Kesher Talk: 07/20/2003

Friday, July 25, 2003

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead Update. Who's happy? Check out Joe Katzman's Carnival of the Obituaries. After some consternation at seeing the Hussein Boyz defended by the usual suspects, he counts at least 25 self-described "liberals" who think their "sudden assumption of room temperature" was just fine. (Some new titillating details.)

UPDATE: Are we . . . neo-liberals?

Roger . . . Roger . . . wake up, Roger.

Mad Mel. I had been following this story for the last few months, so most of this isn't news to me, but it's good to have the whole chronology in one place, by a credible inside source (Paula Fredriksen, a highly regarded scholar of the New Testament, was on the interfaith committee that reviewed Gibson's script). (If you aren't registered with TNR, Amygdala has a workaround, or you can read the entire article here.)

According to the TNR article, Mel Gibson's movie about the crucifixion of Jesus makes no attempt to be historically accurate and is based on the same Vatican II-rejecting theology that his father subscribes to. If the final result follows the script that Fredriksen and her Catholic and Jewish colleagues reviewed, it will be a cinematic version of a traditional Passion Play. Throughout Europe for 1000 years, Passion Plays reliably inflamed hatred of Jews which was expressed in mob violence (as Fredriksen puts it, "dress rehearsals for the Holocaust").

This won't happen in America in the 21st century, but that's not the point. Imagine that Robert Byrd, for example, financed a movie about the Civil War that claimed to be historically accurate, yet referred to discredited eugenics theories and featured stereotypes of blacks that have historically precipitated lynchings. Such a movie would not result in lynchings of African-Americans here and now in the US. But it could certainly influence the kind of individual who goes on killing sprees against minorities. Certainly the intentions of its producer can be legitimately questioned, and declarations of his love and respect for African-Americans is bound to sound a bit disingenuous.

And as Fredriksen points out, although this film is not dangerous to Jews in America,

I shudder to think how The Passion will play once its subtitles shift from English to Polish, or Spanish, or French, or Russian. When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.

Tacitus - whose blog and commenters I respect - tends to have a blind spot about these things. He is airily dismissing the issue, apparently not having learned much from the "blood libel" thread, where he eventually grudgingly admitted his critics had a few points. I think he doesn't take the physical danger seriously, and views our anxiety as a lot of whiny political correctness. But there is such a thing as murderous violence motivated by hatred of a group, and it is the height of naivete or willful blindness to deny that the same images and lies can precipitate a new round of violence.

UPDATE: More on Mel's "traditionalist Catholic" movement," and even more clarification that Gibson follows in his dad's footsteps. Also, the report from the Catholic scholars group, who make it very clear that they

called together by expert staff members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League to review a version of the screenplay of the Mel Gibson film, The Passion.

and that their

evaluation was founded upon magisterial teaching documents of the Catholic Church, which were extensively quoted in a four page appendix in our eighteen-page confidential evaluation. Suggestions that our criteria for evaluating the screenplay were not authoritative Catholic teaching compromise the magisterium's absolute rejection of the long-lived "Christ-killers" libel against Jews, a rejection enshrined in the Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate and subsequent Vatican and episcopal conference documents.

UPDATE: Tacitus links, and they're discussing it a bit over there.

UPDATE: However, I don't think it's anywhere near this big a deal.

Jews in odd places: Argentina: Ain't the Internet grand? Were it not for the net, Judaism in Argentina might not survive.

“I live in a small town in Chaco province,” said Adriana Krapivka. “We are only five non-assimilated Jews there, my family. If it wasn’t for the Internet, how could I be in touch with Judaism?”

Thursday, July 24, 2003

"It's Tommy this an' Tommy that . . . " The Sarge is rightfully pissed at pundits from all wings whose care for the military begins and ends with their political usefulness.

I don't believe that a good portion of the Left cares one whit about anyone in the military. Well, they do care, but only as a means of attacking their political opponents. When's the last time you saw a lefty blog express concern for our welfare outside the context of attacking the President or his Administration? It doesn't happen all that often because they're partisans, and partisans don't care about people unless it helps them look better or makes their opponents look bad.

Not that the Right is much better. . . . The Right likes to make us out as these mythical people of unquestioning devotion, rock-solid patriotism and heroic determination in the face of adversity. The military, knowing a good thing when it sees it, presents us in that manner and many in the military buy into the myth because they were sold on it prior to coming in. It makes for a fascinating schizophrenic society, but that's the subject of another post. The problem is, the Right will just as easily sell us down the river as the Left if they sense we are not living up to the fiction in their heads.

Read the whole thing. Comments too.

Baghdad 2003 = Prague 1990 Dept. A few months ago I wrote:

Think Prague in 1990. I have a feeling all the young dot.commers who got laid off two years ago are going to converge on Baghdad over the next six months. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

Some people said I was being overly optimistic, but the emergence of Western entrepreneurship in Iraq is right on schedule. Check out the Baghdad Bulletin. It's published by a gaggle of 20-something Anglosphere expats, and it seems to be an attempt to impartially deliver local news. And there's this guy and these folks, and plenty of Iraqis - locals and returning expats - are starting or reviving businesses as well.

Next stop: the Palestininian territories. Far-fetched? No. The Iraqis and the Palestinian Arabs are the most middle-class Westernized entrepreneurial Arab groups in the Middle East. We are not "imposing Western culture" on them, we are helping them remove obstacles to doing what they are already very good at.

Let a thousand "MacDonals" bloom.

Tenacious conspiracy theories Dept. Cointelpro reports that, even though all doubts about the USS Libery incident are finally laid to rest as a result of the NSA finally releasing their archives (and what took them so long?), the usual suspects are still getting traction.

Just like Jenin, and Muhammed al-Dura, and Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, and the number of Israelis who died in the WTC attack, and IDF beatings of Palestinians, and [insert your favorite blame-the-Jews conspiracy theory here].

Irresponsible press Dept.. You would think the press would have learned to stop misquoting Paul Wolfowitz. But they haven't.

But Reuters can top that. They completely rewrote a journalist's story to say the opposite of what she wrote, and kept her byline on it.

Jews and GWB: The President has a new Jewish Liasion - Tevi Troy.

Troy, who was sworn in Monday, will retain his domestic policy portfolio but will also assume responsibility for dialoguing with the Jewish community on domestic and foreign affairs issues. He replaces Adam Goldman, who had served as liaison since Bush came to office but who announced in the spring that he was leaving the White House for the private sector.

Troy, who is Orthodox, previously served the Bush administration as deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor. Troy was also a policy director for Attorney General John Ashcroft when Ashcroft was a Republican senator from Missouri.

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Over 38 need not apply. This is outrageous. But typical. You should see how many social outings groups are advertised on Craig's List with the caveat that everyone has to be under 40. I'm not talking about dating - certainly people have the right to include age in their criteria for a romantic partners (although the guys looking for women 10 years younger than they are are dreaming). I'm talking about movie groups, outings groups, dinner party groups.

If you're right out of college, I can understand that you would be intimidated by someone 20 years older than you. But I think people should have gotten over that by the time they're, oh, 28?

It's public information. Find out who is giving what donations to which candidates. (For example, Garry Trudeau gave $3000 to Howard Dean.) (Why am I not surprised?)

Jews in odd places: Canada: Canada is counting Jews - and possibly even accurately:

UIA Federations Canada, the umbrella organization for 11 federated Jewish communities across the country, has paid about $300,000 to the federal census office, Statistics Canada, for the detailed numbers on the size, shape, age and other variables for communities across Canada.

Dubbed the National Jewish Demographic Study, the project constitutes “the largest comprehensive demographic study ever undertaken of the Jewish community in Canada,” according to research coordinator Charles Shahar.

Unlike the 2000 U.S. census, the 2001 Canadian census asked citizens to identify both their religion and ethnic background. The two variables will allow demographers to determine the number of Jews with greater accuracy, Shahar said.

(Alright, so Jews are not so odd in Canada. Most of my family is there. However, I'm stuck with that title for this ongoing series of posts, so you will all just have to live with it.)

Why I switched to Mozilla. This article sums it up. I had abandoned Mozilla when there were so many bugs in 6.0 for Mac. I was using IE until I finally migrated to OSX last month (I'm not what you would call an "early adopter"). Netscape 7.1 runs great on Jaguar (except for a bug in the bookmark search function, which I expect they will fix soon) and has so many cool features that I took the plunge. For example, the new Blogger interface is very user-friendly on Mozilla, but looks entirely different on IE for Mac. The bookmark management, tabs, all the fine-tuning you can do in the preferences, context-sensitive menus - all wonderful. It's standard-compliant and cross-platform. What's not to like?

I can think of only one thing IE does better: I can hit Command-up arrow and Command-down arrow to jump to the top or bottom of a page. Mozilla doesn't have this key sequence. Yet.

Why I don't use Safari: I depend on my bookmarks. I like to file things in carefully designated topic categories (I still have meticulously organized Eudora email files dating back to 1995, likewise 2 file cabinets full of paper Stuff). When Safari lets me import and export bookmarks at will, I'll consider using it.

UPDATE: Mozilla is at a turning point. Here's the dish:

1. Netscape the web browser/suite is dead. RIP 2. All Netscape employees have either been laid off or reassigned to another AOL TW division. 3. There are no longer any AOL employees directly paid to work on Mozilla. 4. The non-profit and independent Mozilla Foundation has been started and will control Mozilla development. Notice the new web site at www.mozilla.org 5. Mozilla is NOT dead, far from it. 6. AOL TW will donate $2 million over the next 2 years. Since the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, companies (including AOL TW) can continue to donate money basically for free since they can use it to reduce their taxes. AOL will also continue to support Mozilla in areas such as domain names, servers, bandwidth, etc. 7. IBM and Sun, among other companies, have said they will continue to support Mozilla. 8. A good portion of the former Netscape developers will continue to work on Mozilla. Some have even gotten hired by companies like IBM and Sun to continue to work on Mozilla. Depending on donations, the Mozilla Foundation will be able to keep some Mozilla developers on full-time pay.

I don't care whether it's called Mozilla or Netscape as long as it has the features I like. And if another browser supercedes it in features I want, I'll use that one.

UPDATE: I downloaded and played a bit with Camino and Firebird. Neither are ready for prime-time. Both duplicate some but not all of Netscape 7.1's features with an Aqua interface (making it more superficially OSX-like, for those who care). My suggestion: keep 7.1 preference settings and features, and even add more if you want (but make sure they work and that I can turn off the ones I don't want), junk all the functions except the browser, rebuild it on top of the fastest OSX compatible engines and whatnot if necessary, make the interface Aqua to the extent that it's not annoying (I find the Aqua interface very annoying in general - it was the major factor keeping me from moving to OSX for 6 months), allow any importing and exporting of any bookmarks from any other browser (open-source, remember?), make sure all the optional plug-ins and extensions work with each other. And add key sequences to jump to the top and bottom of a page.

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Ding Dong, the witch is dead. Yes! [pumping arm in the air] (For anyone who's been living under a rock for the past 2 years: these were bad people.I mean, really bad people.)

UPDATE: Apparently some people have been living under rocks. Well, okay, they knew Q and U were despicable torturing monsters, but nobody can be as eeeeevil as the Bushitler (TM).

How would you like it if U and Q showed up at your doorstep and announced "It's payback time!"

"Americans, they do not do things by halves. They knock you off, then they have a slide show to explain how they did it."

In new tape, Uday and Qusay confirm they are dead. And Saddam is encouraged to give the eulogy at the funeral.

Same old double standard. Unlike any other liberated victims of totalitarian oppression, for some reason Human Rights Watch thinks Iraqis won't be "impartial" enough to sit in judgment of Saddam and his henchmen. Needless to say, some Iraqis think otherwise. (via Damian Penny)

Cool stuff. The world's biggest sand dune. It's 1200 feet high and called Big Daddy.

A handy chart on when to use which communications media, in 2003 and 2023. (via BookBlog.)

Robert Ballard, shipwreck archeologist extraordinaire, is investigating an unusually intact Byzantine wreck in the Black Sea. And you can watch it all live online. (via Cronaca.)

Artistic collaboration with insects and a Java panorama applet for MC Escher art. (via Points of Departure)

Jews in odd places: Argentina: Can you dance the tango? It is a requirement in Argentina, so no wonder that Jews there have a "romance with the dance."

From playing guitar, piano and accordion to writing music, singing and dancing, Jews have had a close tie to the tango music that was then emerging in the Buenos Aires area. For many, tango simply provided the possibility of work.

The Jewish contribution to tango’s development was so rich that tango researchers wrote a book entitled, “Tango, a History with Jews.”

Now, nine Argentine Jews have formed a new tango group to honor these roots. The group, Inspiracion, the first Argentine Jewish tango orchestra, made their debut at an April 30 concert in Buenos Aires sponsored by B’nai B’rith and the Holocaust Foundation.

However, not everyone appreciated the idea. One Jewish grandmother of 63 — who preferred not to publish her name — said she saw nothing inherently Jewish about the group, except for one instrumental song called “Zeide.” “This is purely commercial and discriminatory,” she said. “They perform tango; the show has nothing related to Judaism. It’s like creating a group of Jewish dentists."

Monday, July 21, 2003

Comparing occupations. Some notes on the fighting and attacks that occurred in Germany through 1947. Parallels to Baathist insurgency? You bet.

That link via Pathetic Earthlings, which fisks a critique of the Iraq occupation. What's amusing is that the critique cites McArthur's occupation of Japan as a good model, while maintaining that we've already overstayed our welcome. PE points out:

We took Baghdad on April 9, 2003. It's now July 18. That's about eighteen weeks. [Actually more like 15 weeks. - ed.] And, apparently, the United States needs to leave yesterday.

We took Japan in September 1945. We handed over power to civilian authorities in 1952. - about 360 weeks later. The way this cat figures it, we should have left Japan around Christmas Eve, 1945.

Support Daniel Pipes. Please take a moment to sign a petition, or write your representatives urging confirmation of Daniel Pipes for a position on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. If you are undecided, this site has plenty of links to information on the issue.

Speaking truth to power. Dan Drezner links to some coverage of the Palestinian Authority's treatment of dissidents. This needs to be given wide publicity (and more attention from groups like Amnesty), but I wish Drezner would mention - in addition to intellectuals like Nusseibeh - economic dissidents such as Omar Karsou and the tremendous impact of economic reforms. I still maintain that when the history is written of the democratization, eradication of the terrorist mindset, and subsequent establishing of the State of Palestine, the actions of Omar Karsou and Salam Fayyad will loom much larger than those of Sari Nusseibeh.

That said, anyone sympathetic to the establishment of a viable society in the Palestinian territories - whether as a separate state, part of Israel, or part of Jordan - needs to join Daniel in putting the spotlight on the small minority of Palestinian leaders who continue to advocate for nonviolent resistance and negotiation. And no, that doesn't include the motley crew of NGOs and Western agitators who claim to advocate nonviolence but who in fact protect and encourage jihadists, and who don't have the political or emotional maturity to tell the difference.

Latest news on the ground. The Samizdata blog has an anonymous British correspondent in Iraq.
Dispatch I.
Dispatch II.

And Trent Telenko has correspondence from a Special Forces soldier in Iraq.

The 20 greatest American MEN in history. Meryl fisks Right Wing News' list of the 20 greatest Americans in history, and I agree that if you end up with a list with no women on it, you need to take a deep breath and review your choices.

This is not affirmative action or political correctness. This is just noticing what's in front of your nose. It's also a typical example of the kind of selective memory that Women's Studies, African American Studies, etc. were designed to correct. Whether or not those disciplines have since been completely captured by ideology is besides the point. Bringing to light history which has been ignored by the mainstream enriches our understanding of our common past, as long as the studies are subject to the same academic rigor as the mainstream.

I can understand the inclusion of Reagan, because of his role in precipitating the end of the Cold War, but I certainly wouldn't rank him at the top. MLK should be ranked higher. And I don't see why any generals should make the cut. Individual generals don't matter to world events as much as boys like to think. Whoever made sure that the War College has the right curriculum or that the army had the best supply chain probably had a greater influence.

I would agree with the inclusion of Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks for sure, and Gloria Steinem can certainly stand in for the 10-12 seminal figures of the feminist resurgence of the 70s, of which she was one, although I would argue that Betty Friedan was more of a pioneer. Good job, Meryl.

This week's Pintele Yid recommendation - For our gentile friends and Jews who want to rediscover their heritage - recommending quintessentially Jewish cultural works (books, TV specials, CDs, Torah teachers, poets, websites, and more) which transport you inside a Jewish skin and show you the world through Jewish eyes.

Last week's recommendation:
Week 2 recommendation.
Introduction to the series and first recommendation.

The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz.
Sometimes your own culture is best illuminated by dialogue with another. This comparative religion study, travelogue, sociological reportage, and personal journal all rolled into one, by a somewhat sardonic poet and English professor, chronicles the historic 1990 meeting between a delegation of idiosyncratic American Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama, who - faced with exile and persecution of his people - wanted to know how the Jews had survived similar experiences.

The ensuing cultural exchange galvanized the Jewish leaders to make Jewish mysticism more accessible, an effort which has had a profound effect on American Judaism over the past 15 years. Kamanetz also writes about his conversations with notable Jewish Buddhists such as Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, and Pema Chodron, as they recall their negative reactions to the Judaism of their youth.

Not to give short shrift to the Tibetan struggle, but this book makes my list for its keen and affectionate portrait of contemporary liberal American Jewry and some of its leaders (especially the sui generis Rabbi Zalman Schachter).

Nearly every major religion has developed a tension between its exoteric forms -- accessible to all practitioners -- and its esoteric secrets, which are restricted to a small band of initiates, if only to prevent the misuse of that esoterica. In a series of remarkable discussions, the Dalai Lama and these two learned, ebullient cabalists, Rabbis Schachter and Omer-Man, compare notes on the character of meditation, its structures, rhythms and traditions. To read these chapters is something like walking through a mythic garden . . . .

"The Jew in the Lotus" is the kind of book that seems, at first glance, to have been written for a carefully delimited audience: Jews, Buddhists and Jewish Buddhists. But that is an illusion. It is really a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarizing them.

Take that, Madonna.

(Another diary of the meeting in Dharamsala.)

Week 5.
Week 6.
Week 7.
Week 8.

Sunday, July 20, 2003

Happy Birthday! "In Context" is one year old. A great blog, which should not be news for any of you by now. Keep up the good work, Lynn.

How to lose friends and influence nobody. Tim Blair notes a news item:

A major indigenous community has lobbied John Howard to stay on indefinitely as Prime Minister, dismissing the left of politics as "clueless" and calling for a new alliance between Aborigines and conservatives.

Maybe they got tired of being patronized.

Tim also notes that New Statesman book reviewer Stephen Pollard has left the magazine because of their increasing moobattiness.

Tim also has a long comment thread about the teapot tempest "Niger uranium" issue, leading off with some quotes from Mark Steyn's usual acerbic 2 cents. Like everyone else, Steyn has some advice for the Democratic party:

One reason why the President, in defiance of last week’s Spectator, is all but certain to win re-election is the descent into madness of his opponents. They’ve let post-impeachment, post-chad-dangling bitterness unhinge them to the point where, given a choice between investigating the intelligence lapses that led to 9/11 and the intelligence lapses that led to a victorious war in Iraq, they stampede for the latter. Iraq was a brilliant campaign fought with minimal casualties, 11 September was a humiliating failure by government to fulfill its primary role of national defence. But Democrats who complained that Bush was too slow to act on doubtful intelligence re 9/11 now profess to be horrified that he was too quick to act on doubtful intelligence re Iraq. This is not a serious party.

. . . Struggling to keep up, John Kerry has said that Bush ‘misled every one of us’, even though the Senator himself has been warning about Saddam’s weapons for years and voted in favour of the Iraq war months before the State of the Union or Colin Powell’s UN presentations or anything else.

[URL inserted by me. - ed]

New times, new alliances. The growing Jewish-American and Indian-American alliance is bearing fruit.

Indians and Jews share "a passionate commitment to respect for others, for the rule of law and for democracy," Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, told the jubilant crowd after the House vote. "And lately we have been drawn together by our joint fight against mindless, vicious, fanatic Islamic terrorism."

In recent months, pro-Israel and pro-India lobbyists successfully worked together to gain the Bush administration's approval for Israel to sell four Phalcon early warning radar planes to India for about $1 billion, a deal that has alarmed the Pakistani government. Three years ago, the United States blocked a nearly identical proposal for Israel to sell radar planes to China. The same coalition of groups -- including the U.S.-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), America Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) -- is now seeking U.S. approval for India to purchase Israel's Arrow ballistic missile defense system.

This growing rapport mirrors a similar realignment between India and Israel.

Although both countries gained independence from Britain at about the same time in 1947-48, they were wary of each other for decades. India, as leader of the non-aligned movement, had close ties to Egypt and the East Bloc. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, India has become one of Israel's largest business partners, with more than $1 billion in trade and many high-tech joint ventures.

Ironically, the collapse of the Cold War alignment freed up not only India, but Russia herself. According to Stratfor, Israel and Russia are teaming up to supply crude oil to East Asia, via an Israeli pipeline that let's Russian tankers bypass the Suez Canal.

Though Israeli-Russian relations during the Cold War can only be described as hostile, the two states now see themselves as partners in many respects. About 1 million Russian Jews have immigrated to Israel since the Cold War ended, shoring up cultural and economic links between the two states. The war in Chechnya also has given Russian authorities an appreciation for Israel's security concerns, and the two harbor the same fears about Islamist militants.

In the post-Sept. 11 environment, Russia and Israel also have discovered that they share a new rival: Saudi Arabia. Various Saudi factions support both the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories and the Chechens in southern Russia. The Kremlin suspects a Saudi hand in the recent suicide bombings in Moscow as well. Both Israel and Russia consider al Qaeda a scourge to be uprooted and eradicated, and -- like the United States -- have not been surprised to discover that al Qaeda's financial paper trail leads back to Saudi Arabia.

It's amazing what a little global terrorism will do to realign national interests.

For the past 20 years, the Persian Gulf states -- especially Saudi Arabia -- have held a de facto monopoly over crude supplies to East Asia, allowing them to charge an "Asian premium" that at times has ranged as high as $3 a barrel. In 2002, some 40 percent of Saudi Arabia's 7.0 million bpd in exports went to Asian consumers. That surcharge alone netted Riyadh a tidy $1 billion to $2 billion in supplemental profit.

Saudi Arabia hopefully spent the income wisely, because Riyadh won't be seeing that cash again. With the onset of Tipline operations, Russian crude can compete directly with Saudi supplies anywhere in Asia. The Tipline's existing capacity will quadruple Russia's presence in Asian markets, assuming no additional upgrades -- which are almost a foregone conclusion.

Heh. (via LGF comments.)

UPDATE: Allison points out that Indians and Israelis are doing some high-tech business deals too. (When someone writes a history of the Indian/Hindu-Israeli/Jewish relationship, it will be interesting to see how much of this shift was a result of all the Jewish and Indian nerds mixing it up in Silicon Valley. Many of the successful high-tech entrepreneurs are one or the other.)

Kesher Talk

Friday, July 25, 2003

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Monday, July 21, 2003

Sunday, July 20, 2003

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