It is well known that evil thrives and flourishes when good people do nothing to stop it. Boston Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life’s (COEJL’s) citation of MoveOn.org and Al Gore in promoting the Live Earth event shows how scams, frauds, and exploitation thrive when no one speaks out against them. It is obvious that well-meaning Jewish progressive organizations have not learned about MoveOn.org’s official promotion of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian positions, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic hate speech at its disgraced Action Forum. It is also clear that Al Gore is doing quite well in his occupation as what medieval people would have called a pardoner or indulgence seller, and whom nineteenth-century Americans would have ridden out of town on a rail.

Here is the meeting announcement in question.

Boston COEJL (Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, coejl.org) is sponsoring a “Party for the Planet”/Live Earth concert viewing on a giant-screen TV for the Jewish community and guests from 7-11 p.m. at Tifereth Israel, 539 Salem St., Malden (off Rt. 60, near Rts. 1 and 93). MoveOn.org and former Vice President Al Gore are urging Americans to hold “Parties for the Planet” on this date to watch the “Live Earth” concert and listen to special remarks from Gore.

Let’s begin with the Live Earth event itself, which appears to be advertising for Royal Phillips Electronics. Phillips is agitating for legislation to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs, which probably has something to do with its commercial interest in compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). We have nothing against energy efficiency, and we have in fact tried CFLs ourselves to reduce our electric bill. Our experience is that even the full-spectrum ones are suitable for incidental lighting, but not for reading or computer work. If they were, Phillips would not need legislation to ban competing products, because incandescent bulbs would no longer be competitive. This tells us everything we need to know about Phillips’ motives, and its ability to design a CFL that will sell itself.

For those who are scientifically-inclined, here is the formula for Net Present Value (NPV).

P = current outlay, in this case the cost of the CFL
A = annual return, i.e. the value of the electricity saved by the CFL
i = your required rate of return on your money
N = life of the investment, i.e. the CFL

Now, suppose a CFL saves $40 over a ten-year life span ($4/year)–and we have seen them touted as saving this much or more. The present value of that CFL, i.e. what we should be willing to pay, is $20.08 if we can earn 15% on our money–which happens only when the stock market is doing very well. In fact, the savings from a CFL are after-tax money, and this makes them even more attractive. Most CFLs sell for far less, so this seems like a no-brainer investment. However, if the light from the CFL is unfriendly to the human eye, we are not going to buy it at all. Philips should be focusing on making an eye-friendly CFL instead of asking for legislation to ban incandescent bulbs.

Our perception is therefore that Live Earth is a propaganda event whose purpose is to encourage legislation to ban incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFLs. This is entirely consistent with the Climate Action Partnership (CAP, aka Climate Action Profiteers) that wants legislation to force consumers and businesses to buy its members’ “green” products. Under color of “saving the planet from global warming,” CAP’s members are agitating for entirely self-serving legislation with which to enrich their bottom lines. We are, incidentally, speaking from the perspective of someone who has published books and articles that contend that compliance with the ISO 14000 environmental system standard should not only be free but profitable. This is because designing processes to minimize waste (like metal shavings and cutting fluids) reduces the cost of the wasted materials, and also the cost of disposing of them. Last night, we E-mailed a local wind farm information on contra-rotating propellers and turbines, of the kind that originated with torpedo screws. (If there is only one propeller, the torque will turn the torpedo and waste considerable energy on water friction. Similarly, the torque on a single windmill is wasted energy.) It seems that a California wind power group is already doing this, and we would be delighted if the local wind farm can use the idea to make its energy cheaper and therefore more competitive.* Bottom line: if you want to “save the planet,” develop green products and green energy sources that are competitive with fossil fuel power, and stop agitating for self-serving legislation to force people to use uncompetitive ones.

On the other hand, even Chemical & Engineering News‘ Bette Hileman, an advocate of greenhouse gas regulations, has compared carbon offset trading to the medieval practice of selling indulgences for sins. Al Gore, whose house uses more energy in a month than most people’s homes use in a year, buys these indulgences from a company of which he is chairman. He also has an interest in a very environment-unfriendly zinc mine, so we must conclude that his sole interest in “saving the planet” is to rake in royalties from “Earth in the Balance” and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The following quotes, meanwhile, speak for themselves as far as Al Gore’s character and integrity are concerned.

Albert Gore, 16 December 1998: “If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He’s already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people.”

Albert Gore, February 2004, regarding George Bush: “He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place.”

We savvy. When Bill Clinton was thinking of bombing Iraq, Saddam Hussein “used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors” and “has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people.” When George Bush removed Saddam Hussein, however, “He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place.” Albert Gore has no character, no ethics, and no integrity whatsoever. He is a self-serving fraud, a liar, and a hypocrite. He was probably a carpetbagging snake oil salesman in his last incarnation, and a medieval indulgence seller in the one before that. Boston Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life may want to realize that plenty of anti-Semites are calling the Iraq war a “war for Israel,” and that assorted “Zionists” and even “Jews” cooperated with the Bush Administration to “play on our fears and take America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops. This brings us to our next subject: MoveOn.org as an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-Catholic hate organization.

Here are but a few examples of the racist and anti-Semitic hate speech that MoveOn.org knowingly and willfully welcomed at its now-disgraced Action Forum:

* 10 out of 13 MoveOn.org Action Forum members voted to agree that the Talmud is a “hateful scripture” and Israel is run by “Judeo-Nazis.” That is, of the 13 people who voted, 10 agreed with it and only 3 found it repugnant. The statement also included an actual blood libel of Jews: ” In this text, Jews are commanded to slaughter non-Jews who are viewed more or less as animals or at least lesser human beings.”
* 12 out of 15 voted in favor of a racist statement that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are “house slaves.”
* 13 out of 16 voted to agree that “Zionism is Racism.”
* 12 out of 14 agreed that “Removing all Israeli obsessed Jews from congress would stop a lot of killing.” (Note that the Jews in question are mostly liberal Democrats!)

This hate speech did not take place in a vacuum. It may well have been encouraged by official MoveOn.org bulletins and cartoons that promote hatred and contempt for Israel, Jews, and Catholics.

http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/bulletin13.html#8 is still online

This essay describes many of the familiar neo-conservatives as having “dual loyalties,” making policy decisions in the interests of the State of Israel as much as the United States.” The source (Kathleen and Bill Christison) is highly anti-Semitic.

THIS IS THE ARTICLE THAT NOAH T. WINER IS CITING. It talks openly of “Jews with divided loyalties.”

“We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives’ agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being “Israeli-occupied territory.”

“Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties-the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel’s safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.”

“…(We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term in the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should be identical and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to the United States. But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the subject of dual loyalties arises.)”

It therefore comes as little surprise when we see the following comments on MoveOn’s Action Forum:

Congressman Tom Lantos told PM Olmert of Israel that he wants to freeze the $ 230 million U.S. aid package to Lebanon. Lantos is the ranking democrat on the House Foreign Relations Comte. Lantos said, “The [Lebanese] aid package should be witheld until the Lebanese government displays responsibility”. Responsibility ? Israel is guilty of war crimes in their cowardely attack on Lebanon and the whining, arrogant Jew wants Lebanon to demonstrate responsibility ! This is another example of how many Jews/Zioniosts in our Congress use the U.S. for their own greedy purposes. DUMP ISRAEL.

Here is yet another Noah T. Winer bulletin.

MoveOn Bulletin
Friday, June 20, 2003
Noah T. Winer, Editor
noah.winer moveon.org

Subscribe online at:
http://www.moveon.org/ moveonbulletin/

…INTRODUCTION: WHERE DOES THE ROAD MAP LEAD?
In July, 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak broke off talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat at the Camp David summit hosted by U.S. President Bill Clinton. That September, Ariel Sharon, chairman of the Likud party, made a provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Control over this holy site for both Muslims and Jews is contested by Palestinians and Israelis. The visit implied Israeli sovereignty over all Jerusalem, the eastern portion of which is considered occupied territory by the international community. So began the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising.

As in the first intifada in the late 1980s, the demand is for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem — which has persisted since 1967 — and acknowledgment of the Palestinian refugees right to return to the villages from which they were forced to leave during the 1948 war that established the State of Israel. In the 33 months since, human death has saturated the region: 816 Israelis and 2,384 Palestinians have been killed.

…From The Nation:
“For in failing to focus on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, about to enter its 37th year, and on Israeli settlements, which underpin that occupation, the Road Map misses an opportunity to end this conflict. Instead, it concentrates on Palestinian violence and how to combat it — as if it came out of nowhere, and as if, were it to be halted, the situation of occupation and settlement would be normal.”
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030609&s=khalidi

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FACTS ON THE GROUND: TERRORISM
Human Rights Watch condemns suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/isrl-pa/ [This seems to be the only real criticism of Palestinians in the whole bulletin.]

Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, on the Rantisi assassination attempt.
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article254.html

…From The Nation:
“A recent poll by Israel’s Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies shows that 56 percent of Israelis — up from 48 percent last year – would ’support a unilateral withdrawal from the territories in the context of a peace accord, even if that meant ceding all settlements.’ Here is the signpost for a realistic road map that could be charted by the Bush Administration.”
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=carey

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FACTS ON THE GROUND: THE SEPARATION WALL
Gush Shalom reports that the separation wall Israel is constructing in the West Bank is not at all along the internationally recognized 1967 “green line” border. The wall, officially being built for security, annexes illegal settlements into Israel.
http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/

A troubling report on the 25-foot tall separation wall from Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot describes how the system of barbed concrete walls and armed watchtowers will imprison hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without access to their agricultural lands.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1546.shtml

The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment on legal efforts to block the wall.
http://www.lawsociety.org/Press/Preleases/2002/oct/oct15e.html

Right: Gush Shalom (aka Jews for Jihad), Electronic Intifada, Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment… We savvy, Mr. Winer. We savvy real good. Meanwhile, we doubt that the Action Forum’s vicious attacks on Catholics took place in a vacuum either, given MoveOn’s official position on Catholics:

It therefore comes as no surprise whatsoever that eight out of nine MoveOn people who read the following material on the Action Forum voted to agree with it.

By continuing the attack on the GOP’s culture of corruption with a call to arrest the Catholic pedophiles of America, we have the ability to break up the perverts and criminals running the country today. WE know there are hundreds of thousands of pedophiles created by the Catholic church’s shuffling them around since 1950. WE know most of these people went on to higher education. By pushing for a complete outing of the 12,000 pedophiles they’ve admitted to so far we can put incredible pressure on any politicians who might be part of the cult. How many DeLay types want their constituents to find out that they’ve taken advantage of the teenage sex trade of the Marianas islands? … But until the priests are hounded down and arrested like the baby rapers they are, the neverending cycle will continue. You want to throw a monkey wrench in both political parties? Call for the arrest and immediate incarceration of the Catholic Pedophiles of America.

Boston Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life: Are you going to continue to stand with an organization that not only promotes anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate speech, but the above kind of hate speech directed at yet another religious faith? Is this something Jewish progressives are prepared to tolerate, condone, and support?

* Nothing in this opinion piece constitutes “engineering advice”