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Sunday, September 30, 2007
Life Above The Horizon Is Different
By Jim Belshaw
For the Journal
Life changes when you stand up to silhouette yourself against the horizon. Wave your arms and make noise and the change can become dramatic.
Anyone— politicians, football coaches, actors, judges— can expect to live life differently from those who remain below the horizon, quietly going about their business.
This horizon business is only one of the reasons that it is likely that e-mail sent to Mikey Weinstein is different from e-mail sent to you or me.
Here's one example, the writing style unedited (as others will be as well, except for length).
E-mail: "A jew lawyer, officer, and you call yourself a "serviceman" or, even more laghably, a soldier or fighting man? You, like your kind, are a pushy loudmouthed parasite. What jew would serve unselfishly? Answer is none."
Weinstein is an attorney, a graduate of the Air Force Academy (AFA), a legal staffer in the Reagan White House and the father of two sons who graduated from the AFA.
It was when his youngest son reported a steady diet of Christian evangelizing by Academy superiors that Weinstein went public and engaged the Academy in a long, bitter dispute.
"It was 44 months ago, the length of World War II," he said.
It's been more than a year since I last spoke to him. He had just come home from making speeches on both coasts and sitting for a long TV interview.
He's been doing this now for almost four years. He said he has no intention of slowing down, of living quietly below the horizon.
As a consequence, his inbox never lacks for reading material.
E-mail: "I am of italian and irish descent, and these are two nationalities that have died in waves for this country ... each of those two groups has spilled hundreds of gallons of their blood for every pint of jewish blood that has fallen for this country."
Weinstein said he gets a lot of that sort of thing, declarations of whose blood is better.
The intensity surprises him.
"It's odious," he said. "I didn't realize how much reason has gone out of the country. The monsters have come out."
E-mail: "You will not win, even with lies, and if you try to stick to the truth (not a jewish forte) you will lose badly."
E-mail: "We know you rats and you dont fool us. Mikey Weinstein looks like a (expletive) with ears."
He formed a nonprofit— the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He said about 50 people work for it now.
"We're not going to stop what we're doing," he said. "It was Arthur Ashe who said you reach a point in your life where going for it is more important than winning or losing."
E-mail: "How many socities in history have expelled jews? And, how was it again, it was not ever due to any misdeeds of the expelled parties?
"One other thing— how many jews have died in this latest war of ours? Any?
"P.S. Did you notice one other thing— I didn't resort to epithets or name calling ... "
Weinstein said if someone engages him on the merits of an argument, he's "the friendliest guy in the world" and willing to have a conversation.
If they don't, he punches back. His replies to the e-mails quoted here are not models of civility. He says punching back is the only way to confront a bully.
So four years into it, he doesn't think about quitting.
"I think it will be enough when we get the country to respecting the Constitution," he said. "At the end of the day, it's not a Christian-Jewish question. It's a Constitutional question.
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.