Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein

Thursday evening, a retired US Marine Corps Colonel approached me and asked if I had interviewed a soft-spoken professor. He had viewed a You tube video that had been sent to him from a Facebook page. I smiled and told him, that the person he referred to in YouTube video was Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein, a contributing editor and esteemed colleague at the New English Review. I also explained that Dr. Rubenstein is a noted Jewish theologian, an ordained Rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Rubenstein also holds a Master in Theology (S.T.M.) from Harvard Divinity School and was awarded a PhD from Harvard University in History and Philosophy of Religion. Further, he is a Lawton Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Florida State University where he taught for 25 years and is a President Emeritus and Life Trustee of Bridgeport University in Connecticut. I further explained to my friend that Dr. Rubenstein is the author of seminal works concerned with the aftermath of the holocaust, After Auschwitz; History, Theology and Contemporary Judaism, and history of surplus populations , The Cunning of History. Of increasing importance is Dr. Rubenstein’s, Jihad and Genocide that presents a stark warning to co-religionists and all Infidels of their fate under the Qur’anic doctrine and Islamic Shariah law. More about Dr. Rubenstein’s several careers, lengthy publications list and honorary degrees can be found here. Dr. Rubenstein recently celebrated his 91st birthday in January 2015. He lost his beloved wife and guiding light, Dr. Betty Rogers Rubenstein , after 47 years of marriage in 2013.

The video my friend referred to was one of a series of interviews we did at the 2010 NER Symposium with the able assistance of a team from The United West, J. Mark Campbell and Alan Kornman, fellow counter-jihad activists. Samples of their fine work during the 2010 NER Symposium can be found here. When the You Tube video of Dr. Rubenstein’s interview and provocative comments about President Obama were posted back in 2010, it literally went viral, reaching over a million hits within a few weeks.

My curiosity about my friend’s comments about Dr. Rubenstein’s 2010 interview prompted me to do a Google search. After finding the Facebook page he referred to I noted the tens of thousands of views it had recently received. Dr. Rubenstein’s comments about President Obama were prescient in retrospect when he first made them in 2010. They are relevant given the myopia on display by the National Security echelons in the Oval Office and the President’s recent press conference remarks. Criticism has arisen with the President’s referring in a Vox.com interview to “randomized attacks” against unidentified Jewish victims at a kosher supermarket in Paris. Then there is the public consternation over the lack of a strategy that begs the necessity of defining the nature of the threat to “degrade and defeat” the Islamic State that lies bestride war torn Syria and Iraq like a Jihadist colossus. An Islamic State that has attracted tens of thousands of foreign Jihadists flocking to its doctrinal cause of promoting the Salafist exemplar, the Prophet Mohammed of 14 Centuries ago. That is following the way of Allah, Jihad, seeking ultimate Islamic domination of the globe by slaughtering thousands of religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Buddhists as captives in the Middle East and attacking hapless victims in the West.

Watch Dr. Rubenstein’s prescient NER interview of 2010: