c. 2004 Religion News Service
Religious Groups Say Attack on Gallup is Attack on Faith
(RNS) Some religious groups are crying foul over a liberal advocacy group’s attempt to make an issue about the faith of pollster George Gallup Jr.
MoveOn.org went after Gallup in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Tuesday (Sept. 28) in which it criticized the pollster’s methodology in surveys that showed President Bush leading Democratic challenger John Kerry.
The ad ended with a reference to Gallup’s faith.
“Gallup, who is a devout evangelical Christian, has been quoted as calling his polling a `kind of ministry,’ ” the ad said. “And a few months ago, he said `the most profound purpose of polls is to see how people are responding to God.’
“We thought the purpose is to faithfully and factually report public opinion.”
Gallup, 74, and recently retired from the Gallup Organization, made some of those comments in a Religion News Service article.
Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, decried MoveOn.org’s approach.
“It’s one thing to challenge methodology and credibility,” said Foxman in an interview with The New York Sun. “It’s another thing to say that the methodology and credibility are motivated by faith. … What if the poll was headed by a devout Jew. How would we have felt.?”
The New York City-based Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights was also offended.
“The implication is that if you take your religion seriously, you can’t be objective,” said Catholic League president William Donohue. “To bring in a man’s religion and basically suppose, `It’s those Christians again, misleading the public.”
He later added, “I thought it was despicable.”
Raymond Flynn, former Democratic mayor of Boston, said he sees the ad as part of a dangerous trend.
“There’s really a growing, blatant, anti-religious sentiment in the United States,” said Flynn, national director of Catholic Citizenship, a voter registration organization. “I think it makes it dangerous because then we can dismiss somebody on the basis of their religion for having a narrow, uneducated point of view.”
Officials at MoveOn.org did not respond to a request from Religion News Service for an interview.
Gallup retired from polling in May of this year and remains active in the organization’s outreach efforts. Prior to his retirement, he spent five decades writing survey questions on a range of topics, including private religious beliefs and political attitudes.
In an interview with The New York Sun, Gallup shrugged off the criticism.
“I wasn’t angered,” Gallup said. “I’ve been polling for 50 years. Particularly at election time, people get very uptight and start throwing brickbats.”
He dismissed the idea that he would skew a poll.
“One, it’s dishonest,” said Gallup. “Two, that would be absurd. It would make you look terrible, for the company and everything. That’s off the wall, totally off the wall.”
Anti-Defamation League Warns of Neo-Nazi Marketing to Teens
(RNS) The Anti-Defamation League is warning school officials nationwide about a fall marketing campaign by neo-Nazi groups planning to distribute about 100,000 free CD music samplers containing anti-Semitic and racist songs.
The target audience is expected to be middle school and high school students, said the league, based in New York City.
“This is the first broad-scale distribution that we’re aware of,” said Daniel Alter, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director for civil rights.
The CD will include obscure bands playing songs with titles such as, “White Supremacy,” “The Nationalist,” “White Kids,” “Teutonic Uprise” and “Hate Train Rolling.”
The ADL said the marketing campaign is called “Operation Schoolyard USA,” with key organizers including Panzerfaust Records, a music company based in Newport, Minn. A company spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Alter said Panzerfaust’s Web site apparently toned down the CD’s online images to make it more appealing to potential teenage consumers. “They specifically said (online) that they intended to keep a low profile,” he said.
The ADL issued a bulletin this week to educators about the free CDs and contacted the National Middle School Association, the American Association of School Administrators, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National School Boards Association.
“Panzerfaust hopes to use the hard-driving music to recruit youth to its racist and anti-Semitic ideology,” the ADL bulletin said.
Aditionally, the ADL’s 30 regional offices are contacting local school officials about the marketing campaign, which Alter said will rely on the CDs being distributed by local hate groups.
Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL’s national director, said in a statement that the marketing of neo-Nazi music shows that hate groups, “are finding ways to repackage their old-fashioned hatred and anti-Semitism into new, more deceptively attractive forms that can appeal to a younger audience.”
_ David Finnigan
National Jewish Book Award Recipients Announced
(RNS) A sweeping history of Jewish life in the United States took the top honor among the National Jewish Book Award winners, which were announced Tuesday (Sept. 28).
Since 1948, the National Jewish Book Award has presented what is considered the most prestigious prizes of the Jewish book world. The prizes are awarded by the Jewish Book Council.
The winner of the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award was “American Judaism” (Yale University Press), written by Brandeis University professor Jonathan Sarna.
The book traces Judaism in America from colonial days through the present,exhaustively exploring virtually every movement, subculture and trend that has shaped the religion.
Awards were also given in other categories, including “contemporary Jewish life and practices,” “Holocaust,” “visual arts” and “children and young adult literature.”
Winning books covered a panoply of issues and topics, from the visually impressive “Diaspora: Homelands in Exile” by Frederic Brenner (HarperCollins) to the modern Jewish thought and experience winner, Daniel C. Matt’s new edition of the Jewish mystical text, “The Zohar: Pritzker edition, Vol. 1” (Stanford University Press).
The collection “I am Jewish” (Jewish Lights) was honored in the anthologies and collections category. Edited by Ruth and Judea Pearl, the parents of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the book explores different interpretations of their son’s much-quoted last words.
The awards will be presented at a dinner in December at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Quote of the Day: Radio Host Dennis Prager
(RNS) “There are no boundaries to evil today that tended to exist in the past. Terror in the past, for example, they wouldn’t kill kids. There were rules. … But this is the century now of religious evil. We had the century of secular evil in the 20th century.”
Syndicated radio host Dennis Prager, a co-author of best sellers on Judaism, speaking Wednesday (Sept. 29) on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
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