Kesher Talk: 03/23/2003

Friday, March 28, 2003

The children of Iraq. 13-year-old Charlotte Aldebron spoke at a peace rally in Maine a few weeks ago. It is wonderful that she was willing and able to address a crowd of mostly adults, and I'm willing to assume she wrote her own speech. It is ignorant and naive, and I would be willing to attribute that to her relative immaturity, except for the fact that too many adults are just as blinkered. So I'll respond not so much to Charlotte as to the adults standing with her:

I notice Charlotte doesn't mention the toddler whose feet were crushed by Saddam's torturers in front of her mother, or the mothers raped by the secret police in front of their children, or all the children left homeless because their parents were imprisoned or killed by Saddam, or the children malnourished because Saddam spent his oil-for-food money on palaces. Or the children maimed and killed by suicide bombers in Israel whose families get reward money from Saddam, or the children all over the world that could be killed or left homeless if the terrorism funded by Saddam and the people he inspires is not checked.

Charlotte gave this speech before the war began, but let me add a few more facts about children in Iraq right now:

The are given rifles and told to fight and their mothers used as human shields. They are kidnapped to force their fathers to fight. They are hungry because humanitarian relief ships can't get through because of Iraqi mines in the harbor, and because Iraqi soldiers hijack relief convoys and take all the food for themselves.

Anti-semitism or "anti-zionism"? One masquerades as the other in these distasteful letters to the editor from the British Medical Journal on the academic boycott of Israel.

(via Medpundit)

More war-related news. I'm pouring most of the really hot items into Command Post. These are juicy tidbits with more shelf life:

A retired U.S. Army colonel with years of experience observing and advising Arab military forces explains why Arabs lose wars. I found this link on One Hand Clapping, where someone added a comment explaining the success of the Israeli army against numerically superior Arab forces. (Scroll to the last comment.)

The most detailed comparison of the Iraq War to the 1952 Gary Cooper Western, High Noon.

I haven't seen any of these but I'm glad they're there.

Congress discusses funding defense against bioterrorism.

Plague coming closer. This is very scary: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome appears to be gaining a toe-hold in Toronto.

Anti-semitism round-up. You knew attacks on Jews were way up in France. Did you know they were way up in California?

The report found not just a troubling spike in the number of anti- Semitic incidents in Northern California -- from 13 to 118, more than half of which reportedly took place in San Francisco and Alameda counties -- but also in the severity of some of the attacks. . . . "These assaults on people, and the arson, and the bomb threats, are more direct and in-your-face acts of anti-Semitism. In a lot of ways, that is more troubling than the actual number of incidents," said Jonathan Bernstein, the Anti-Defamation League's regional director for Northern California. "We had no assaults in the Bay Area the previous year. That's a new phenomenon for us."

Read the whole thing.

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Uppity Jew Dept. The Magen David is now a fashion statement in Israel.

when questioned about what started the Star of David trend, Israeli youth aren’t inclined to launch into a political diatribe or cite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s wistful odes on the essence of Zionism. They explain they’re taking their cue from a local rap artist who goes by the name of “Subliminal.” A glance at the rapper’s latest album holds some clues. The cover art features a mud-covered hand clutching a shining gold Star of David pendant. The lyrics contain strident political prognoses like “the country is vacillating like a cigar in Arafat’s mouth,” while urging Israelis to seek unity with lines like “together we will survive, alone we will fall.” . . . .

. . . What Madonna did for crosses in the U.S. in the 1980s, Subliminal is now doing for the Star of David. And the link with the loud and confrontational culture of hip-hop has made large stars even more popular.

Humanitarian news in Iraq. Every week I get an email from a group of international development consultants, with a round-up of news from around the world related to development projects. They also have a weekly quiz on obscure political and geogrpahic topics and job postings. This week's email includes the following:

IRAQ: Invoking "the terrifying impact" of war on Iraq, grief for the dead and anguish for the living, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed March 26 to the divided UN Security Council to unite on a common purpose and to the international community to respond swiftly and generously to a new "flash appeal" for humanitarian aid for the Iraqi people.

The UN's World Food Program said the government-run food distribution system was still partially functioning in South and Central Iraq, where food agents are delivering incomplete rations and this month's distribution of incomplete rations has already started in areas unaffected by the ongoing conflict. But the WFP said it was difficult to calculate to what extent these distributions would affect overall food security in South/Central Iraq. The distributions will improve some families' food reserves, but WFP lacks precise details about the size of rations being delivered and the distribution cycle, which usually takes a month to complete. The agency is still operating under the assumption that most families, who are entirely dependent on monthly food rations for survival, will run out of food by the end of April.

Mercy Corps staff in Kuwait, who are closely monitoring a growing humanitarian crisis in southern Iraq and preparing to deliver relief supplies once the security conditions inside Iraq permit, that conditions inside Basra - a city of more than 1.3 million people in southern Iraq - are of a particular concern to aid workers in the region. Basra's electricity has been cut off and as a result more than half of the civilian population does not have access to clean drinking water. U.S. General Tommy Franks, addressing a news conference at his command headquarters earlier in the week, said "humanitarian assistance ships are loaded and we'll begin to deliver needed humanitarian assistance -- food, water, medicine -- to Iraqis within the next few days." The people of the port city of Umm Qasr and Basra "will in the days ahead be able to have more access to food and more access to water than they've had in decades," he said.

Naive tools or duplicitous terrorist sympathizers? You decide. Remember Rachel Corrie? She worked with a group called the International Solidarity Movement. Palestinian peace activists, right? Well, the IDF just flushed out a senior member of the militant Islamic Jihad group from their West Bank offices, which also houses the International Committee of the Red Cross, international medical group Medicins Sans Frontieres and the Bank of Palestine.

The army said two women with the group, one British and the other Canadian, tried to hide the man but the group's spokesman, Tom Wallace, said the two group members were not aware of the man's identity.

Yeah, right.

More war-related news. I'm pouring most of the really hot items into Command Post. These are juicy tidbits with more shelf life:

Winds of Change has a list of links with maps, details about weapons used in the conflict, procedures for taking prisoners, explanations of military rank, profiles of coalition military units - in short, background info for following the war all in one place.

Another article on warblogs.

Bill Herbert notes that Oxfam is too pure and good to take money from Iraq War coalition members.

An American in an Arab-language news-media panel discussion tries to combat misinformation about the war in Iraq. (Via Tal G)

Peace Troll Taxonomy 101. I usually don't reproduce entire comments from someone else's thread,but it's a very long thread and you may not want to wait for it to load. This was Comment #310:

Peace Troll Taxonomy 101

In recent weeks, LGF has been regularly visited by "Peace" trolls. This has proven an unexpected boon for science in general, and taxonomy of peace trolls in particular. At this point, four different species of "peace" troll have been identified.

The easiest one to identify is the "Jihadi" troll. Its thinking is that the U.S. are not behaving as decent dhimmi should. If the U.S. were educated properly, they would submit to Islam. Because the Jihadi troll is a Muslim, it's obviously right, and anybody who has the gall to disagree is guilty of racism or is a ZioNazi Jew.

The second species is the anti-Semitic troll, proud member of the 'tin-foil hat brigade'. The anti-Semitic troll believes that everything it disagrees with is the fault of a vast conspiracy by the Jews. It's all written in the Protocols, and has been organized back in 53 A.D. If you disagree, that's because you're Jew, or because you are an extremist Christian waiting for the Rapture, or whatever. While the anti-Semitic troll is not Muslim, it is often pro-Arab. Anti-Semitic trolls about in any "Rachel Corrie" thread. Research is under way to use "Corrie" as a quick speciation test for anti-Semitic trolls.

The third species of troll is the "control" troll. "komis" and "reality check" are good examples, and as all control trolls encountered on LGF are not U.S. citizens. It thinks that it should have a veto on everything the U.S. does, because the U.S. is the only remaining superpower. It wants a say in how the U.S. spends its money, sets its foreign policies, runs its justice and organizes its healthcare and welfare system. Most of all, it wants the U.S. to hand over control over its military to anybody but the U.S. This being its "right", the control troll is pained that the U.S. doesn't comply, and find it extremely hypocritical that while not respecting its "right" to control the U.S., the U.S. insists it is fighting for the cause of good.

The last species of troll is the "bolchevik" troll. Anybody who studied the fight between "menchevik" and "bolchevik" will immediately recognize the origin of the species name. The bolchevik troll is a U.S. citizen whose ideology is not shared by the majority of the U.S. citizens. Because its ideology is right and progressive and altruistic, it understands that its opponents are either morons to be insulted and ridiculed for their obvious lack of intelligence, or victims of a covert and evil conspiracy by the press, the oil cartel, the Jews... It is easy to identify by the way it claims to be a better American and love America, but... not as it is, no. It has to be totally destroyed and rebuilt according to its ideology FIRST. However, the speciation of the bolchevik troll can take some time.

Of course, there are also 'mongrel' trolls. Those are the result of interbreeding between two different species of trolls, and combine the endearing trait of both categories. Note that not all types can interbreed: control and bolchevik trolls are not interfertile. Neither are anti-Semitic and Jihadi trolls. Just like mules, mongrel trolls are generally not fertile. . . .

And a little farther down there's an addition:

I'd propose adding a new category, one which arguably covers NOB: the "Emotive Troll". These trolls don't take any coherent political position with regard to much of anything. Their central concern is to demonstrate how they feel things much more deeply than do we hateful warmongers. They tend to express the belief that peace is produced by repeating the word "peace" a sufficient number of times.

And another:

I would submit that there is another, minor species: Trollus Petit that merely cruise in, toss in little green pineapples of contrarian thought to attract attention to themselves, and scoot along without really intending to participate in any sort of debate. Their bites are annoying, and in some cases can cause nausea, but are rarely fatal. . . .

My peregrinations across the political blogosphere over the past year enable me to provisionally confirm the accuracy of these findings. Taxonomy of right-wing trolls still to be defined.

UPDATE: Some more troll types, from my comments:

Segacs says:

I'd like to add a category: the Ad Homonim troll. This is a troll whose sole purpose is to level personal insults and attacks at the writer of the original post, or at another commentator. He (or she) rarely debates the issue at hand, preferring instead to turn the conversation into grade-school level insults.

Asparagirl says:

Then there's the non-partisan "totally whacked out random babbling guy" troll, which has inhabited my blog a few times.

Also, the "quotes Scripture at me constantly" troll type tends to be right-wing and evangelical Christian and inordinately attracted to any posts of mine that mention sexualities other than heterosexuality.

That last one would qualify as a right-wing troll, I think.

I'm a big StorahTelling fan, so I was very pleased to see the troup get some press:

When the live music starts — a reedy horn, viola and dumbek drum doing a sort of Middle Eastern improv — there are some surprised stirrings from the sleepy adolescents in the audience. Then the sound of a Yehudah Amichai poem recited slowly in Hebrew reverberates through the room, the electronic synthesizer overlay giving it the illusion of being in a cave. A young man at a piano reads the English translation into a microphone. An impassioned piano and vocals rendition of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” follows.

Then, when everyone is wondering what all this has to do with the Torah portion, a trim, youthful man in a large knit purple yarmulke walks to the front of the room. What follows is difficult to classify. It’s not storytelling. Not a play. Not quite performance art. And definitely not the standard Torah service. Yet it has elements of all four. Welcome to Storahtelling, where “story meets Torah and history sometimes meets fantasy,” according to its founder and director, Amichai Lau-Lavie.

If you live in the New York area, make an effort to see them. If not, get your local Jewish community to bring them to town.

Saddam adopting Palestinian tactics? I had been wondering this myself:

Using civilians (especially women and children) as shields - check.
Arming children and encouraging them to fight - check.
Trying to force the enemy to bomb heavily-populated urban areas and then painting the enemy as brutal - check.
Dressing soldiers as civilians - check.
Relying on the enemy's adherence to humanitarian codes to gradually wear them down - check.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

IDF radio: Britain's ambassador to Israel said today that the danger of an Iraqi attack on Israel has been substantially lowered. I hope he is right, but somehow I feel differently.

More war-related news. I'm pouring most of the really hot items into The Command Post. These are juicy tidbits with more shelf life:

A British newspaper enacts a large-scale editorial comment on the French.

I've been living in NY about a year, I have family here, I like it for many things. But as a born and raised Texan and proud former resident of zipcode 78704 I have a problem with this sign from the NYC antiwar march.

(I have noticed an interesting generational divide. People under 35, I tell them I'm from Austin and they think that's cool. Dell Computers, great music, hip town, a lot of them have been there, have friends there. People over 35: Um, Austin's the state capital, right? right-wing blah blah Bush blah blah gun nuts blah blah is it safe for Jews there? blah blah.)

Meryl notes another little souvenir from the march, and follows it with the rant I would write if she didn't already do it and do it better than me. (But Meryl, you forgot to add the Ten Commandments and the Torah, which at least two other religions thought highly enough of to borrow huge chunks.)

Dean Esmay has an interview with an Iraqi expatriate who once served in Saddam's military. As the interview was taking place, word flashed on CNN that citizens of his home town Basra were rising up against Saddam's troops.

Sex, politics and religion. Give a big blog welcome to The Lone Dissenter, a smart outspokenstudent trying to survive in a politically leftist Bay Area high school.

If you feel like the Lone Dissenter sometimes, check out a long LGF thread on The Great Divide - losing friends and family because of different political views on 9-11 and the war. Lots of heartwrenching personal stories, and some heartening ones too.

Yes, a realignment is taking place, but it's not as simple as "liberal " vs. "conservative" or even "capitalist" vs. "socialist." I wouldn't even say it's "isolationist" vs. "interventionist," although that's part of it. It's been written about before - some call its adherents "anti-idiotarians" or "eagles" - but we are all having a hard time defining ourselves exactly. i can identify one theme running through the posts in this thread: sensible people with real relationships and their feet on the ground, getting fed-up with a certain lack of common sense and emotional dislocation from others.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

A primer on UN resolutions. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw says the coalition is hypocritical in its attempt to enforce UN resolutions against Iraq, but not against Israel. Jack Straw needs to bone up on the difference between various types of UN resolutions (not to mention the political agendas behind the advancement of various resolutions).

I wrote about the differences between resolutions on Iraq and Israel last month. If you have an email address for FM Straw, please pass along the URL.

(Cross-posted to the Command Post op-ed page.)

UPDATE: Oh for God's sake, would somebody please sit Straw down and feed him a few facts? Never mind - apparently Bush is serving Israel up on a plate to provide cover for Tony Blair, our esteemed allies France and Russia get to direct the "road map" after all, and Mr. Terje "video? video? who's got the video?" Larsen gets to put in his two cents.

(links via LGF comment thread)

The view from 8th Avenue. Really beautiful sunset today. NYC has been having wonderful weather after a very cold month. Yesterday I walked over to the Hudson and walked up the bikepath to the new Hudson River Park and then up to the Boat Basin. Then over to Fairway and some groceries.

More war-related news. I'm pouring most of the really hot items into Command Post. These are juicy tidbits with more shelf life:

Protest Warrior inflitrates antiwar marches and comes back with great photos. They also have a line of t-shirts and bumperstickers.

Speaking of printed Iraq war ephemera, ever wonder what US propaganda leaflets look like?

Via Sullivan: why American Catholics have no problem breaking with the Pope over the war.

Official statements from the Democratic National Committee, specifically Daschle, Pelosi, Kennedy, Biden, Levin, Frost.

Did you know the USA is the only nation that has ever asked the UN permission to go to war?

Another blog round-up. Eve Tushnet dissects the commodification of social identity. Specifically "crunchy conservatism" and "rocknroll conservatism."

Via Oxblog, hawkish American leftists - who'da thunk it?

Gary Farber informs us that Osama's niece is trying to launch a singing career. (I would question her timing but I suppose now is better than a year and a half ago.)

Stomach hurting level funny, or maybe I've just been up too late.

Islamofascism.

In a speech that he gave at Columbia University, Umberto Eco spelled out fourteen features that he considered were typical of Eternal Fascism (which he also calls Ur-Fascism ); adding however this explanatory detail: " These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it."

The author then goes on to relate each of these features to traditional Islam.

It comes around. Shmuley Boteach notes that more Americans are experiencing what it usually feels like to be Jewish in Europe.

When I lived in England for 11 years serving as rabbi at Oxford University, I became familiar with the practice of more than a few British Jews removing their kippot while at university, and later while at work in London, for fear of being discriminated against by superiors or attacked by anti-Semites. But who would have thought that one could be a citizen of the most powerful nation in the history of the world and still have to hide the tee-shirt with the Statue of Liberty while standing under the Arc de Triomphe?

Boteach then draws a parallel between Jews and Americans:

In asking King Ahasuerus for the authority to slaughter all the Jews in the ancient Persian empire, [Haman] says: "There exists a people, dispersed and scattered among the nations, in all the provinces of your kingdom. And yet their values are entirely different from everyone else's ."

Jewish singularity, Jewish peculiarity, a refusal to blend in and be like everybody else is what foments hatred in Haman's breast. Why do you Jews hold yourselves aloof? Why don't you just become like everybody else? Do you think you're better than us? Add to this the Jewish penchant for promoting social justice and a steadfast commitment to espousing morality and you have the perfect formula for hating the foreigner who not only rejects your way of life while living in your country but makes you feel inferior, to boot. . . .

You see the same antipathy from Europeans directed at George W. Bush. Before Bush, Europeans could look at Americans and speak of a common Western heritage. But along came Bush and upset the whole applecart. He divided the world into good guys and bad guys, those who are with us and those who are against us. He threw God into his language at every opportunity. And by doing so he made the Europeans feel less worthy. Who is this guy? Does he think he's better than us? What, we're not moral? Heck, we're better than him. He's a warmonger, and we are men of peace.

(via Jeff Jarvis, who has a whole lot more to say on the subject)

Beloved Sofer Al Kirschfeld Dies At 100. I never heard of this guy, but now I'm going to be scrutinizing the Torah every time I get an aliyah in this town.

Monday, March 24, 2003

IDF radio says that the US informed the Israeli government about the hits. It is still unclear whether those were real or fake(?) launchers, and whether they were Scuds or other.
Israel senior military source is quoted as saying that although the Allied forces have captured the H-2 and H-3 airfields, there are still "problematic" Iraqi forces in the area, thus the level of alert remains high in Israel.

Israeli reporters to the back of the bus. Caroline Glick - a senior reporter for the Jerusalem Post - had to pass through Kuwait to get to the front in Iraq. Kuwait had issued a statement to the international press corps that anyone transmitting reports to the Israeli media would face criminal prosecution.

Read what Glick had to go through to take her rightful place alongside other international correspondents in Iraq. She ends with this observation:

. . . Kuwait hates the Palestinians. The Kuwaitis kicked the Palestinians out of their country. The way I was treated had nothing to do with Beit El or Netzarim. It has to do with Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and the Bible.

As I joined the 2-7 mechanized infantry battalion on Tuesday night, I realized that it was the first time I had felt safe in 48 hours. On Sunday afternoon, as I felt my body melting in the oppressive desert heat and its odor borne of five days in the heat and dust and wind without a shower wafted into my nostrils and shocked me, I understood how I would know when peace has come.

Peace will be upon us when I can feel as safe and welcome at a five-star Kuwaiti hotel as I felt in the Kuwaiti desert with the US army.

Obscuring their dog tags: Ha'aretz reports that Jewish soldiers in the UK's fighting forces have been allowed to erase mention of their religion on their dog-tags, fearing they would be executed if they were captured. There are some 15 Jewish soldiers among the 45,000 British fighters currently in action in the U.S.-led campaign.

European anti-semitism watch. Switzerland gives us the usual official apologetics for terrorists and comparisons of Sharon to Hitler. But France always beats out all the competition in this category: antiwar demonstrators stab two Jewish boys. A small Sephardi synagogue in a mostly-Arab French suburb has been attacked twice.

“There were friendships before” — before the start of the intifada in Israel 22 years ago, before 9-11, Ginette says. Jews would shop in markets alongside Arabs, who also have roots in northern Africa. Then “sporadic attacks” started. Ginette was roughed up twice. The couple’s car was damaged. Their son was attacked “many, many times,” his kipa knocked off his head.

Then, on Yom Kippur eve, two weeks after 9-11, a car drove by the synagogue and Molotov cocktails were thrown through the synagogue’s front door. There were no injuries. In the August 2002 attack, as the Arab violence in Israel escalated, two unidentified youths broke into the building’s basement one night and set it ablaze. Again, no injuries, but the basement was destroyed.

Will the French bureaucracy wake up? France's minister of education, Luc Ferry, claims to be willing to denounce anti-semitism when he sees it. We're waiting to hear from you, Luc.

Meanwhile, EU parlimentarian Francois Zimeray continues to conduct a lonely but successful battle to investigate Chris Patton's blank check to Arafat and his PA .

UPDATE: Paris mayor condemns latest attack on Jews. A commentor points out that "Mayor Delanoe was himself stabbed with a knife last October by a man the Paris police described as a "39-year-old devout muslim".The attacker was thought to have been incensed by Delanoe's homosexuality."

The Jewish way in rock & roll: Richard A. Macales reviews a UK professor's book, Rock ’n’ Roll Jews, discovering "that Jews were, and continue to be, major players in the rock industry. For every “name” performer, like Bette Midler, there are hundreds of behind-the-scenes Jewish figures who have enabled rock to thrive."

Irving Berlin, who popularized Tin Pan Alley music (the forerunner of rock), was a commercially successful role model for many of the pioneer Jewish rock ’n’ rollers.

The heroes are not the ones we typically think of...

Rather, they are the obscure and often tormented lives of songwriters with names like Doc Pomus (R&B songwriter for Elvis), who was confined to a wheelchair due to childhood polio.

Other personalities in the book include Los Angeles’ own enigmatic producer, Phil Spector. The still-active Spector, who was recently arrested on suspicion of murder at his Alhambra home, penned the hit “To Know Him is To Love Him,” based on the inscription on the tombstone of his father who took his own life. Another interesting story is told of Lou Reed, the urban music legend of “Take A Walk on the Wild Side” fame. He wrote racy lyrics at a time when radio stations were fearful of having their licenses lifted by the Federal Communications Commission. We also find colorful sketches of Monterey Rock Music Festival maven Lou Adler, but not his co-producer, Holocaust survivor Bill Graham. And then there are the “black lyrics” of co-writers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller.

... The author explains why Neil Sedaka became one of the first outwardly Jewish performers in rock’s early years. Sedaka was the antithesis of the male sexual predator macho artist and usually performed on the piano in classical music garb. His publicist always made it a point to remind everyone that Sedaka was trained on classical piano by none other than the virtuoso Artur Rubinstein. This fact has even been mentioned on the TV show “Jeopardy.”

Only in the “counterculture” 1960s did other obviously Jewish performers surface. The nonethnic Tom and Jerry of the 1950s became the very Jewish Simon and Garfunkel of the 1960s and ’70s. Billy Joel, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is another rock idol of the new type. Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow represent a middle-of-the-road musical sound and a very Jewish persona.

Paradoxically, the two groups that bemoan “satanic” rock music the most — Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews — both use this medium to effectively communicate the human relationship to God. For trivia buffs, Norman Greenbaum is the Jewish singer-songwriter behind one of the most popular Christian rock songs of all-time, “Spirit in the Sky.” Yet, he never converted to Christianity. He just liked the sound, words and imagery.

Sunday, March 23, 2003

The "Command Post" has moved here. Please adjust your bookmarks. And if you have not visited yet, you have been missing the most up-to-date news on the war, so go now.

Several thousands of Israeli Arabs have joined their brethren in the PA to protest the war in Iraq.

IDF radio: Berlin police arrested 6 Muslims, from Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia, suspected of planning a suicide attack against Israelis/Jews or Americans.

Behind closed doors. The Jewish Week has a story about a Muslim journalist who inflitrated extremist Muslim groups in France, and now has a price on his head.

Until he dropped out two days before his book My ‘Brothers’ the Assassins was published, Sifaoui lived with the Islamic militants of Paris 12 hours a day and prayed with them five times daily. He watched them raising money on the streets of Paris and recruiting future terrorists in jails and in mosques. He traveled with them to London and Madrid. Sometimes he openly taped his conversations, sometimes he used a hidden camera and microphone.

What would happen if he were discovered? Sifaoui makes a slashing motion across his throat. “They would have killed me,” he says.

Sifaoui knew the risk he was taking but says it was worth it. Would he do it again? “Oui,” he responds, “because we all are threatened by terrorists,” not only journalists posing as sympathizers.

Brave man and righteous Muslim.

Meanwhile LGF passes along a story about a Jewish reporter infiltrating the Muslim Student Association at Queensborough Community College.

More blog round-up. Oxblog fisks a witless NYTimes editorial about war casualties.

Aaron's Rantblog reprints Bob Dylan's "The Neighborhood Bully," a pro-Israel song from his album Infidels, with lots of embedded links.

. . . Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Every empire that's enslaved him is gone,
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.
He's made a garden of paradise in the desert sand,
In bed with nobody, under no one's command.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The Head Heeb reminds us of the venerable Jewish community of Cairo, Egypt - home to both Maimonides and Isaac Luria.

Kehaar over at Silflay Hraka has rounded up some links pro and con on drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

Diane reflects on the blog community.

I am a sort-of-hawk (at least, conditionally pro-war), and I am communicating with a Baghdadi from New York City; an Israeli puts up a mirror site for this Iraqi; the guy in Baghdad wishes an Israeli woman and her family well while he is about to be shocked and awed by my country's unparalleled ability to wage war; she puts up a website from the IDF Home Command for him to download a PDF survival guide in Arabic.

Yes.

Jews in the military.

. . . . as a lone candle flickered in a tent at Camp Commando near the Iraqi border, one of four Jewish soldiers at the evening Sabbath service began to cry when Rabbi Irving Elson put his hands on his shoulders and prayed. “Be strong and of courage and trust in the Lord,” Rabbi Elson said, quoting from the Book of Joshua.

There are between 5000 and 8000 Jews in the US military, and about 1500 now in the Gulf. Jewish organizations have organized to provide them with chaplains (there are 4) and kosher-for-Pesach food. Rabbi Elson, who has been traveling throughout the Kuwaiti desert the last few weeks to conduct weekday and Sabbath services for the Jewish soldiers, described the services last Sabbath as “awesome.”

“I went with the Seventh Marines [who] … are literally in the tip of the spear,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We could see the lights of Iraq from our ‘synagogue.’ Every prayer seems to have extra meaning out here, in particular prayers such as Sim Shalom [bring peace] and Hashkiveinu [a prayer for God’s protecting love].”

There is also a listserv for Jewish families with members in the military.

Armed masked thugs attack major American cities. Even Justin Raimondo is seriously fed up with the antiwar protesters.

Masked thugs stopped cars, and tried to drag people out. These "peaceful" protesters had quite an array of weapons: stun guns, crowbars, brass knuckles, and other instruments of mayhem were confiscated from arrested demonstrators. They deliberately blocked streets, tied up the entire city for 8 hours, broke windows, threw rocks, and wreaked havoc, acting like the hooligans they are. Some of them wore masks, demonstrating that they are also cowards. News crews were assaulted with spraypaint, rocks, and other objects.

A milder version of these tactics were replicated in Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York City, and elsewhere, but San Francisco was, naturally, the worst. Over 1,000 people were arrested in the City by the Bay, but most were, unfortunately, released. Shouting their defiance – "We’ll be back! We’ll be back!" – they are still out there, as I write [10:00 PM, March 20], moving in groups from intersection to intersection, creating as much chaos as possible. They are organized, they are violent, and they are nuts.

Well well well.

Kesher Talk

Friday, March 28, 2003

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Monday, March 24, 2003

Sunday, March 23, 2003

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