Where were you on November 22, 1963? Jeff Jarvis links to a
meditation on the events of 40 years ago (and read the comments too).
I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.
I am three years older than Terry, but I identify more with him than the boomer stereotype he describes. Perhaps that is because I am female and didn't have the Vietnam draft hanging over me. Perhaps it's because I grew up reading Robert Heinlein novels. Who knows.
Anyway - where was I on November 22, 1963? I was in 4th grade at Walnut Hill Elementary School in Dallas, TX. It's still there - a pretty mission-style building with a red tile roof. I stopped by when I visited Dallas for my 30th high school reunion a few years ago. It was hot, and the end of the school day. Doors were open and adults and children going in and out. I walked right into the auditorium - dusky red upholstered pop-up seats and heavily varnished wood floors - and immediately flashed back 40 years. Here was where I lost the school spelling bee on "awry." Here was where we were all assembled on November 22nd, 1963, and the principal explained to us that the President had been shot (he hadn't been confirmed dead at that point) and we were all sent home. Those were the days when a kid could walk home from school alone, which I did.
I don't remember much about the next few days, except that the TV was on continuously with news coverage and all the grownups were preoccupied. I do not remember seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. I do remember the endless funeral procession, and finding the whole thing very tedious.
For me, the Kennedy assassination was significant because I grew up in Dallas, the scene of the crime. This was the first assassination of any American politician in decades, much less a sitting president. The condemnations and analyses of Dallas were viscious. For the next five years at least it was shameful to be from Dallas. Just living there at the time of the assassination you shared the taint.
Days after President John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were gunned down here in November 1963, Brigadier General Herbert Hall, retired in Tucson, folded a large certificate into an envelope and mailed it to the mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell. Over the words "Honorary Citizen of Dallas," a title given to him by city fathers during the Korean War days of 1951, Hall had scrawled: "Returned with shame and sorrow."
The Kennedy assassination shocked the world, but it shamed Dallas. The city immediately felt the sting of the nation's revulsion. It was scorned as a nest of rightist bigots and Kennedy haters, and even branded as somehow complicit in the president's death. For years afterward, Dallas, a brash, proud place that has always strained to hold its head a little higher than its Texas neighbors, treated its darkest days with a stunned denial and shrank from honoring the slain president.
I remember every time our family took a vacation, and my brother and I got to playing with some kids we met wherever we were, as kids do, someone would ask where we were from. "Um, America." "Yeah, I know.
Where in America?" "Um, Texas." "
Where in Texas?" (Muttered) "Um, Dallas." "Eeuuw. You people shot the President!"
(Maybe that's why I didn't buy into the boomer malaise. Not only was I a child of Holocaust refugees, I was also a native Dallasite. By the time I hit the politically and socially turbulent late 60s, I knew all about scapegoating and I had a mean bullshit detector. If anyone would like to get a statistical sample of Dallas kids and check out this hypothesis, let me know what you find out.)
I have heard vague references to the feelings of vulnerability of the Dallas Jewish community, especially after Ruby's murder of Oswald, but I don't remember my parents saying anything specific about it. They and their tight-knit group of Mittle European immigrants in the wholesale apparel business must have all been terrified, wondering if pogroms were about to erupt. After all, the assassination of a Nazi official by a Jew was the pretext for Kristallnacht. But I went back to school, everything settled down, and aside from the lingering despising of Dallas - which evaporated after the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations showed that such a thing could happen anywhere - everything went back to normal.
UPDATE: Gary - a mere five year old at the time -
also got impatient with the endless TV coverage.
Minyanim run amok. As dusk falls on Manhattan and I prepare to head downtown to the one-year anniversary potluck Shabbat dinner and davening at Kol Hakfar, let me share
this nice snapshot of the burgeoning of independent minyanim in America's most Jewish city. I am acquainted with everyone quoted in the article, including the author, enough to say hi to, so I guess I'm where it's happening. But it can happen in your town too, as Elie Kaunfer says:
This is not a New York-only phenomenon . . . Independent minyans can exist in most major urban areas where people are looking for spirited, independent prayer," he said, citing a list of new havurot and minyans including the "D.C. Minyan" in Washington, D.C.; Tiferet in Cambridge, Mass., and groups in Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
And Austin! The "Living Room Minyan" was just getting off the ground when I moved to NYC, and my friends tell me it's going strong. Let a thousand minyans bloom!
Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. I usually don't link to the same things as Instapundit because I assume everyone who reads KT also reads Instapundit. (Is there a blog reader who doesn't?) But this is so good I want to make sure you don't miss it:
James Lileks responds to Salam Pax's snide "letter to Bush" in the Guardian (which is quoted in Lileks' article). It's the last half of the column. I got pissed when I read Pax's letter, and James called him out far better than I could have (warning: there is a bit of profanity at the beginning).
UPDATE: LGF commented on this too. My post is now
really redundant. An LGF commenter
contributed an aphorism by Mark Twain:
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- Mark Twain
Yup.
UPDATE: Glenn has a
roundup of blog responses to Salam and Lileks.
I told you so Dept. After the revised schedule to transfer political power to an Iraqi government was announced I spent considerable time in several
blog comment threads maintaining that this did
not mean we were "cutting and running."
More evidence. Although I was incensed about the Florida recount and the Supreme Court decision (and still not convinced I was wrong), I'm thankful for life, prosperity, health, friends, the freedom to associate, speak, and worship freely, and the fact that Al Gore is not our president today.
PS Speaking of Tacitus, he's
celebrating Thanksgiving in Nairobi and has a lot to say about everything.
Jews in odd places: The South of France:
A French archbishop in a synagogue, wearing a yarmulke, drinking kosher wine and singing the praises of the Torah? Believe it. It happened at an unusual book party earlier this month at France's oldest synagogue in Carpentras. Jules Farber, an American Jewish journalist who has lived in the south of France since 1997, presented Monsignor Cattenoz, archbishop of Avignon, with a copy of his new French-language book, "Les Juifs du pape en Provence: Itineraires," or "The Pope's Jews in Provence: Itineraries." Published last month, Farber's book is a detailed study of a small population of Jews who endured five unhappy centuries of rule by the Vatican.
"We Christians have to look at our roots, and our roots are in the Torah," Cattenoz said in remarks to 150 people crammed into Carpentras's petite synagogue, which includes a vintage matzo oven and a 14th-century mikvah. Among the guests were the Catholic mayors of four towns in which Jews of the Middle Ages were allowed to live, the rabbi of Avignon, Jews who trace their roots in the region as far back as the 16th century and representatives of the local Protestant church.
It was a lovely ecumenical moment in a region that has a harrowing history of treating Jews badly. For much of the second millennium, the Jews lived not in France proper, but in the Comtat Venaissin, a swath of what is now Provence. The Comtat belonged to the Vatican from 1274 to 1791, and the Jews had the grudging permission of the popes of Avignon to reside there after they had been expelled from Languedoc, Herault and every other surrounding province.
The official line, in booklets published by the Vaucluse region's tourist board, has long been that the Jews were "welcomed and protected" and "granted the freedom to live and worship" by the popes, who ruled from Avignon for most of the 14th century, before power returned to Rome (bishops and other papal emissaries continued to govern the Comtat from Avignon until the French Revolution).
Such revisionism still goes on, but the truth is slowly coming out. "The popes 'welcomed' the Jews because they wanted to use them as scapegoats," said Farber, who has written extensively for The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor, and who spent five years researching his book. "They wanted to keep them impoverished and downtrodden, so they could say to their Catholic populace, 'See, they didn't recognize the savior, so they have to suffer.'"
Suffer they did, in crowded carrieres (from the ProvenÁal word for "street," since Jewish quarters in the south of France usually comprised a single street) that were locked up tight at dusk. "It was a matter of control," Farber said. "There was a Christian gatekeeper, and the Jews had to pay him." After working as doctors, surgeons, masons, dyers and bookbinders in the 14th century, Jews were gradually excluded from all professions except money-lending and selling secondhand goods. They were forbidden to speak to Christians, and forced to wear distinguishing signs — first rouelles, red and white "wheels" pinned to their clothing, and later, yellow hats. "They wanted to make sure people could see from a distance who was not a Christian," Farber said, "and to keep Jews from having sexual relations with Christians — they were especially concerned about that."
For all the hardship, small communities of Jews — never more than 2,000 altogether — managed to survive for five centuries in the ghettos of Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon and L'Isle sur la Sorgue. All are within an hour's drive of each other and, if you look closely, you can still find traces of pre-Revolutionary Jewish life.
Congress Passes Legislation For Sanctions Against Syria: Read
the bill itself and the Senate Policy Committee's
briefing.
(Associated Press)
WASHINGTON -- Legislation imposing economic penalties against Syria gained approval in Congress on Thursday, reflecting broad agreement among lawmakers that Syria has been a detriment to the fight against terrorism in the Middle East and Iraq.
President Bush is expected to sign the bill even though he is not enthusiastic about such restraints on his foreign policy. The measure requires the president to act if Syria does not make significant steps to reverse its tolerance and support of anti-American forces.
The House voted 408-8 in favor of a Senate-amended version of the legislation that, at the urging of the White House, gives the president greater leeway to waive the punishment on the basis of national security.
"The Syrian regime has the blood of Americans on their hands," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla). Administration officials agree, she said, that "Syria is on the wrong side of history and now it is time for it to suffer the consequences."
Syria long has been on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with North Korea, Sudan, Cuba, Iran and Libya. But Syria is the only country on that list to have full diplomatic relations with the U.S.
Awarding normal relations to Syria never made any sense, said Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.), a lead sponsor of the bill. Congress is saying to Syria in the legislation that "The time is up ... we are not coddling you any more," Mr. Engel said.
U.S. officials acknowledge that Syria, at Washington's prodding, has taken steps to prevent anti-American terrorists and weapons from crossing its border with Iraq. But lawmakers said the Damascus government has fallen short in numerous other areas.
The legislation notes that Syria has provided a safe haven for anti-Israel terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad and is accused of pursuing the development and production of biological and chemical weapons.
The bill states that Syria must end its support of terrorists, terminate its 27-year military presence in Lebanon, stop efforts to obtain or produce weapons of mass destruction and long-range ballistic missiles and interdict terrorists and weapons from entering Iraq.
If Syria fails to meet those conditions, the president must ban sales of dual-use items, which can have both civilian and military applications.
He also must impose at least two out of a list of six possible penalties: a ban on exports to Syria, prohibition of U.S. businesses' operating in Syria, restrictions on Syrian diplomats in the U.S., limits on Syrian airline flights in the U.S., reduction of diplomatic contacts or a freeze on Syrian assets in the U.S.
The original House bill gave the president waiver power for the two sanctions. The Senate, in approving the bill last week by an 89-4 margin, added an amendment that extended the national security waiver to include dual-use sales.
The Bush White House and its predecessors have made liberal use of waivers in the past to avoid disrupting diplomatic links with other nations, and sanctions on Syria would likely have greater political than economic effect. Bilateral trade with Syria amounts to only about $300 million a year.
There was no immediate comment from the Syrian Embassy in Washington, although Syrian officials have warned that it would damage America's overall standing in the Middle East.
What they are really saying. Norm Geras lays out what todays' protesters in London are really saying. Unless they specifically decide to say something else. Which they won't.
But it's actually much worse than moral equivalence and here is why. Because not only is Bush to be toppled, as Saddam was by jubilant Iraqis, but there has never been any similar great public showing, by the forces of 'peace party' liberalism and the socialist, anti-globalist left, of any joy, or even relief, or solidarity with the joy and relief of most Iraqis, over the original toppling. In so far as this is ever expressed at all, by individual 'peace'-niks, it's side-of-the-mouth, get-it-over-with-quickly stuff. But as for public rituals, leave alone clear and forthright individual statements, it's the great big zero.
So the wished-for demise of President George W. Bush, this is a matter for public enactment and celebration; but the actual demise of one of the world's worst dictators, that is a dirty little piece of private shame for people who should have been out there shouting their elation, should have been some time for heaven's sake - if not on that day, then later, today even - shouting their joy that one national prison had been prised open, that one foul symbol of the crushing of humanity had been toppled, echoing the relief of Iraqis. But they never did and they still won't. What a scale, what a relativity, of values.
Naturally, you can demonstrate against Bush's visit today and not feel yourself part of this meaning. But you are unless you aren't, and you aren't only if you make that clear somehow. The most visible public face of the event - in the fake toppling, in the organization and leadership of this anti-war movement, in some of its most prominent spokespeople - says to the world today, as it has been saying for many months: Bush, no; Saddam, mumble, cough (or worse).
Norm also challenges Britain's chapter of Amnesty International, whose director
publicly urged people to protest Bush's visit. Apparently he isn't the only one reconsidering his support of the organization. But,
I have withdrawn my support from two other charities which opposed the war to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but in both cases there are other charities doing similar work and to which I can transfer the same support. Members and supporters of Amnesty - as I have been for so many years now that I don't remember since when exactly - don't have anywhere else to go in that sense. So what I wrote was motivated by a desire to see a tendency arrested if it's developing, not a desire to discredit an organization I've supported over so many years.
Jews in odd places: Cuba: The Hotel Raquel is Cuba’s first boutique hotel catering specifically to
adventurous Jewish tourists. Richly illustrated passages from the Old Testament cover the walls of the small but elegant property, located in what was once a thriving Jewish neighborhood of Old Havana. Cuban mojitos are served at the L'Chaim bar, along with Israeli salad, matzoh ball soup and cheese blintzes.
For many years, the structure housing the Raquel was used as a warehouse and fabric depot. Now, its eclectic architecture and romantic Art Nouveau interiors — all refurbished — have made the Raquel a jewel in the crown of Habaguanex S.A., the state entity charged with fixing up Old Havana’s hotels and restaurants. The property is located six blocks from Congregacion Adat Israel, Cuba’s oldest synagogue, and boasts the largest stained-glass window on the island.
The 25-room hotel originally was built as a bank in 1908, a time when thousands of impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe, Turkey and Syria were immigrating to Cuba.
After the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, nearly all of the Jews fled to the United States and elsewhere. Today, no more than 1,300 Jews live in Cuba, most in Havana.
True words. Someone on one of Tacitus' threads put into words something I had been thinking for awhile:
I think we're looking at an artifact of the info age, instead of micro-management, we're all guilty of micro-analysis. Because communications have reached Arthur C. Clarke's predicted state where" everyone in the world can talk to everyone else at the same time", there is a huge amount of info out there and a huge number of people out there scanning it for the slightest bit of meaning. In previous ages, the President would make a speech every few weeks and the newsprint would report on it and that's were you got your info. Now you've got 14,321 bloggers, pundits, underemployed day-traders and cyber-lurkers analyzing the verbal and written droppings of every Deputy-assistant-undersecretary's gofer for meaning.
All-in-all the extra access to info is a good thing, but don't forget the classical "signal-to-noise" problem.
However, Bush either isn't aware of this or diesn't think it's important. He does make a speech about once a month, but meanwhile a dozen memes have been born, grown, aged, and died within the public discourse.
Memo to de Villepin: STFU. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has urged that power be handed over to a provisional Iraqi government by the end of the year. Mr de Villepin said the June 2004 date favoured by the US was "too late".
"We need to move faster. This is an extremely urgent situation," he told French newspaper La Croix.
Is there a French word for chutzpah? (via
Tacitus)
Even more way cool stuff. An interview with
Dennis Miller.Waiter, there's a
fly in my urinal.I want one of
these. I could use it as a coatrack or something . . .
Our closest galactic neighbor. With MP3 computer simulation.
C. R. Jew for all your frum fashion needs. (via
Grasshoppa)
Jews in odd places: Scotland: A synagogue in Scotland's largest city, Glasgow, has appointed
Scotland's first female rabbi in the same month as the election of the first female moderator-designate to the Church of Scotland's general assembly. Rabbi Nancy Morris took up her post at the Glasgow New Synagogue, in Newton Mearns, on October 15.
Britain's "reform" and "liberal" movements have around 20 women rabbis in the UK. Glasgow's is the only "reform" synagogue in Scotland, where there are no "liberal" synagogues.
And that goes a long way to explain why my Yom Kippur in Edinburgh years ago was so Orthodox...
Rabbi Morris, 41, who is from Montreal in Canada, had previously been working with the Har Tikvah community in Brampton, Ontario, her first post since she graduated as rabbi from Leo Baeck College, London, in 2002.
David Goodman, chairman of the synagogue, felt her appointment would herald a new era for eighty-year-old establishment.
Home-grown antisemitism. It's happening here, folks. The only reason it wasn't a synagogue or JCC in a part of the country with lots of Jews is because we've got security up the wazoo. I imagine a small museum in Indiana didn't feel they needed it.
And I believe the "Timothy McVeigh" graffiti was to throw law enforcement
off the scent.I didn't blog on the
Turkish synagogue bombing because by the time I read the news
larger-circulation blogs were
all over
it. And even though I have been seeing almost daily news of attacks on Jews, the Turkish bombing
hit me deeper in the gut, and I couldn't write. Maybe it was because I heard the news in shul on Shabbat, when we were doing the
mishebeirachs for those who are ill, and someone stood up and announced it. Maybe because some last straw had finally been laid.
Now this, only two days later.
I always wondered how Jews in the States felt during the 30s, hearing about the increasing violence and persecution of their fellows in Germany, trying to get the word out, arguing with their family, friends and neighbors who preferred to keep their heads in the sand, casting about for some way to head off the impending disaster. Now I know.
Meanwhile, Chirac sort of begins to
get a clue.
Taking the mickey out of creepy terrorist tools in la-la-land Dept. I
think this is a parody of the antiwar movement (these days it's hard to tell).
Dear "President" Bush,
I don't know if you know Janet Street Porter, but she's one helluva sassy lady. Her motto? Tell it like it is. So let me tell you what it's like being me, right?
I've been away on sabbatical to research and write my new book, Wotchoo Lookin' At: The Authorised Biography of Sir Nicholas Serota (Faber, £35) and I arrive back in Blairland to find that for these past three years my son Marley has been lying on the green sofa in the basement in his Reeboks watching Eminem on MTV eating Big Macs, drinking Coke and surfing the internet for anything with Britney Spears on it.
What do all these have in common? Right first time, Georgie, baby. Country of origin: US of A.
What do you plan to do about it, then? Frankly, we in this country have been living under the American jackboot for far too long. As Harold Pinter so memorably put it in his recent poem:
There's a bomb/Up your arsehole/Chum/And if you want to shit it out/You can't/Chum/Because the president won't bloody let you/Chum.
The single human being I most admire in the world right now is Michael Moore. The guy's a genius. Talk about brave. If it wasn't for Moore, we'd never have discovered the link between Lee Harvey Oswald, the Osmonds, the tobacco multinationals, Pee-Wee Herman, Mark Chapman and Spiro Agnew. Nor would we now know that for four years in the 1980s Osama bin Laden was a fully paid-up member of the Disney Corporation, working first as a stoker on the Casey Jones Railroad Experience in Disneyland Florida, and finally as a key member of the Three Bears in the Goldilocks House in Disneyland Paris.
How to solve the whole Middle East thing? It would even be hard to solve just the Iraq problem in 200 words. But at least we can try. So first, George, let's for God's sake let bygones be bygones. I don't agree with your foreign policy, and - who knows? - maybe on reflection you don't agree with certain aspects of my forthcoming series of media studies seminars (Jade Goody and the Meaning of Big Brother) at the University of Oxbridge (formerly Thameside Polytechnic). But here's my advice - and it's advice I literally beg you, George, to take.
Take a few hours off. Light yourself a scented candle, dim the lights down low, and pick up Anita Roddick's wise and beautiful book, Lessons I've Learnt from the Peppermint Shower Gel Tribe of East Africa. Then read it, George - read it, and, believe me, you'll never want to go to war again.
And Janet agrees with me.
Bel Littlejohn
Columnist
Anyone could guess that the Guardian is not my favorite paper, but I have to give them credit for assembling such a wide variety of sympathies on one page.
UPDATE: Actually, it's four pages.
harry and commenters are not amused.
Survival Sukkah -- Jews in odd places: Uruguay: At first glance, it's yet another reality show: Eight young people between the ages of 18 and 26 are placed together in a restricted area from which they are not allowed to leave without permission. Thousands of people stay tuned via the Internet, with the help of two video-cams that document the proceedings, and a vote is held each day to decide which participant will be sent "off the island." The last remaining contender is declared the winner. Just one little thing sets apart this team and its mission from the others: the space in which the participants are placed is
a Sukkah.
The last survivor - Alan Paikes, 20, from Uruguay - won a plane ticket to Washington and a visit to the Holocaust Museum there.
There have been several other attempts to lure young people in the Uruguay community into identifying with Jewish values. Last year, for instance, Purim was celebrated at a fashionable club in Montevideo in order to attract a crowd of students that do not usually observe the holiday. A large audience attended the party; for most of them, it was a first encounter with hamentashen.
Spinning spinning spinning . . . . The spin has
begun (read the comments) in response to
the leaked Saddam-Al Queda memo.UPDATE: Mark Steyn:
There's "no connection" between Saddam and al-Qa'eda, because radical Islamists would never make common cause with secular Ba'athists. Or so we're told by pro-gay, pro-feminist Eurolefties who thus make common cause with honour-killing, sodomite-beheading Islamists, apparently crediting Saddam with a greater degree of intellectual coherence than they credit themselves.
(Read the rest for more choice Steynian bon mots.)
UPDATE: Lt.Smash uses his years of experience reading intelligence briefings to
defend the memo.
The fantasy of control. Tacitus says, at the end of a long agonized post on the latest twists and turns of administration policy:
The day may well come when a newly-sovereign Iraqi government will order us out. Or they will adopt the cruel garb of theocracy. Or they will succumb to civil war. Or they will control Baghdad as Karzai controls Kabul. Or they will resort to Ba'athist-style secular repression as a means of holding the country together. And what then? Will it all have been worth it then? Will we look back and wish we'd grasped the nettle firmly as honor and common sense demanded back in the hard fall days of 2003?
To which I say:
Whether you are teaching school or raising kids or running a drug rehab center or reconstructing a country or whatever - at some point you have to let go. You only have so much control. Iraqis may do any or all of these things - it will be their decision. All we can do is help get them on their feet, guide them, give them tools, teach them how to use them, and at some point it simply isn't in our hands anymore. (And, as Glenn says,
Iraq doesn't have to be perfect. It is good enough if it can sustain conditions significantly better than under Saddam)
And then - like all the other callings I mentioned - we will agonize over whether we could have done a better job. And others will criticize our handling of the job. And they may be right. But just because we "grasped the nettle firmly as honor and common sense demanded back in the hard fall days of 2003" doesn't guarantee that the Iraqis will become whatever we hope. That doesn't mean we
didn't "grasp the nettle" - it just means that they have free will.
This is similar to the fantasy of control I see on the Left, in the assumption that our failure to get an approval for war from the UN is due to diplomatic bungling on our part. As though France, Germany and Russia don't have their own global agendas. It's similar to the self-doubt of a jilted girlfriend: "If I had been blonder, bustier, more acquiescent, more charming . . . he would have stayed." Well, maybe, but you can't run your life that way. We should certainly engage in frequent self-examination, but at some point it's out of our hands. People are going to do what they're going to do.
As a counterweight to the pessimism on Tac's thread,
read through this discussion. Follow the links. We are
not leaving Iraq. We
are helping them set up a constitution. Maybe it's too soon, but sometimes people don't rise to the occasion until responsibility is placed in their laps.
More here.
Jews in odd places: Mexico: The
Federal Law to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination -- which includes an explicit prohibition on anti-Semitic discrimination -- passed unanimously in both of Mexico's legislative chambers in April and was signed by President Vicente Fox in June.
The law calls for a 300-member National Council to Prevent Discrimination, which is being formed now and will begin operating in January. The council, which will have branches throughout the country, will address alleged violations of the law.
There are about 50,000 Jews in Mexico, mostly in Mexico City, the capital.
Jews have been both welcomed and persecuted throughout Mexican history, as the country has struggled with competing desires to attract immigrants for economic reasons and to maintain a cohesive society. Jewish settlement in Mexico dates back to the Spanish colonization in the 16th century. But Mexico´s inquisition, although not as severe as Spain´s, virtually eliminated the Jewish community. In modern times, significant Jewish immigration began in the late-19th and early-20th centuries with arrivals from Europe, Russia and Syria. Jewish immigration increased when the United States restricted entry in 1924. Mexico prohibited Jewish immigration in 1933 and 1934, but then opened its borders to European refugees fleeing the Nazis.
Herding cats Dept. Rogue initiatives all over the place. Bush needs to whip his cabinet into line - they are blessing all these amateur peacemaking efforts, which undermine both American and Israeli official policy. Unless it's all "unofficially official" overtures. Which is a bad idea - isn't that how Oslo started?
Well, organizing Jews was always like herding cats. If anything will be the death of Israel it will be that.
On the other hand . . .
Creepy terrorist tools Dept. I got an email from a friend who sends me pro-Israel stuff, forwarding an email supposedly from a pro-Pal demonstrator, I assume in Washington, DC. I present it for your perusal - I make no claims about its veracity. If you know the DC left-wing scene and the media down there, you can fill in the blanks:
Below is email on web to anti-israel groups about Channel 5. . . . Please write Channel 5 and forward this email to the new director. Also write CBS headquarters in New York.Our Rachel Corrie Banner made it onto Channel 5
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 09:36:53 -0800
From: Wendy XXX
Subject: Our Rachel Corrie Banner made it onto Channel 5 KPIX's coverage of the rally on Sunday!
Hi All,
One of my activist colleagues told me that the backside of our Rachel Corrie Banner which says: “We the People to the US Government: Stop Support of Apartheid Israel NOW!” was included in Channel 5’s coverage of the Stop the Wall Rally on Sunday! Yeah!
Channel 5 KPIX is really the best channel if you are going to watch the mainstream TV for news at all. They usually have a presence at all the pro-justice for Palestinian rallies, and I have personally talked to one of their reporters who told me that he and others are pro-justice for the Palestinians. AND they did that two-part series on the Israeli Apartheid Wall this past Sun. and Mon. nite. As it turns out, it was only a 2 part series. I called KPIX last night to confirm that because there were rumors that had originally been a full week series, but the woman I talked with said it was always just a 2 night series. I told her I thought it was an excellent report and I would like to see more coverage on the Apartheid Wall, and she replied that I would be seeing more on it!
By the way, try to make it to the 6th Rachel Corrie Banner Project Demo on Monday, Nov. 17 (this Monday coming up!) at noon in front of Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s office at 1301 Clay St. a@ 12th in front of the twin-towered Federal building. We’ll stay til 1:30. Even tho Barbara Lee is better than the average politician, she has congratulated Sharon both times he got into office (ugh!) and she recently voted for the ridiculously unfair Syria Accountability Act, and other such “sins”.
Also, by the way, the Zionist CyberTerrorists are at it again, stealing people’s e-mail identities and spamming pro-Pal activists with some insipid story about “Jews need a sovereign nation, blah, blah, blah”. Not while persecuting non-Jews, that’s for sure. And not with my tax dollars.
Have a great weekend!
Wendy
I wonder if Wendy is a pseudonym for
Evan Maloney's favorite ISM tool?
Civilian jobs in Iraq. If you're looking for adventure and a chance to do some good in the world:
SOFIA (Support Our Friends in Iraq and Afghanistan) is a Department of Defense program that seeks to locate and hire qualified personnel to work in Iraq or Afghanistan assisting the fledgling governments in their quest to become full-fledged democracies. To do this, prospective applicants must be willing to live under field conditions, initially alongside their military counterparts and, eventually, mostly on their own.
The
Kellogg Brown & Root division of Halliburton
has openings too.(via
Tacitus, who is itching to go over there in spite of "furious spousal resistance")
Why We Blog Dept. Unlike
Jennifer Howard, I use blogs as news portals - I scan three or four a day for links to the top news stories of the day - and opinion shapers/stimulators - I tour another bunch that feature lively comment threads that argue different sides of important issues and often lead me to even more news links. I also use this blog, and my comments in other blog threads, to do my little bit
to fight the information war. I'm not blogging (much) about my personal life, hobbies, or work, except in passing. I'm blogging (and I apologize for being grandiose about it) about the future of Western civilization and the survival of the Jewish people.
So, no, I'm not the least bit bored.
UPDATE: Ralph
has some comments too.
