LAT: "The Valley's Not So Civil War" (RW Fresno)

[DBoon]

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-hubbard6feb05,1,7538078.story?coll=la-headlines-west

soon learned that the synagogue where my two sons had gone to preschool was exhibiting its own kind of madness. Temple Beth Israel hadn't been the same since 9/11. Not long after the attacks, the more ardent conservatives in the congregation began showing up in military fatigues to guard the front gates. Their suspicions made even the top choice to be the new rabbi look like a traitor. In a meeting with temple leaders, he was asked about peace in the Middle East and ventured the opinion that Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat were two peas in a pod. The rabbi returned to South Carolina, never to be heard from again.

...

The temple's loudest voices suddenly belonged to a committed band of Republicans led by Stuart Weil, a frog farmer who ran the local branch of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful Washington lobbying group known as AIPAC. I first spotted Weil on Blackstone and Shaw at a rally to reelect Bush, holding a sign that read "Liberate the People of Iraq." He was a 52-year-old man with braces on his teeth and a ponytail that hung down from a bald crown. The ponytail wasn't born of some midlife crisis. Like a religious man's yarmulke, it was there to remind him of a constant presence. In his case, that presence wasn't God but the Palestinian intifada, the never-ending assault of suicide bombings in Israel that had transformed his whole way of thinking.

A few days later, we stood inside a corrugated tin shed in the middle of a stretch of almond orchards and citrus groves where Weil tended to more than 1 million African dwarf frogs. He was a quirky mix of energies. He refused to talk about the methods he used to propagate more of the Congo species than any other breeder in the world—frogs destined for fish tanks across North America. Yet he had no problem discussing the various means by which he was mating evangelical Christians and Jews in the same united fight against Democrats and Muslims. Tapping into the valley's deep reservoir of Pentecostal churches, a legacy of the Dust Bowl migration, Weil made friends with preachers and ex-military men who were so passionate about Israel that they considered themselves part of an army of "Christian Zionists."

I didn't know such a legion existed until I turned the radio dial one evening to KMJ-AM and made the acquaintance of John Somerville. He was a retired Marine colonel who lived in the hills above Fresno and clung to a worldview that could not have been more straightforward had it come down from God himself, which of course he said it did. Nations that supported Israel received God's blessing. Nations that crossed Israel received God's curse. The least hint of wavering on the part of the U.S.—any pressure to remove Jews from their biblical West Bank lands or carve out a Palestinian state—would be met with a hurricane-like calamity.

While the article's intro seems to imply the lack of civility is mutual between right and left, what the article overwhelmingly demonstrates is unrelenting right-wing attacks against any dissent.

[seabeyond]

1. same madness after 9/11 in my kids private christian school

to watch it develop and peak in spring of 2004 was a huge lesson for me. gave me so much insite what was happening ot the country. pulled kids out after 6 years, in late nov 2004 because of the madness

[punpirate]

2. It's probably no accident that...

... Fresno is the home base of Free Republic.

Last time I was through there, it struck me as a very, very tense place (and that was a year before 9/11). I'd stopped at a motel for the night, went in and paid the bill and got room keys. I walked out to the car to get my bag and there was a police helicopter overhead--snapped on the night sun and didn't leave until I pulled out the car keys and waved them at the helicopter and then opened the car door.

[Le Taz Hot]

3. I knew it!

:argh:

LTH
Fresno

[Syncronaut Seven]

4. Many Christian churches have seen this scum float to the top.

Agressive members who bully the congregation. It's all part of the Nazi plan.

The only thing that pisses me off worse than anti-semites is zionists.

Two peas in a pod.