While watching the controversies surrounding Bob Sungenis unfold, I have repeatedly been struck by the parallels between his behavior and that of former President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. This comparison, of course, is hardly flattering to Bob. How serious, then, to find a self-proclaimed Catholic apologist behaving in ways that so closely parallel the behavior of such individuals. And yet, it is precisely for that reason that this essay is important, I think, for character is truly the issue. As there appear to be at least a few who sincerely do not understand the nature and seriousness of the problem in this regard, it seemed to me that the use of this analogy might help to make matters clearer for them.
I do not broach this topic lightly or flippantly. But the Catholic apologetics community and the public at large really does need to know who it is dealing with when a man claims so stridently to represent the Catholic Church and her teachings. This is particularly true in regard to an issue as sensitive as Catholic–Jewish relations and most especially when this sensitive issue has been treated with reckless disregard for the truth and basic standards of decent behavior.
For example, when the information broke out that the President had been having an immoral relationship with Monica Lewinsky (whom Sungenis claimed had been sent in by "the Jews" to bring down Clinton), the President's wife was quick to attach the blame, not to her husband whom she knew full well was a serial adulterer, but rather to a "vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president" (link). Bob Sungenis has been caught citing Nazis, repeatedly plagiarizing sources, issuing threats to former CAI associates and correspondents, publishing the most bigoted language against Jews, slandering Catholic converts from Judaism and his own bishop, and much more. But he's never truly taken responsibility for his own actions. Rather, he has chosen repeatedly to spin it all as a great conspiracy to destroy him:
as soon as I began to speak critically on Jewish issues and point out the severe lack of critical Catholic judgment on them, most of my former friends and colleagues have made it their determined goal to ostracize me from the Catholic community and precipitate my financial ruin, which is particularly disturbing because I have a wife and nine children to support. Every day [sic!] for the past five years I have experienced malicious character assassinations, half-truths, set ups, deceit, gossip, hatred and assortment of distortions of my life and work that I had hardly dreamed was possible. (The Old Covenant, Revoked or Not Revoked, footnote 1, pp 1-2)
In the very image of the Clintons, Bob just can't seem to imagine that anybody would respond vigorously when he does things such as: accusing Jews of promoting pedophilia and of being inherently violent, recruiting CAI patrons to try and "out" his opponents as closet Jews, or treating Jewish converts to Catholicism as malicious subversives, to name but a few examples. Rather, he conveniently concludes that it must be everybody else's malicious nature that would cause them to respond negatively to his words and actions. Similarly, like the Clintons, he and his supporters can't seem to grasp the distinction between the immoral actions of an unjust aggressor and the moral actions of those who seek to defend the targets of that aggression.
Another common feature of the Clintons is their blatant double standards. For example, when radio shock jock Don Imus used the word "ho's" to refer to members of the Rutger's University womens' basketball team, Senator Hillary Clinton personally sent an e-mail to her supporters denouncing Imus for his "small-minded bigotry and coarse sexism." But Clinton had no problem accepting $800,000 in campaign contributions from rapper Timbaland, whose lyrics are replete with the word "ho" (link).
And with Bob Sungenis, as with the Clintons, double standards are legion. For example, while claiming to be a Catholic apologist par excellence, Bob has repeatedly adopted non-Catholic methods of argumentation and evaluation of evidence in order to deny the powerful Catholic consensus that there will be a future special conversion of Jews to Christ (see numerous examples in The Ongoing Role of the Jews in Salvation History.)
In his piece "My Ph.D. from Calamus International University" Bob sneeringly denigrated the credentials of Jacob Michael, while at the very time employing Ben Douglass—whose credentials are essentially identical to Michaels'—as Senior VP of Apologetics at CAI (see Just What the Doctor Ordered?).
Sungenis was livid when Michael Forrest went public with www.sungenisandthejews.com (after numerous attempts to remonstrate with Bob privately), blustering that, "The least you could have done with something this serious is allow me to give the other side of the story along side of yours so that the viewing public could judge for themselves" ("Michael Forrest and the Jews"). But as was pointed out in Comments on a Controversy, Sungenis never once contacted such individuals as David Moss, Roy Schoeman, and now his own ordinary, Bishop Rhoades, in order to accurately ascertain their beliefs before publicly charging them with the most extreme deviations from the Catholic faith.
Sungenis was equally livid when former colleagues were compelled by justice to make certain e-mails public in order to defend various individuals from false charges. But at the same time, Sungenis himself has been perfectly willing to utilize private e-mails. However, he did so not to defend anyone from injustice, but simply to embarrass and cajole his opponents (see An Update on the Negotiations).
For many more examples see also "More Double Standards" in Sources, Schoeman, and the Credibility of Bob Sungenis, "Double Standards Abound" in David Palm's Defense of Michael Forrest and the examples in Just What the Doctor Ordered?.
Another tendency the Clintons have is to engage in provocative behavior only to then accuse their opponent of doing the very thing they have done. Recently, for example, in order to try and blunt a win for Barack Obama in South Carolina, Bill Clinton injected racial issues into the Clinton/Obama contest in a number of stump speeches. When Obama finally was forced to respond, the Clinton campaign turned around and blamed Obama for...you guessed it...introducing race into the contest. As the New York Times reported:
Former President Bill Clinton defended himself Wednesday against accusations that he and his wife had injected the issue of race into the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina, and he accused Senator Barack Obama of Illinois of putting out a "hit job" on him (link).
Again, the parallels to Bob's behavior are remarkable. Back when this controversy had been newly ignited by the publication of www.sungenisandthejews.com, Bob insisted that his wife was an independent witness to a critical phone conversation that he had had with Michael Forrest:
Oh sure. I'm just making all this up about Mr. Forrest having another gig opportunity in 2005! Where would I ever get the notion that Mr. Forrest had an upcoming gig and that his promoter was looking at our website, if not from Mr. Forrest?? My wife was a witness to this whole series of events, and she can't believe that Mr. Forrest is now denying this! Sure, Mr. Forrest quit his band in 2004, but what does that have to do with Mr. Forrest seeking a solo gig at a new concert in 2005?? (Sungenis, Michael Forrest and the Jews; my emphasis).
And in another place Bob even denigrated his own recollection of the events, thus magnifying the importance of his wife's allegedly independent testimony:
But regardless of our respective views on who left and who got fired, the thing that bothers me the most is HOW this all came about. Whether Mr. Forrest left or I fired him is nothing compared to the absolute betrayal I endured under Mr. Forrest's hand because of his sudden actions against me. I have forgotten many of the details of the events that transpired, but my wife was also a witness to these events, and she has a memory like an elephant. She also knows the great pain I went through when Mr. Forrest decided to betray me so suddenly. (Question 50, November 2006; my emphasis)
So he admitted that his own memory is faulty—although this never stopped him from making the most outlandish charges against Forrest with absolute certitude—but backed up his own deficiencies by resorting to his wife's memory. The obvious problem is that his wife simply does not have any independent access to the facts—she was not an eyewitness at all, but got the details of Bob's conversations with Michael Forrest from Bob himself. Here's how I presented this in my essay Sources, Schoeman, and Sungenis:
This hasn't stopped [Sungenis] from continuing to insist that Forrest is lying (most recently in a private email to me of January 20, 2007: "As the record stands, not only was Mr. Forrest going to play music at this speaking engagement, he was in the process of trying to get even more opportunities to speak and play his music. That's what he told me on the phone ... Ask him. If he denies it, he's a liar."). In the same Q & A in which he admits his own lapse of memory he brings his wife into the fray: "my wife was also a witness to these events, and she has a memory like an elephant" (ibid.).
I considered it highly unlikely that Mrs. Sungenis actually heard the phone conversation of on or around 1 March 2005; at the very least, if she had, one would have expected her to use her elephantine memory to help Bob avoid making repeated mistakes of established fact during this controversy: No Bob, there was no music gig. No Bob, there was no concert promoter. No Bob, Michael doesn't play the guitar. No Bob, Michael never said anything about his promoter being worried about CAI. Etc.
I asked for clarification of this point. Bob answered that, "My conversations on the phone are often held on speaker-phone, and my wife, since she works for CAI as a secretary and bookkeeper, is often listening to my conversations, whether by happenstance or deliberately" (private e-mail of January 20, 2007). But Bob sidesteps the crucial question: did his wife hear the specific conversation in question, in which Forrest presented to Bob his reasons for leaving CAI? Forrest, well acquainted with speaker-phones in his line of business, is quite certain that this conversation was not held on a speaker-phone and anybody who has carried on such a conversation knows that one can tell if the other party is using such a device.
But even if Mrs. Sungenis was privy to this conversation between Michael and Bob, she gave Forrest no indication that she was listening in, which is clearly an ethical breach of privacy and not at all praiseworthy. For my part, I do not believe that she was eavesdropping and thus she is in no position to be an independent witness to these matters.
As such, it seems more likely that Bob's wife parroted back to him the same distorted characterization of events he undoubtedly shared with her after his conversation with Forrest in the first place. If this counts as an "eye witness" then Mr. Michael would certainly be a credible "eye witness," since he too was in conversation with Michael Forrest both before and during Forrest's departure from CAI, and has seen both sides of the email correspondence. The obvious difference in terms of objectivity is that neither I nor Jacob Michael are married to Forrest (Sources, Schoeman, and Sungenis).
That's it. Bob brought his wife into the argument, claiming that she was an independent witness to a conversation between him and Michael Forrest. I questioned that claim and gave my reasons for so doing. How did Bob proceed to spin this? It's easy to figure it out—just ask yourself, What Would Bill Do? That's right. After bringing his own wife into the controversy and then dodging pointed questions about whether she really was an independent eyewitness to the events in question, Bob followed up—in another rant reminiscent of Bill's "hit job"and Hillary's "vast right-wing conspiracy"—by claiming, not just that we had introduced his wife into the controversy, but that we had "attacked" her:
I have been on the forefront of Catholic apologetics exposing the errors and agenda of these Jewish racists for the last five years. You can imagine what they have tired [sic] to do to me. Relentless attacks on my personal life, my academic life, my theological and biblical knowledge, my apostolate, even my wife and children ("Catholics Falling for Jewish Errors").
This is vintage Clinton...or Sungenis. But the bottom line is that we now know for certain that Bob was lying about his wife having independent access to information about Forrest, because we found where Bob himself had accidentally admitted that he gave her the details of his interactions with Forrest. Here's how it was reported at this blog:
Of course, while we're at it, let us not forget one of the more blatant personal lies Sungenis has told about his dealings with Michael Forrest. He has been absolutely adamant that his wife was an "eyewitness" to his phone conversation with Forrest before Forrest quit:
Sungenis: "Mr. Forrest yelled to me on the phone that I was an anti-semite…My wife was a witness to the whole fiasco. No one else was an eyewitness…" (Christopher Blosser and the Catholic ADL, page 3)
and in attempting to prove to David Palm that his wife actually heard his conversation with Forrest, Sungenis wrote:
Sungenis: "My conversations on the phone are often held on speaker-phone, and my wife, since she works for CAI as a secretary and bookkeeper, is often listening to my conversations, whether by happenstance or deliberately." (e-mail of January 20, 2007)
Apparently, either his mother never warned him about telling lies and the need for a good memory or he forgot her advice. Read on from October 2006, when he at least told the truth about the source of his wife's account:
Sungenis: "Mr. Forrest never denied to me that he had a gig or a promoter for the gig around the beginning of 2005. He told me these things on the phone, and my wife remembers it because I told her about the whole conversation." (JMATJ, p. 54, emphasis added)
(More Notable Quotes From Sungenis)
Another example of this propensity to accuse his opponents of the very thing he just did himself occurred back in the spring of 2007. Bob managed to coerce a CAI patron named Bill to approach Jacob Michael under cover of anonymity, to ask Jacob if he had Jewish ancestry. Frankly, this can only be viewed as the product of an extremely paranoid mind—accusing your opponents of being closet Jews is also a move right out of the Nazi play book. As an aside, the whole thing starts to take on the character of a Monty Python sketch when one finds Fr. Nicolas Gruner accusing E. Michael Jones (Sungenis' mentor and ally on "Jewish issues"), who has his own problems with anti-Semitic rhetoric, of being a closet Jew:
For his part, Father Nicholas Gruner, defender of the secrets of Fatima—and someone frequently taken to task by Fidelity for his obsession with alleged marian messages—shows his colors when he tells Cuneo that "Jones is secretly a Jew. He's a Marrano, planted in the American Church to confuse Catholics and sow hatred against people like myself. I think most of us have figured that out by now" (The Smoke of Satan, First Things, Dec 1997).
This is all the more remarkable when we consider a satire written about Sungenis entitled, “The Zionist Conspiracy Deepens” in which life comes amazingly close to imitating art; in this satire an even-more-paranoid anti-Semite ends up accusing Sungenis, who is referred to as "Robert Hanswurst", of being a closet Zionist:
The reality is, this man, who once fearlessly investigated and exposed Zionist conspiracies and plots across the globe by means of such ironclad proof as: Pope Paul VI wearing a Jewish ephod, FDR’s likely Jewish ancestry and Pope John Paul II’s secret love of bagels, is a Zionist himself...
Who else but Hanswurst is going after the Jews with such sustained intensity and notoriety? Who else but Hanswurst has even managed to elicit sympathy from our ally Louis Farrakhan toward the Jews by his constant, ferocious attacks (“Those poor Jews!” Louis Farrakhan, August 2005)? Who else but Hanswurst has clandestinely tipped the enemy off as to our real views and aims by incredibly damaging “accidents”? The truth is there for the objective to see: Hanswurst is using the same tactics he proved that the Jews used back in the days of the Holocaust: fomenting intense global distrust of and anger against the Jews with the underlying intent of eliciting sympathy which in turn will facilitate the spread of Zionism. The conclusion is thus inescapable: Hanswurst is a Zionist.
To reiterate, my intention here is not to ridicule Bob Sungenis. But perhaps a little humor is appropriate in the face of men whose paranoia is such that every adversary is suspected of being a closet Jew, while at the same time they claim vociferously not to be anti-Semitic.
Returning to the issue at hand, when Jacob uncovered the "plot" to "out" him as a Jew, he and Bill had a private heart-to-heart conversation (via e-mail) about the things Bob had been saying and doing for the past 5 years. Unfortunately, Bill sent this private correspondence to Bob. And what did Bob do? He published it on his web site, tagged with his own rebuttal. Now let's be clear. Jacob Michael did not publicize this information, Bob did. He put Jacob's accusations of anti-Semitism, made in private, in a public place where all of his readers could see them, and then proceeded to challenge Jacob, publicly, to provide the documented proof.
And so Jacob did just that - in the RSATJ post Sixteen Proofs of Sungenis's Antisemitism. At this point, Bob (again) went ballistic and (again) threatened to sue Jacob for libel.
So, let's review. Bob sent Bill to "uncover" Jacob Michael's alleged Jewish ancestry; then Bob published Jacob's private correspondence with Bill on his website; he then went on to publicly demand that Jacob prove his charges; and then he became irate and started threatening a lawsuit when Jacob did precisely what Bob demanded (providing proof). This is right out of the Clinton bag of tricks.
Another obvious parallel between Clinton and Sungenis is the amazing plasticity words have when either man needs to wiggle out of a sticky situation. When it was convenient for him, former President Clinton suddenly had difficulty remembering the basic definitions of salient words like "is" and "sex". Similarly, when it is convenient for him, Bob Sungenis has difficulty locating the dictionary definition for salient words like "anti-Semitism", "plagiarism", "vigilante", "calumny", "libel", "disavow" and even well-defined Catholic words such as "Judaizer". Perhaps even more clintonian is the fact that he accused his opponents of not defining their terms or of adopting false definitions. See Sungenis's Definition Difficulties and More Definition Difficulties.
Again, the purpose of documenting these parallels to the Clintons is not to ridicule Bob Sungenis. Rather, it is to help people more easily understand the nature of some serious character deficiencies that have resulted in some very serious injustices against both individuals and groups. Hopefully such an analysis can serve both as a warning to the Catholic apologetics community at large and also as a mirror for Bob himself, so that he might eventually come to the realization of how badly he has been behaving and amend his ways.
The bottom line is that when one presumes to lead others, whether as president of the United States or president of a purportedly Catholic apostolate, trustworthiness is absolutely vital. It really is character that counts most.
David Palm
