7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred

I Suppose an Explanation is In Order at This Point in the Series: Why Should Those Who Are Not Jewish Care So Much About Antisemitism? Here's My Story of How I Got Here.

Dec 31, 2022

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This post is the eighteenth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

So here’s something strange but true: people tend to mistakenly think I’m Jewish. And this has been happening for awhile. This misunderstanding seems to come both from my appearance and my last name. Even my fiancée thought so! Jewish people themselves sometimes think that I’m one of them. One of my Jewish mentors and friends paid me the kindest compliment when he told me that I have a “yiddishe cuppe” - a Jewish mind.

But, in fact, I’m not ethnically Jewish, and I don’t practice Judaism as a religion. I considered converting for a number of years about a decade ago, but ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Judaism seems to have the same core problem as Christianity, the faith I was raised in and still embrace: it’s just too hard to figure out which variant of the religion is the one, true “correct” one when each school of thought seems to have its fair points and its excesses. Haredi, Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox? Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Non-Denominational? I haven’t been able to find a Christian church for me in the twenty years since I left the one of my youth for the basic reason that I usually either feel too “conservative” in a “liberal church” and too “liberal” in a “conservative church.” My Jewish friends have warned me that this same problem seems to manifest among synagogues. I now suspect it more has something to do with organized religion as a whole - that any time a religious group just gets too big, and its doctrine too formalized or dogmatic, it becomes too oppressive to the individual.

The solution I arrived at to counter this is to embrace my own quirky disorganized religion. “Judeo-Christian Mystic” is the combination of labels I’ve embraced for a number of years now. “Pagan Soul, Jewish Mind, Christian Heart, Secular Spirit” was the magick spell I cast on myself many years ago and at this point it seems to have worked. This translates into preferring Jewish philosophical interpretations of the Torah, Kabbalah-infused occult ideas about the spiritual realm, a Christian faith in the resurrection and absolute love of Jesus, and an unapologetic hippie lifestyle with its corresponding psychedelic cultural ethos. As far as I’m concerned, it might as well still be 1969 — all the music, ideas, and dreams of that time are still so alive in me.

So what happened that inspired me to focus on Zionist advocacy for Israel and its corresponding task of raising awareness about global antisemitism? The answer lies in seven life experiences, which I’ll list and then explain:

An early introduction to Jewish culture through Jewish family friends I now regard as surrogate grandparents.
A difficult adolescence that shaped me into an outsider who innately sympathizes with other outsiders.
An up-close view on the international media’s coverage of the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 during my years as an editor focusing on media criticism.
The experience of working with, befriending, and being influenced by the late Barry Rubin, PJ Media’s Middle East editor and a noted scholar of the region, who passed away from cancer in 2014 and whose approach I’ve long sought to popularize.
Studying, writing about, and engaging in activism to counter the antisemitic American Islamist movement from 2016 through 2020 at the Middle East Forum, the think tank which had supported Rubin’s work.
Researching the pervasive anti-Israel bias in Middle East coverage on Wikipedia with the late Jack Saltzberg, founder of the nonprofit activist organization The Israel Group, who died suddenly in July of last year from a heart attack.
Being traumatized by the death in August 2021 of the late Tamara Wilhite, my lead columnist when I ran Liberty Island Books, who passed away from COVID-19 after, as her father explained to me in a devastating phone call, she refused to be vaccinated due to her passionate libertarianism, devotion to online right-wing media, and distrust of Joe Biden. Following that, my further discovery of the rampant Covid misinformation, which had come to dominate the conservative media to which I’d dedicated years. And the fact that most of my “friends” and “colleagues” just didn’t give a fuck.

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I’ll break each of these down one by one:

Discovering My Secret Jewish Grandparents in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s

My father’s most important professional mentor was a Jewish psychology professor at Indiana University. Half a century later, they’re still writing papers together. Growing up we often visited their home and they invited us to Passover dinner, took me to their synagogue, and showed me the Jewish books which had most influenced them. At the time I just regarded them as close family friends, but now looking back I feel so much affection for them that I see how they functioned as surrogate grandparents. While I had very kind, loving grandmothers growing up, both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, one of whom physically abused me as a child. So Ken and Audrey’s love and kindness filled a gap I never knew that I had. Looking back I feel a sense of love for them and they implanted in me an affection and respect for Jewish culture and Jewish people. My strong impression of the goodness in so many Jewish people was a deep influence on my eventual escape from Evangelicalism.

Embracing Outsider Solidarity from 1994 through 2002

In a recent previous essay here at the substack I explained “Why I Hate Indiana,” explaining how from fifth grade on, once we moved to the conformist culture of Indiana I felt perpetually like a strange outsider, unable to embrace the sports-obsessed culture and dominant Evangelical religious sensibilities. As a result of this imprint I’ve developed a bias and sympathy to all cultural outsiders and oddballs, whether they be blacks, artists, LGBTQ members, and the original outsiders of Western Civilization, the Jewish people. If you’re on the margins of polite society and just don’t fit in with the herd, chances are I’m going to feel some sympathy and solidarity with you. We outsiders need to support each other.

Disgusted by the Global Media’s Hatred of Israel, Symbolized by the Bias in Reporting on the Mavi Marmara in 2010

In 2009 I began my first full-time editorial position as the managing editor of the media criticism site NewsReal Blog and associate editor of the hawkish conservative publication FrontPageMag. At NRB we covered all sorts of media bias from the hosts of MSNBC to blog posts at Huffington Post. But one event in particular horrified me more than any other global controversy: Israel’s effort to defend itself from the Mavi Marmara ship attempting to breach the blockade protecting Israel. I monitored the global media and saw how all over the world seemingly everyone was taking the side of the violent activists opposing Israel, demonizing the Jewish state for defending itself. This was a big wake up call to me that Israel was a perpetual target of a media which really should know better. After that, covering anti-Israel bias became a particular concern in my editing efforts, eventually even supporting the creation of a sub-blog at the publication we called “Right to Exist” which was edited by Seth Mandel, a deeply talented writer-editor who went on to edit Commentary and The New York Post before moving on to executive editor of The Washington Examiner. I’ll never forget meeting Seth at CPAC and watching in awe as he debated a Pat Buchanan fanatic passing out copies of Buchanan’s American Conservative and spouting typical anti-Israel rhetoric.

Losing My Friend and Mentor Barry Rubin in 2014

While I was editing NRB and discovering Israel advocacy, one author beyond all others presented the most enlightening and amazing writing on the Middle East: Barry Rubin, a scholar and blogger who had written or edited dozens of books. The man was amazingly prolific, writing so many blogs reporting on the controversies across the Middle East that it was nigh-impossible to keep up. And he completely transformed how I understood the Middle East. He was also a key influence inspiring me to part ways with NRB and FrontPageMag and join him at PJ Media where I became his editor, including editing his final blog posts before he died. You can read his archive here. The most important thing that I learned from Barry was the incredible complexity of the Middle East. He taught me to see each country in the Middle East as its own phenomenon and the broad variety of Islamist groups fighting in the region. Working with him I evolved so much in my understanding, coming to grasp the Middle East more as a scholar instead of an over-the-top polemicist blogger. He died from cancer in 2014 and I miss him so much. After he died even Benjamin Netanyahu took notice, writing a letter of condolence.

Encountering the Jew-Hating American Islamists Face-to-Face from 2016 through 2020

Inspired by Rubin’s association with the group and the organization’s anti-Trump position, in 2016 I decided to accept a job as coordinator of the Islamist Watch project at the Middle East Forum. I later shifted to the California correspondent to a local-focused program called the Counter-Islamist Grid (CIG) where I focused exclusively on Islamist activists and imams in Southern California. So for years it was my job to spend every day monitoring the activities of antisemitic extreme Muslims who were poisoning the broader Muslim community. I spent my days tracking them online and digging into their funding sources. As the correspondent for CIG I engaged in actual shoe leather journalism, attending multiple Islamist conferences, and banquets, and visiting their protests outside the Saudi Arabian consult to complain about the Muslim nation imprisoning their Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated clerics.

I’ll never forget one protest outside the consulate where I stumbled into an argument with the communications director of CAIR-Los Angeles. I refused to give him my name and he asked me why I was being so despicable. I answered, “Because you work for a despicable organization.” He asked why, and I responded, “Why do you think the United Arab Emirates labeled you guys a terrorist organization?” And he could only whimper, “We’re a 501©3 group.” He’s apparently no longer with the group - CAIR has a ridiculous turn-over in its positions, so I’m not at all surprised.

Losing My Friend and Mentor Jack Saltzberg in 2021

In 2018 I joined as the first employee for Jack Saltzberg’s activist organization The Israel Group. I had one task: to spend 20 hours a week helping Jack investigating the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish content infesting Wikipedia. I learned so much from Jack about Wikipedia, and about Israel more broadly. I considered him a good friend and someone who taught me so much - at least until January 2021. At that time, we got into a big fight about the new tactics he wanted to use to pursue Wikipedia, which no longer focused on the research and journalism to which I was devoted. We began to negotiate my separation from the organization - and then, in the middle of it all, he had a heart attack. I was so devastated. A part of me felt guilty that perhaps the stress of our separation may have contributed to his death. Having lost Jack, I now feel compelled to try and continue his work. He’s the one who really inspired me to become a Zionist activist.

The American Right Stabs Me in the Back Multiple Times from 2011-2021, Goes Fucking Insane Over Covid in 2021, and Starts Killing Its Most Devoted Members with Misinformation

This final point will really require a second post to unpack all its aspects fully, as it’s a fairly long and complicated story. But I’ll hit the highlights. From 2009 to 2021, I worked for four explicitly “conservative” organizations - FrontPage Magazine, PJ Media, the Middle East Forum, and Liberty Island Books. And at all four groups, I found myself personally betrayed and treated like shit by my bosses. Some of them still even owe me money, never paying me for the work I did for them, even after I uncovered exactly how much they should have paid me for the books I edited. Fuck all of them — you’re all evil, abusive bastards.

But they’re hardly the only ones in right-wing media who did deeply evil things which traumatized me. In August of 2021, my most loyal columnist at Liberty Island Books, Tamara Wilhite, a woman I regarded as a friend and whose science fiction books I planned to publish, died from Covid-19. As I investigated what had led to her death, I came to one devastating conclusion: she had been duped by her intense libertarian ideology, which had caused her to place unwarranted blind trust in her beloved right-wing media. Death by ideology. I felt I could no longer run a company called “Liberty Island” when my most devoted writer had died because she took “Liberty” to such a deadly extreme.

If that weren't disillusioning enough, I then discovered that, in fact, many of my right-wing colleagues were making the same mistake Tamara had made: putting their lives at risk, refusing to be vaccinated, for one far-right ideological reason or another. I began urgently posting on Facebook and arguing with people to try and debunk their misinformation. But my pain was not met with sympathy at all. Instead, I became the bad guy, accused of not respecting my friend’s “choice” to risk her life and leave her two children without a mother. Other right-wing authors blasted me for dishonoring Tamara’s memory, dismissing my denunciation of the ideology that killed her as “speaking ill of the dead.” Further statistics I discovered horrified me: only 5% of Democrats consuming mainstream media were vaccine deniers, while over 30% of Republicans consuming right-wing media were. Had I spent over a decade of my life supporting the creation of a media which made its most loyal adherents six times more likely to die from an entirely preventable disease? It drove me mad, especially once I came across this NPR article revealing that my beloved PJ Media was now hiding its most extreme Covid denialism behind a paywall to avoid fact checkers criticizing them:

Behind paywalls, some Salem Media commentators offer even more extreme takes. In July, PJ Media Editor Paula Bolyard warned readers that the critical reaction to the site's coverage of COVID-19, especially its caustic takes on public health officials, had taken a toll. And, Bolyard wrote, there was a reason she was asking readers to subscribe to get past the paywalls: She did not want to subject her site's most powerful posts to scrutiny.
"Regular readers of PJ Media know that much of our COVID-19 coverage has been behind a paywall, accessible only to our VIP subscribers," Bolyard wrote. "It's just not worth our time to have to deal with the fact-checkers, who have been working overtime to discredit us and damage our reputation."
Behind the paywalls for various Salem Media sites, writers and podcasters have blasted the use of masks and vaccines against COVID-19 and instead promoted discredited cures. Additionally, hosts unleash coarse rants against the media, and glory in their ability to evade not just fact-checkers but social media moderators. On repeated paywalled streaming videos, RedState's Scott Hounsell raises aloft a middle finger to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey.

Given all that had happened and what I’d discovered, I decided I could no longer in good conscience participate in any sort of “conservative” or right-wing media. It was time to chart a new path, and I felt God was now calling me to bring together Jews, Christians, Muslims, and my fellow mystics to do something much more meaningful. And so God of the Desert Books was born. I hope you’ll join me in this new effort to create books and other media which can bring people together instead of so cruelly dividing them for money and temporary political power.

Thank you, everyone, for your kindness, support, and understanding.