly, the grassroots campaign of ordinary Englewood citizens -- we have achieved a great victory with the announcement by the Libyans, confirmed by our State Department, that Kaddafi has withdrawn his request to pitch his tent in Englewood. We have made our town a terrorist-free zone. Proverbs 24:17 declares, "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles." Unlike Kaddafi's welcome of the Lockerbie bomber, we are not here to party. How could we, when even as Kaddafi departs from our midst, his embassy, official Libyan territory, remains as my immediate next door neighbor? How can we rejoice when the 270 innocent people of Pan Am 103, including 180 Americans and 38 residents of New Jersey, remain dead? And how can we rejoice when so many American soldiers remain murdered and maimed by the Libyan 1986 bombing of a Berlin Discothèque? But it is not only for demonstrations against Middle Eastern dictators that we invite in the community. Our home is open to large numbers of people every Friday night, the Jewish Sabbath. We try to emulate our patriarch Abraham whom the Bible relates pitched a tent for all, welcoming in the hungry and offering rest to the weary. Til today Jews get married under a canopy, a tent with no walls, signifying that the couple should build a home that is closed to none. But whereas the tent of Abraham welcomes the weary with warm food, Kaddafi's tent targets the innocent with incendiary bombs. Where the tent of Abraham invites widows and orphans, Kaddafi's tent creates widows and orphans. And whereas Abraham's tent was illuminated by the glow of the human heart, Kaddafi's tent is illuminated by the infernal fireballs of airplanes detonated in the sky. Abraham pitched a tent of universal brotherhood while Kaddafi's is a terror tent of shame. Some say that Kaddafi has done penance. Why should we Jews reject him when our High Holy Day period, just a few weeks away, is all about the human ability to turn away from sin? But what kind of penitent sends his private jumbo jet to bring home a cowardly killer of 270 people and then throws a Mardis-Gras-style reception to receive him? Such a man is not a penitent but is a pious fraud, a religious charlatan, and an international menace. The campaign of our little New Jersey town has provoked a response from Kaddafi's son in an op-ed in today's New York Times. Saif Kaddafi writes, "Contrary to reports in the Western press, there was no "hero's welcome" for Abdel al-Megrahi when he returned to Libya earlier this month. There was not in fact any official reception for the return of Mr. Megrahi....The strong reactions to these misperceptions must not be allowed to impair the improvements in a mutually beneficial relationship between Libya and the West." Not only would the Libyans kill our citizens, they would insult our intelligence. It is also particularly shameful to now see that the London Times is today reporting that evidence has now emerged that letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the British Justice Minister to Kenny MacAskill, his Scottish Counterpart, to free the Lockerbie bomber. "The British government decided it was "in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom" to make al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya." It is surely befitting that MacAskill, who has disgraced himself as well as the Scottish government, resign immediately. Our ongoing battle to remove the Libyan compound from our community and my personal battle to evict them as my direct next-door neighbor is a David-and-Goliath struggle, a small New Jersey town and a father of nine against an oil-rich Middle East dictator who is currently being courted by Western leaders. And yet, even standing outside this Libyan mission we are not afraid. Yes, we are aware that in 1984 female British constable, Yvonne Fletcher, was assassinated with a burst of machine-gun fire from the Libyan Embassy. Still we are courageous because we Americans know that the only thing to ever fear is our own cowardice in the face of tyranny and terror. From the time that Thomas Jefferson, at the risk of his own life as a British subject, classified George III as a tyrant in our Declaration of Independence Americans have never cowered before tin-pot dictators like Kaddafi. Colonel Kaddafi, you are no match for the inheritors of General Washington. To paraphrase William Jennings Bryan's famous statement, "You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold," Mr. Kaddafi, "You shall not drown the morals of the American people in a barrel of oil." We don't have oil wells in Englewood, only beautiful trees, even as your Embassy cuts them down with impunity in order to give your security personnel a clearer line of site into my residence. We will defeat you because righteousness is on our side. As Martin Luther King said, "The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice." To my brothers and sisters in Libya whose per capita annual income is $14,000, I say that we appreciate your suffering. We understand how in Libya you cannot read the truth in a newspaper and cannot choose your own elected officials. We have no gripe with you, only with your leaders who live off the sweat of your backs to enrich themselves and live in extravagant opulence, as the Kaddafi's home behind me amply demonstrates. In my country we require sex offenders to register so as not to harm their neighbors. Will my government, then, allow a terror-supporting government to reside next door to me? Will President Obama, the leader of the free world, not lead by denying Kaddafi a visa to the United States? Will my President, a devoted and loving family man, place me in a position where my nine children need to be under the scrutiny of Libyan intelligence? And what message is our President sending to our brave troops fighting overseas by allowing a man who just last week glorified a heartless killer onto American soil? Susan Cohen, whose only child, Theodora, aged, 20, died on Pan Am 103, told me, "It hurts so bad to see how Kaddafi has won, how all the Western leaders are now running to kiss a terrorist's feet." Well Susan, here in little old Englewood, NJ, we didn't kiss his feet. Unlike Megrahi, we didn't even kiss his hands. Rather, we told him to kiss a part of our bold New Jersey anatomy. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network. His upcoming book is The Blessing of Enough. www.shmuley.com.

August 31, 2009, 9:10 AM