Kesher Talk: 09/22/2002

Friday, September 27, 2002

Battered Palestinian women on the rise: Meaning, there are more reporting to the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion Research that they are getting physically abused at home since the 2nd Intifada began. Were they getting in trouble for demanding that their kids not be sent on suicide bombing missions? Hard to say. "The poll showed that 86 percent of respondents said violence against women had significantly or somewhat increased as a result of changing political, economic and social conditions in the Palestinian territories." What does that mean? Well, the women are complaining that "local customs and traditions hamper Palestinian women's advancement and that boosting their social, economic and political status was essential."

So change is in the making, right? Wrong: "the great majority of the respondents said women should concentrate on being good wives and mothers rather than on their rights."

Unrest in Syria: Reports are coming in from diplomatic eye-witnesses of serious riots in Damascus over the last weekend that sound worrying for the still fledgling regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. What began as protest demonstrations in the suburb of Kabas against one of Bashar's "Modernization" projects, a new road building scheme, turned into wider anti-regime riots that raged through Saturday and Sunday and overwhelmed the riot police.

Order was restored when the army was brought in Sunday, and began using live ammunition. Interestingly, the Syrian army then proceeded to use a tactic they had learned from the Israelis, deploying armored bulldozers to destroy the houses of those presumed to be responsible.

They flattened half of Kabas -- which goes to show that young President Bashar is a softie compared to his late father, Hafiz al Assad. Faced with dissent in the town of Hamah in 1982, the old man flattened the place with artillery and paved over the rubble -- and the 10,000-plus corpses. (from UPI Hears)

Harvard president takes stand against anti-semitism: From Lawrence Summers' much-discussed speech, given for morning prayers at a church on Sep. 17:

I have always throughout my life been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel. Such views have always seemed to me alarmist if not slightly hysterical. But I have to say that while they still seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago.

I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy -- a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.

Top 10 UK Jews: TotallyJewish.com's top 10 list of Jews who have influenced Britain:

1) Peter Sellers
Film, radio and television star of Goons and Pink Panther fame.

2) Brian Epstein
The man who discovered the Beatles.

3) Benjamin Disraeli
Former prime minister, although baptised a Christian, he lifted the ban on Jews being MPs.

4) Isaiah Berlin
One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.

5) Michael Marks
In partnership with Tom Spencer created one of the UK’s leading retailers.

6) Lord Robert Winston
Heads human fertility research behind IVF treatment.

7) Ernest Chain
Won Nobel Prize for the commercial production of penicillin.

8) Seigfried Sassoon
First world war poet who defined historical analysis of the great war.

9) Daniel Mendoza
Eighteenth century pugilist who introduced footwork, strategy and sparring to modern boxing.

10 ) Rosalind Franklin
Chemist who unravelled the structure of DNA.

Should NATO admit one more country? Invitations to join the NATO alliance will be issued in November, at a summit in Prague, to Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Neil Bar-or argues that, "Israel should be admitted as a full member into NATO" ...

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Synagogue's last two members struggle to keep it: Dorothy Karon, 83, and John Siegel, 90, are the last two active members of B'nai Abraham synagogue. They are survivors of a once thriving Jewish community, mostly eastern European immigrants and their descendants, who prayed and played poker, married and mourned under one roof for much of the last century. The AP has the story.

''As long as we're alive, this building is going to stay alive,'' vowed Karon, who still drives to the synagogue in her '92 Cadillac though she lives only at the other end of the block. ``I feel connected to this building.''

''It's part of family,'' Siegel said. ``I can't see letting it go.''

Orthodox Punk Rocker:

Lawyer, lecturer, punk rocker — and executive president of an Orthodox synagogue. Welcome to the world of Bram Presser, 26, the Melbourne, Australia-based lead singer of Yidcore, a Jewish punk rock group that specializes in Jewish and Hebrew songs.

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Presser donned his tallit and took his place with the other 11 members of Melbourne’s North Eastern Jewish War Memorial Centre’s synagogue choir. As executive president Presser is responsible for fiscal affairs at the synagogue, which serves 260 families.

Presser “does a wonderful job and it’s a pleasure to have him on our team,” Rabbi Gideon Fox says. “And he is not a three-day-a-year Jew. We are often blessed with his company. He certainly adds color to the choir.”

Presser says: “Not all the shul members approve of me, but they do say they like me when I am quiet.”

Prospects for peace with Arafat's regime? Looking dim...: This week, the Arafat-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades issued a
statement calling critics of Arafat "traitors who cooperate with Israel," while threatening to kill any PA official who holds contacts with Israel over the establishment of a new leadership.

On Tuesday in Ramallah, these threats were carried out. Masked gunmen opened fire at the home of Nabil Amr, a former PA cabinet member who has openly challenged Arafat and called for wide-scale reforms in the PA. Palestinian sources told The Jerusalem Post they believed the attack was carried out by Fatah gunmen as a warning to PA officials who are trying to undermine Arafat's rule.

Amr, who until recently served as PA minister for parliamentary affairs, recently published an article in London's Arab newspaper blasting Arafat for having missed an historic opportunity by rejecting proposals at Camp David. "After two years of bloodshed, we are now calling for what we rejected," he wrote. He also suggested that many senior PA officials are corrupt and responsible for the theft of public funds. (courtesy of HonestReporting)

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Is House leader Dick Armey slagging off left-wing Jews? Um, not exactly.

Asked at a forum for a Congressional candidate in southwest Florida about the political divide between conservative and liberal Jews, Mr. Armey, a Republican from Texas, was quoted in The Bradenton Herald as saying, "I always see two Jewish communities in America: one of deep intellect and one of shallow, superficial intellect."

Mr. Armey, who did not deny making the remarks, was then quoted by the Florida newspaper as saying that conservatives were drawn to "occupations of the brain," in the sciences, while liberals gravitated toward "occupations of the heart," like the arts.

Actually, Dick is just being crass and stereotyping. As best I can tell, he is being anti-left, not anti-semitic (you can judge the right or wrong of it yourself). But that did not stop Dick's Democratic opponents from seizing the day. Rep. Martin Frost of Texas and Nita M. Lowey of New York, two Jewish members of the House Democratic leadership, described Armey's comments in a joint statement as "breathtaking in their ignorance."

"We're certain we speak for people of every religious and ethnic background in condemning the disparaging comments made by Dick Armey about the millions of Jews and other Americans who happen to disagree with his right-wing ideology," the Democrats said.

So Dick clarified his remarks yesterday, more or less along the lines I had figured: "Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people... I have not been impressed with the intellect of the left since I was a freshman in college."

Crass, insensitive, offensive? You have a case. Implied anti-semitic? Nope.

Update: JTA has more coverage.

Pyramids in Jerusalem? In deference to the curiousities of my fiancee, here is an article from Archeology on ancient Jerusalem burial practices.

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Can government workers work well? Apparently so...: I never would have expected it, but the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) guys -- the new federal replacements for the old Joe and Jane Schmoes who used to run airport security -- kick ass. No, they did not chase me down or beat the crap out of someone. Folks are still getting wanded and "randomly" checked.

The big difference was in professionalism, speed and efficiency. These are not the sort of things I'm used to seeing in federal workers, yet there they were. We were zipped through security at the airport in Baltimore this past Friday like lightning. The amount of people in the airport was the same as usual (we always get to travel at rush hour, joy), but there was no waiting in line for an hour and a half.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

Casualties of the Press: Does the media spin the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the Palestinian slaughter of Israeli civillians while obscuring the killing of Palestinian civillians? Ahmed Bouzid, penning the "Shoptalk" column in Editor & Publisher (Sep. 23), says yes. "Despite the evidence, the simple view that Palestinians slaughter civilians and Israelis at worst unintentionally or mistakenly kill them (with "stray bullets" and "errant shells") still prevails, unshaken, in the reporting of the conflict by all the major U.S. newspapers."

Bouzid's evidence that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian civillians are reports from "human-rights organizations on the ground." Refering to Israeli military actions in Jenin in the spring, he cites Physicians for Human Rights, which said Israeli soldiers were "specifically aiming at peoples' heads", as well as Human Rights Watch, whose May 3 report on Jenin said that Palestinian civilians "were killed willfully or unlawfully," and were used as "'human shields.' "

Although there has been little correction in the popular press or from activist groups, what was once called the "massacre" at Jenin seems to have been nothing of the sort. The May 7 UN Secretary General's report found no evidence of any kind of massacre:

Fifty-two Palestinian deaths had been confirmed by the hospital in Jenin by the end of May 2002. IDF also place the death toll at approximately 52. A senior Palestinian Authority official alleged in mid-April that some 500 were killed, a figure that has not been substantiated in the light of the evidence that has emerged.

As for the status of the dead as civillians, that is an even more difficult issue. The UN report said it

is impossible to determine with precision how many civilians were among the Palestinian dead. The Government of Israel estimated during the incursion that there were "only dozens killed in Jenin … and the vast majority of them bore arms and fired upon [IDF] forces". Israeli officials informed United Nations personnel that they believed that, of the 52 dead, 38 were armed men and 14 were civilians. The Palestinian Authority has acknowledged that combatants were among the dead, and has named some of them, but has placed no precise estimates on the breakdown. Human rights organizations put the civilian toll closer to 20 - Human Rights Watch documented 22 civilians among the 52 dead, while Physicians for Human Rights noted that "children under the age of 15 years, women and men over the age of 50 years accounted for nearly 38 per cent of all reported fatalities".

As an important (and under-covered) study this summer demonstrated, splitting hairs between "civillians" and non-civillians is not easy. Such numbers, lacking context, are easily misrepresented. Since most Israelis serve in the military and remain active as reserves, it is easy to call an Israeli fatality a "soldier." On the other side, since the Intifada is essentially a guerilla conflict, few members of groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad can be classified as uniformed soldiers. So rather than fighting a semantic battle, it makes more sense to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants and to figure out who might have killed whom.

As the study seemed to demonstrate, about 579 non-combatant Palestinians (just over 38 percent of all Palestinian casualties) were killed by Israelis and 433 non-combatant Israelis (about 80 percent of all Israeli casualties) were killed by Palestinians. While Israeli casualties make up about 27 percent of the total fatalities (as they are usually reported in the media), they actually represent about 43 percent of the non-combatant fatalities.

To the extent that the disparity in raw accounting of casualties has been taken as evidence of Israeli targeting of noncombatants, these numbers weaken the case.

Bouzid's claims of anti-Palestinian media bias cannot be adequately dealt with until his more important claims of what the media is supposedly de-emphasizing or ignoring are verified. To date, Bouzid and others have failed to provide suitable evidence.

Monday, September 23, 2002

Montreal student chased and clubbed: JTA has the scoop on a nasty incident at Concordia University (yes, the same University that saw anti-Israeli rioting and violence when Netanyahu was scheduled to visit, a week and some ago).

A 29-year-old commerce student, who asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisal, was heading to class Monday evening when he noticed a Palestinian poster on the wall inside a school building. "I thought, ‘How could they put this up so soon after the violence last week?´ " said the student, who immigrated to Montreal from Moldova four years ago. He began to take the poster down when he was accosted by an Arab student.

"I realized it would be a better idea not to confront him, so I started walking away," the Jewish student said. When the Arab student began calling someone on his cellphone, the Jewish student began to run.

The Arab student chased the Jewish student down the escalator and through corridors crowded with other students. The Jewish student had almost reached the exit when he was jumped from behind and beaten up, he said.

"I was hit in the head with a hard object, probably the cell phone, and punched. I fell down and while I was on my knees, this guy kept kicking me," the student said. "I was able to get up and face this student when I saw another Moslem student rushing over. I ran outside to the university´s security office and it was then that I noticed how badly I was bleeding from my scalp. The blood was running down my neck."

The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule: Dhimmitude is the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by jihad, encompassing all of the demographic, ethnic, and religious aspects of the political system. The word "dhimmitude", as a historical concept, was coined by Bat Ye'or in 1983 to describe the legal and social condition of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule (the dhimmis). Now it is also the name of her web site, loaded with articles and archives.

Possible LA hate crime - against 2 Jews - finally gets mainstream notice: As noted last week in the LA Independent, now finally hitting the pages of the Los Angeles Times ...

Standardized testing model flunks in California: My TechCentralStation column this week examines the Academic Performance Index system in California, which turns out to have a massive margin of error... thus potentially handing out millions of dollars to the wrong schools.

The Left and Israel - an interesting perspective: Jonathan Irom blames anti-semitism. He postulates, in a lengthy essay, that the Left dislikes Israel because they see it as representing classic Jewish stereotypes.

Kesher Talk

Friday, September 27, 2002

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Monday, September 23, 2002

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