Kesher Talk: 09/29/2002

Hard line pays off: On the evening of Oct. 1, "a wanted Palestinian on the verge of carrying out a suicide attack turned himself in to the Israeli security forces in the city of Nablus. The 17 year-old youth was accompanied by his mother when he presented himself to an Israeli unit operating in the area. It appears that his family's fear of the measures Israel might take against them in response to the young man's actions caused the them to decide to turn him in."

Cynthia McKinney, deposed by... who?! It turns out that Cynthia does not agree with her father Billy's post-mortem assessment of her Congressional electoral loss. While papa blamed "the J-E-W-S," the potential Green party candidate for President blames... India?

... the newspaper article I am inserting in the [Congressional] Record along with this statement shows that they admitted that they invested heavily in the effort to defeat me. To my colleagues of both parties who have also been involved in the effort to expose India's brutal record, I say: Watch out; they are coming after you, too.

They're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho... Sorry, that was unfair. The newspaper article in question does indeed snipe at the Jewish lobby for hogging the limelight:

The headlines credit the Jewish lobby for the defeat of lawmaker Cynthia McKinney in the Congressional primaries on Tuesday. But a neophyte Indian-American activists group, which co-wrote the script for this unusual Georgia election that attracted nationwide attention, is happy with just the footnote that recorded their role.

They like to do it quietly. They are not as political or as established as the Jewish lobby.

Damned greedy Jews, always helping to unseat insane Congresswomen and never giving the brown man any credit...

Update: OpinionJournal.com comments: "We hope the McKinneys find a way to blame the Zoroastrians for their losses (Billy lost his seat in a runoff). It's not that we have any brief for or against the Zoroastrians; we'd just like to see Billy and Cynthia try to spell it."

All about the occupation and the settlers: Chicago Tribune columnist Don Wyclif whines that at a recent lecture, Thomas Friedman did not address the "occupation" and "settlers" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This spurs him to refer to a letter he received on September 19th

from Steven Feuerstein, a founder and sometime spokesman for Not in My Name, an organization of Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

"I almost lost my breakfast when I read the prominent headline over [Tribune correspondent] Christina [sic] Spolar's Page 3 article on the Middle East: `Bomb breaks 6-week calm'," he wrote. "The headline and article project a clear message: since the last suicide bombing on Aug. 4, there was little or no violence."

But a quick Internet search turned up numerous instances of violence, Feuerstein said, except that it was violence inflicted on Palestinians as a result of the occupation.

In other words, it's about point of view.

Actually, it is about data. Had Mr. Wyclif bothered to check the facts on the state of Middle East violence, he would have seen a different picture. 3 weeks in September yielded 248 Palestinian attacks -- shootings, bombings, stabbings -- against Israelis.

"point of view" indeed...

U.S. provided Iraq with bioweapon stocks: The AP reported yesterday that it was us that started Iraq on the road to armaggedon in the 1980's:

The CDC and a biological sample company, the American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including the West Nile virus.

The transfers were done in the 1980s, when the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran. They were detailed in a 1994 Senate banking committee report and a 1995 follow-up letter from the CDC to the Senate.

The exports were legal at the time and approved under a program administered by the Commerce Department.

Are mortgage lenders racist? That is the implication of a new advocacy group report, released yesterday. But as I demonstrate in a TCS column, not only are the racial disparities in mortgage denial rates declining, but the problem has very little to do with race.

Where Chassidim Summer: Every July and August, the little town of Bethlehem becomes the Chasidic capital of New Hampshire, if not of all rural New England. Hundreds of Satmars and other Chasidim, or fervently Orthodox Jews, drive north from New York to enjoy the cool mountain air and tree-lined vistas for which the tourist town is known.

“There could be 200 to 300 extra Jews” in town on any late summer day, says Margie “Moocho” Salomon, a weaver of tallitot and member of the year-round Bethlehem Hebrew Congregation. “Our congregation blossoms, too.”

Non-orthodox community changing there too: JTA also chronicles the ups and downs of forming a havurah in rural New England.

You're My Obsession; Cannot Sleep...: Meryl Yourish takes the long-view of UN activity regarding Israel.

What Farscape character am I? No surprises here:

What Farscape Character are you?

When you CAIR enough to deceive: Links between the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and terrorism are indirect, but concerning.

In their latest escapade, Jake Tapper has found that CAIR's current executive director is a tad wacky. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Tapper describes Exec Dir Nihad Awad's interview with El-Osboa, an Egyptian newspaper, in which Awad explains that Muslims could not have committed the 9-11 attacks - it must have been Israel. (The interview is only available online in Arabic)

How to criticize Israel properly: "So you want to criticize Israel without letting the whole world know you hate Jews. Or, you really don't hate Jews, but you want to criticize Israel?"

Mike Silverman tells his readers how to do it. And don't miss his "Middle Eastern terms defined" section at the end.

Shadow boxing in the Middle East: Yassir Arafat emerged from his headquarters. He came out into the open the other day.

Now the Middle East is watching him carefully ... if he sees his shadow, it means six more weeks of terrorism. (courtesy of Mike sultan)

Is the word "Jew" an insult? On British television, perhaps: TotallyJewish.com notes that the UK's Broadcasting Standards Commission cited 28 obscenities in its foul language report which were considered inappropriate for airing early in the morning.

More than 750 people questioned stated the word Jew was a more offensive term to use on TV than expressions such as such as “d**khead” and “a**e”.

The findings are now guiding the obscenity standards for Channel 4...

Israel should move: That is the studied conclusion of one of Brazil's vice-presidential candidates, José de Alencar. "The State of Israel should move somewhere else."

Not that his rival for the veep spot, Rita Camata, sounds much nicer. "I am attracted to important subjects, like the ... the criminal way Israel behaves toward Palestinians"

The Forward examines the state of Jews and views on Israel in Brazil:

For Brazil's Jews, who number about 130,000, Israel has lately been a topic of some ambivalence. A source in Israel's Foreign Ministry told the Forward that during last spring's Operation Defensive Shield, Israel's consular offices in Brazil received calls from local Jews "who called to say they were ashamed to be Jews."

"No one supports the position of Israel," said Yoel Schwartz, a Jewish Agency emissary stationed in Brazil. "Everything is seen here through the prism of relations with the United States, and Israel is seen as an American satellite."

Jews in former Yugoslavia try to strengthen the community: Vlado Salamon, a physician and part of the Zagreb Jewish community physician, has been the driving force behind an annual get-together aimed at keeping close Jewish contacts in the post-Yugoslav civil war era alive.

Called “Beyachad” — “together” in Hebrew — the event is a weeklong encounter held each Sukkot since 1999 on an island off Croatia’s Adriatic coast.

The event draws Jews from all parts of the former Yugoslavia — and also Yugoslav Jews who immigrated to Europe, North America, Israel and New Zealand. It is primarily aimed at “middle-generation” Jewish adults in their 40s and 50s, but it also draws student-age and senior participants. Some 250 participants registered for this year’s Beyachad.

“Our first goal is to connect Jews from the former Yugoslavia,” Salamon said. “But we also aim to strengthen Jewish culture and combat assimilation.”

In the former Yugoslavia, the country’s 6,000 Jews made up a tiny minority in an overall population of 22 million. Jewish communities in the six Yugoslav republics were united under the umbrella of the Federation of Yugoslav Jewish Communities, based in Belgrade. They maintained close contacts, including spending family holidays at a Jewish community summer camp on the Croatian coast. Most Yugoslav Jews were highly integrated into mainstream life. Many were in mixed marriages or children of mixed marriages, and few were religious.

Beyachad grew out of the sporadic contacts that the Jews of the former Yugoslavia managed to keep up during the wars of the 1990s, when communications between Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade were difficult or cut altogether. Jews from the various Yugoslav successor states were able to hold group meetings several times between 1994 and 1997 — but they had to travel abroad to Hungary or the Czech Republic to do so.

“We wanted to stay in touch, to discuss our mutual problems,” Salamon said. “Finally, in 1998, we were able to hold a meeting for the first time in the former Yugoslavia — at Bled, in Slovenia. It was then that I got the idea to organize Beyachad.” The first Beyachad, in 1999, drew 126 people to the Adriatic island of Murter. By the next year, the number of participants had almost doubled, and interest has remained high.

Kesher Talk

Thursday, October 03, 2002

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