Kesher Talk: 05/19/2002

Friday, May 24, 2002

American Jew with blind hopes of World Cup glory: JTA profiles American Jewish soccer player Jeff Agoos, who plays for the San Jose Earthquake (Major League Soccer). Agoos, 34, was the last player cut from the 1994 team, and though he was on the squad in 1998 when they went out in the opening round, he did not get to play. He's on the roster this year, and has high hopes for playing -- and winning. (Yeah, right)

Thursday, May 23, 2002

Shameless Self-Promotion: My newest Forward article is online. It's probably my best so far, if I do say so myself, and as a bonus I get to make fun of Yankee fans. Check it out, and leave your comments below.

COMMENTS:

#1. May 23 2002, 08:33 pm

Rami: Maybe I missed it, but do you mind putting in a little capsule biography including a hint of which generation you are. You know, like "About Rami" on the side. I get that you're frum, although I don't know which frum-- Young Israel, per chance? No, that's not necessary to include. I'll just guess. Thanks a lot.

jardinblu

#2. May 23 2002, 11:50 pm

I read the essay, Rami. And it was good. I especially enjoyed the "yamaha." I don't follow sports at all. And for me the Jewish baseball issue is frozen for all time with Sandy Kofax. Having said that, I think you have a well-developed and genteel sense of the double identity phenomenon here in America which is true for you. But it may not be as pleasant for others.

jardinblu

#3. May 24 2002, 01:27 pm

"But that an American-born Orthodox Jew and a man who until months before lived in a Muslim village with no running water can be joined in a mutual dislike for the Yankees, it is surely a thing of beauty. "

I guess you are not aware of how condenscending that sounds. How do you know he was from a Muslim village without running water ? He may certainly have come from the capital of Senegal: Dakar. The contrast between you and him could have been written about with more finesse.

André P. (from Canada)

Saudi Ad Campaign a Dismal Failure: The advertizing campaign sponsored by Saudi Arabia which tried to explain to all of us ignorant Americans what wonderful friends of ours they really are, has failed miserably.

A new poll released by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates (their web page does not have the info, I received it by e-mail) looks at American opinion on several topics.

When asked the question, "In your opinion, which country is the United States' best or greatest ally in the Middle East," 33 percent said Israel. The next most popular answer was Saudi Arabia, but this was no great coup at 8 percent.

When respondents were asked about different countries, and whether their views of them were favorable or unfavorable, Saudi Arabia had 32 percent favorable and 49 percent unfavorable.

(For you Anglospherists, Great Britain was 86 percent favorable and only 4 percent unfavorable. Presumably those people are still sore about the War of 1812.)

"Now, since the terror attacks of September 11, has your opinion of Saudi Arabia gotten more favorable, less favorable or stayed about the same?" Saudi Arabia got a whopping negative 36 percent net favorability on this question (out-paced only by Iraq and Afghanistan).

"Recently the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been airing TV commercials in the U.S. I'd like to read you what some have said about airing these ads and ask which you agree with most?"

53 percent agreed with "Saudi Arabia is just trying to capitalize on the events of September 11th and promote their country to Americans during this difficult time."

Only 21 percent credulously believed that "Saudi Arabia is being sincere and showing their support of Americans in this difficult time."

7 percent favored neither option

18 percent did not know or refused to answer

The final fun in this poll comes at the end, where respondents were asked, "If you knew each of the following were true, please tell me whether it would make you MORE favorable or LESS favorable to Saudi Arabia? If it wouldn't affect your opinion either way, just say so."

67 percent were made less favorable when told that "13 of the 19 terrorist hijackers from September 11th were from Saudi Arabia"

62 percent were made less favorable when informed that "Saudi Arabia has paid millions of dollars to the families of suicide bombers in the Middle East"

And 55 percent were made less favorable when the pollsters mentioned that "Some news reports have suggested that Saudi Arabia is using American dependence on their oil supply as a way to change our country's policies in the Middle East."

"It's rare to see any group fail so dramatically like this. The Saudi campaign is well organized, well funded, and yet extremely wasteful. Clearly, Americans are not buying what they are selling. In fact, their advertizing is twice as likely to backfire than to help their cause," said Michael Cohen, VP for Public Affairs, upon the release of his firm's poll. He went on to make a bad joke about the Beatles' song "Can't Buy Me Love."

[the telephone poll hit 1200 random sample respondents over a 2 day period, with a margin of error of +/- 2.9 percent, and was conducted by Western Wats of Provo, UT]

You almost have to feel sad for them! The Saudis have spent at least $3.8 million on this campaign so far. Their ads were sickening, but to the uninformed I'm sure they looked almost appealing.

They've set aside about 10 milllion dollars overall for the campaign, but as far as I know, no national cable network has yet agreed to run the Saud Arabian ads.

Pardon my Nelson, but "Ha, Ha!"

UPDATE: From Slate's Diary (inside On the Media):

This Wednesday starts with one of those interviews, with the head of the PR firm that's been hired by the Saudi government to upgrade its American image. The interviewee has canceled on us three times. Now, he's on the phone from a hotel room in Bermuda, upbeat and eager and so full of spin that it's making me dizzy. He denies the networks have rejected his ads. (They have. We called them.) He denies he's trying to improve his client's image. (Why else are they paying him 4 million bucks?) He even denies that his client has an image problem. (With a 40 percent approval rating?)

2nd UPDATE: The Forward (May 31) highlights dissension within the Patton, Boggs lobbying firm, which has a piece of the Saudi PR action. Not only are they disturbed by the Saudi's ads, but also by some other anti-Israeli ones.

Whatever happened to Israel's Labor Party? Benjamin Ben-Eliezer won the leadership post five months ago but is already facing a strong challenge from Haim Ramon.

Once the only party that mattered, Labor got booted from power following the Yom Kippur War, and never properly rebounded until Yithak Rabin's government in the nineties. But things are not going swimmingly. According to JTA, "If elections were held today, polls show that Labor would win just 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset — barely half of the 22 seats it held under its last leader, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and a far cry from the 46 it held under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a decade ago."

Ramon feels he can turn that around, by offering voters a simple platform: Pull Israeli troops out of Palestinian areas and erect a physical border between Israel and the Palestinians. In vigorously outlining his plan to the Labor Party’s Central Committee in mid-May, Ramon maintained that it was “electoral gold.”

“It’s there, lying on the streets and, incredibly, no one is stooping to pick it up,” he declared. “We should pick it up.”

The quick-witted Ramon, 51, once widely touted as a future prime minister, lost ground when he bolted Labor in 1994 to set up his own Histadrut faction. Later, after he returned to Labor, he ran Peres’ lackluster losing campaign against Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.

All that seems forgiven now, at least by the once hostile Central Committee. Come October, however, Ben- Ami, Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg and others may also decide to throw their hats into the ring.

Whoever wins will have some very big shoes to fill if he is to revive the once-dominant party founded and led by Israel’s legendary first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

The White House was the next target: NBC reported last night that "Abu Zubaydah, the top Al Qaeda leader still in US custody, has told interrogators over the past couple of days that that hijacked airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 was headed for the White House."

Kosher government? According to Eugene Volokh, a federal court of appeals recently "struck down New York's kosher enforcement law -- the law barred labeling food as kosher unless the food preparation complied with requirements enforced by the Kosher Law Enforcement Division of the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets." Eugene appreciates the decision because he feels government should not be deciding religious matters.

I'm inclined to agree. Major religious bodies look after this sort of thing. Most Jewish communities are highly effective at organizing and could easily drum up some nasty repercussions for a business that violated Kashrut while still slapping on a Kosher label. But since the labels that really matter to someone keeping kosher in the strictest sense essentially require an expert Rabbi overseeing all parts of the preparation process. This does not require any government intervention -- Jews are very good at regulating themselves half to death without the government ever getting involved!

Time to go: Good pictures are hard to resist. Here is a surreal one from the DoD: a night launch of an F-14 from the U.S.S. Enterprise back in October.

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Welcome to our new URL: Please reset your bookmarks and links to Kesher Talk's new URL, http://www.hfienberg.com/kesher and go there now. If you are already there, well, enjoy!

Blogspot be gone.

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Sucking up to America? That's what Steven Chapman says the Arab press is doing, by telling us to "drop the kikes and get behind the good guys - the guys with the oil."

Site news: I'm planning on getting my blog off of blogspot as soon as I can. I'm no computer guru, so I am not going to jump into Movable Type or Greymatter, and I am not rich enough to hire someone else to do it. So we'll be with Blogger for at least a little while longer.

I hope to have purchased a hosting plan by the end of the week for my own site, of which Kesher Talk will become a sub-directory.

I had hoped to raise a little cash towards registering the KT domain, by publishing a few KT-related articles elsewhere. I have been too busy so far. If anyone charitable would like to donate towards giving this blog a domain all its own, please feel free to let me know. I'll push more actively once I've set up the new host.

UNRWA may fund Jenin war crimes memorial: This news comes from a Palestinian newspaper, The Jerusalem Times, May 16:

Palestinians have designated Jenin camp as the site of their 2002 Palestinian Nakba "disaster" memorial. Residents of the camp, the Emergency Committee for Relief and Reconstruction and UNRWA have agreed in principle to build a public memorial site within the framework of camp reconstruction in order to commemorate Palestinian victims and raise awareness amongst the international community about Israeli war crimes. The precise location and design of this public memorial will be debated and clarified within the next two-three months.

Rare show of unity in Jewish dollars: In a rare show of unity, the four major Jewish streams are folding their individual fund-raising efforts for Israel into the broad emergency campaign sponsored by the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella group of North American Jewish federations. The effort is a “show of unity among the streams of Judaism that is not seen often enough,” Harvey Blitz, president of the Orthodox Union, said at a news conference announcing the joining of forces on Monday. Leaders of the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist movements pledged their support of the UJC’s Israel Emergency Campaign, which aims to raise $300 million. Since its launch on April 8, the campaign has raised $120 million, according to UJC officials. The funds are being directed to child safety and recreational programs; hospitals; security measures; aid to terror victims; and immigration to Israel by Argentine Jews facing severe economic challenges. (JTA)

Love me two times baby: European Union officials are reeling at a bill -- or rather a wish-list -- from the Palestinian Authority seeking a total of 2 billion euros, over $1.8 billion, for "reconstruction and emergency aid." It includes over $20 million for weapons to re-arm the Palestinian police, an item that comes higher up the list than the requests for health care and education. There also is a $15 million request for "aid to the distressed families of Shaheeds" or martyrs who might better be described as suicide bombers. "Not a chance. Those days are over," one senior EU official tells UPI, and went on to quote former President Bill Clinton: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." (UPI Hears...)

Fool an EU-nik three times, shame on all of them.

Jay Leno last night: "I guess you heard there is yet another Osama bin Laden videotape out. You know, this proves this Osama guy, he's really starting to lose it. You know, what kind of idiot puts out a new video the same week as Star Wars?"

Losing the Temple Mount: Moment (Jun/Jul 2002) has a lengthy look at political maneuvering on that other hill.

The Waqf, "the Muslim religious trust that controls the Temple Mount, the esplanade where the golden Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque now sit and where the First and Second Temples were once located", seems intent on Muslimizing the Temple Mount and eliminating any possible connections to its Jewish past.

The Waqf strategy has two parts: (1) deny and then destroy any Jewish connection with the Temple Mount, and (2) multiply the Muslim connections.

Scientific researchers who want to find out exactly where the Temples were located on the Temple Mount have faced strident opposition.

Among them was a professor of physics at Hebrew University named Asher Kaufman. A soft-spoken, observant man, now retired, Kaufman assiduously devoted himself to exploring the Mount and the ancient sources that describe the Temples. He ended up publishing an important commentary on the Mishnah tractate Middot, since its description of the Temple is relevant to his task. He also published a number of articles in scholarly journals and popular magazines in which he assembled his evidence from the Temple Mount itself, based on rock cuttings, wall remains, cistern locations and measurements he had taken on the Mount. He became such a familiar figure on the Temple Mount that a Muslim official would regularly follow Kaufman as he walked around, observing, measuring, and taking pictures.

Much of Kaufman's evidence has now been covered by paving and plantings. One newly paved path now covers the remains of an ancient wall.

Another scholar who is an expert on the Temple Mount is Leen Ritmeyer, a Dutch evangelical Christian who served as official architect on a decade-long Hebrew University excavation just south of the Temple Mount. He too has been studying the location of the Jewish Temples. He too complains that the Waqf has paved over evidence. Moreover, the Waqf refused to let Ritmeyer explore the many underground cisterns and structures that he regards as critical to his research.

But the larger problem is that the Waqf just doesn't recognize anyone's authority but its own. It regularly flouts Israeli archeological laws, bulldozing, drilling and tunnelling at will. Any important archeological finds are usually swept away.

In 1986, the Temple Mount Faithful filed a suit in Israel's Supreme Court against both the Waqf and the government, alleging these and other Waqf violations of Israel's antiquities and building laws by the damage or destruction of evidence from Solomon's Temple (the First Temple), Herod's Temple (the Second Temple), and other ancient structures. The Waqf of course simply ignored the suit. It neither appeared nor responded. The real thrust of the suit, however, was against the government, seeking to have it take action against the Waqf.

... The Supreme Court took seven years to decide the case. In November 1993, the court ruled that the Waqf had violated antiquities and other applicable Israeli laws on 35 occasions, causing irreversible destruction of important archaeological remains. The court acknowledged that these violations continued even after suit had been filed. Although the court said that the Antiquities Authority (the department had since changed its name) had repeatedly disregarded the Waqf's violations, it refused to order the government to take legal action against the Waqf, saying it was confident that Israeli authorities would correct their past errors (i.e., inaction) in the future. Translation: The issue was too hot to handle, even for the court. The petition was dismissed.

While the Waqf is eliminating possible evidence of the old Temples, Arabs deny that the Temples ever existed.

And they are quite right that there is no direct archaeological evidence that they ever existed. Of course that may be because the Temple Mount has never been, nor can it be, excavated. Nevertheless, as archaeologist Carol Meyers of Duke University has written, "The location of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and thus of the place where the three successive [Israelite] temples were built in biblical antiquity, has never been in doubt." She cites three Temples by counting King Solomon's Temple as the first, the Temple built by the exiles returning from Babylon in the late 6th century B.C.E. as the second, and Herod the Great's complete rebuild of this modest effort as the third. In Jewish tradition, however, the second and third Temples are conflated as the Second Temple.

Why, as Meyers says, has there never been any doubt as to the location? There is abundant archaeological evidence that the original City of David occupied a ridge south of the Temple Mount, an area surrounded on three sides by steep valleys that protected it. Only on the north was there room for expansion to build Solomon's Temple. When Herod rebuilt the Temple, he doubled the size of the esplanade on which it was located. This esplanade still exists. The evidence of Herodian masonry is abundant. We know exactly where Herod expanded the previously existing mount by an addition: A straight line in the masonry (known as the "straight joint") marks the beginning of the addition. Also, there are detailed descriptions of the Second Temple in contemporaneous accounts by the Jewish historian Josephus. Additional material is supplied in the Mishnah tractate Middot. If Herod built his Temple here on an expanded esplanade, it stands to reason that this is also the site of Solomon's Temple, as well as the Temple the returning exiles built. Moreover, Solomon's Temple is minutely described in the Bible and archaeologists have discovered similar temples dating to within a hundred or so years of Solomon's reign that were built on the same plan. The Bible tells us that architects of the Phoenician king Hiram helped Solomon; the nearly contemporaneous temples with a similar plan are Phoenician. In short, although direct evidence of these now vanished temples is missing, there is overwhelming indirect evidence for their existence and their location. No competent scholar denies this.

Only one archeologist in modern times has explored the Mount -- a Brit, Charles Warren, in the late 1860's. He found numerous artifacts said to date "at least to First Temple times."

No one since has been allowed to even do even a simple archeological survey, let alone an excavation. And now the Waqf has announced

that it is going to clean the underground installations on the Mount that have not been explored by a Westerner since Warren's survey in the 1860s. This is, again, something that should be done only under archaeological supervision. According to one report, 10 cisterns have already been "cleaned."

... According to reports, the Waqf intends to fill the cisterns with holy water from Mecca, thereby holy-izing the entire Mount, known to Moslems as the Haram esh-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary.

And wash away any evidence that the Mount is or was Jewish. It's a plan so clever you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.

Monday, May 20, 2002

David Letterman: "Experts are saying Osama bin Laden has shaved his beard and is laying low, plotting his revenge. ... No, wait a minute, that is what they are saying about Al Gore."

Kesher Talk

Friday, May 24, 2002

Thursday, May 23, 2002

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Monday, May 20, 2002

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