Miriam at Bloghead just mentioned a fascinating set of posts from Biur Chametz about the question of women and Torah reading at Orthodox synagogues - specifically Kehillat Yedidyah in Jerusalem. Mr. Biur just went to a halakhic forum on the issue at Yedidyah and reports on the discussion between Rabbi Henkin and Rabbi Sperber.

This discussion dovetails nicely with the topic we are now considering in my Gender and Sexuality in Judaism course - women and the mitzvot. I'm going to show the discussion to my students when we return to class in a week (we are now having our spring vacation).

This Anne Applebaum article (from the Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2004), The Freedom Haters, illustrates the point I made in my previous post: "The larger point, though, is that the 'it's-all-an-American-plot' arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time:  At least a part of the Western left -- or rather the Western far left -- is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States. Many of the same people who found it hard to say anything bad about Saddam Hussein find it equally difficult to say anything nice about pro-democracy demonstrators in Ukraine.  Many of the same people who would refuse to condemn a dictator who is anti-American cannot bring themselves to admire democrats who admire, or at least don't hate, the United States.  I certainly don't believe, as President Bush sometimes simplistically says, that everyone who disagrees with American policies in Iraq or elsewhere 'hates freedom.' That's why it's so shocking to discover that some of them do." She was talking about the recent revolt in Ukraine that led to new elections and a new democratic government.

I am happy that Amnesty International has taken on the cases of the 75 men arrested and held in jail in Cuba for political dissidence, as the wife of one of them reports in this article in the Washington Post - Standing Up to a Dictator , but I eagerly await the opportunity to hear from the American left to protest against the Cuban dictator. It continues to be amazing to me that various groups, including ones in the Jewish community in America, sponsor "educational" trips to Cuba without protesting Castro's dictatorship. (See, for example, this 1998 press release from the president of the AJCongress, which nowhere mentions political repression in Cuba). Is oppression only really oppression if a right-wing dictatorship (for example, like the former Argentinian regime) engages in it, while a leftist dictatorship somehow escapes condemnation because of its universal health care?

Berta Soler Fernandez reports of her husband, "My husband, Angel Moya Acosta, is enduring his fourth detention since 1999, when he openly declared his dissent -- a not-so-frequent attitude among black people in Cuba. Until then, he was a simple technician earning his 135 pesos ($5) a month, although I must say that after fighting for a year and a half in Angola he was less convinced of the rightness of everything the Cuban regime was doing."

And where is the leftist condemnation of the Cuban regime's past military intervention in Angola?

I have to say that I have always found it disgusting when people on the left refuse to criticize leftist dictatorships, while people on the right refuse to criticize rightist dictatorship. It makes all of their agitating for human rights suspect, as if there is not a universal standard of human rights, but only one that is dependent on one's politics. Another version of the same thing is pro-Palestinian activists who condemn every human rights violation by Israel, but pay no attention to human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority, or pro-Israel activists who point out every murder of a Palestinian collaborator with Israel by Palestinians, but pay no attention to the torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

I think that if one is a partisan of a particular cause that one must be careful to hold one's own side to a high standard of human rights. As someone who is pro-Israel, it is important for me to see Israel act in a fashion that as much as possible safeguards human rights for Palestinians. Otherwise, it seems to me, Israel loses much of its ability to argue on its own behalf. And the same is true for people who argue against the U.S. embargo on Cuba - they must hold Castro and the Cuban regime to a high standard of human rights, rather than simply condemning the U.S. government for what it is doing.

Islamic Jihad is trying to destroy the recent peace moves between Israel and the Palestinians. Ha'aretz lists the victims of the latest attack.

In this article on possible threats to the Temple Mount by Jewish extremists, Temple Mount attack could foil pullout, Noam Federman, a member of the Israeli far-right, says, "No one wants the mosques there," Federman said. "But people are torn between the desire to bring them down and the fear that if they are destroyed the Muslims will build more beautiful mosques in their place." It strikes me as highly peculiar that this man, who clearly wants to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount, thinks that the ones currently there (Al Aksa Mosque and Dome of the Rock) are beautiful! And that the worst thing that could happen as a result of destroying these mosques is Muslims building more beautiful mosques! Kind of a back-handed compliment to the beauties of Islamic architecture....

(Link courtesy of Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica)

Just a reminder that one good place to go for news on Darfur is at the blog - Sudan: The Passion of the Present. It gives history of the crisis, ongoing coverage, and connections to many groups trying to act on Darfur.

This is a really heart-breaking story about Darfur - Darfur's Babies of Rape Are on Trial From Birth. One woman who was raped by janjaweed said about her newborn daughter, "She is a janjaweed" - "When people see her light skin and her soft hair, they will know she is a janjaweed."

A recent United Nations investigation into war crimes in Darfur laid out, in page after graphic page, evidence of widespread and systematic rape in the two-year conflict. In one incident, a woman in Wadi Tina was raped 14 times by different men in January 2003. In March 2004, 150 soldiers and janjaweed abducted and raped 16 girls in Kutum, the report said. In Kailek, it said girls as young as 10 were raped by militants.

The fruit of these attacks is now being born in Darfur, and will inevitably become a long-term legacy of the conflict. In a society where deep taboos surrounding rape persist and identity is passed, according to Muslim tradition, from father to child, the fate of these children and their mothers is uncertain.

"She will stay with us for now," Adoum Muhammad Abdulla, the sheik of Fatouma's village, said of the days-old infant. "We will treat her like our own. But we will watch carefully when she grows up, to see if she becomes like a janjaweed. If she behaves like janjaweed, she cannot stay among us."

The fact that he and the new mothers call the children janjaweed, a local insult that means "devil on horseback," underscores just how bitter the division between those who identify themselves as Africans and those who see themselves as Arabs has become, and points to the potential difficulty of acceptance and integration in the years ahead.

In my Judaism class this semester, we are reading Elie Wiesel's book Night, and then discussing the meaning of the vow "never again" in the context of ongoing genocide since 1945 - especially now, in Darfur. What does it mean to say "never again" and really mean it? How can the world act in such a way as to prevent genocides or to stop them when they are occurring?

Last week on NPR's Morning Edition, Scott Simon interviewed Romeo Dallaire, who was the commander of the U.N. mission in Rwanda in 1994 - when the U.N. did not order him to do anything to stop the genocide. Simon asked him what could be done today to stop the killing in Darfur, and he said that he thought a "medium power," like France or Germany, should step in with troops to stop the fighting and enable relief organizations to help the millions of refugees in Darfur.

On today's Morning Edition, John Garang, the leader of the People's Liberation Movement in southern Sudan, which has just signed an agreement with the Sudanese central government to end decades of fighting and death, and whose group is in an alliance with the rebel groups in Darfur, called upon African Union troops and others to band together to stop the fighting and janjaweed attacks in Darfur.

It seems clear what the solution is - a sizable military force must enter the Darfur region to stop the attacks on civilians by the janjaweed and Sudanese government soldiers, bring a ceasefire between the rebels and the government forces, in order to allow aid agencies to feed people and get them medical care. But who is going to do this? The U.S. is now involved in a fruitless fight at the U.N. over how to try accused Sudanese war criminals - with the U.S. arguing that they shouldn't be tried in the International Criminal Court. I don't understand why this argument is happening while the killing is still going on. Isn't the most important thing to stop the killing? It seems like an excuse for everyone, including the U.S. government, to avoid actually doing anything.

Latest on Ward Churchill: Hamilton College Cancels Event Amid Protests on Panelist's 9/11 Essay. The college decided to cancel the event because of "credible threats of violence." I wish that Hamilton hadn't invited him in the first place, but on the other hand, it's not right that threats of violence should keep him from speaking there. I don't believe that threats should be allowed to prevent someone from speaking in public, no matter how repugnant his views. By the same token, universities in Canada have refused to allow some Israeli speakers to appear (after having being invited), out of fear of violent responses (my recollection is that Ehud Barak was disinvited to speak at Concordia University for this reason). I think the college or university should do their best to arrange protection for the speaker and the college, rather than backing down in the face of threats.

More on Ward Churchill at Hamilton in today's New York Times - Unrest on Campus Over Speaker Who Sees U.S. Role in 9/11. Some details reported that haven't appeared in other sources:

The college newspaper, The Spectator, published a photograph of Professor Churchill wearing a camouflage jacket, beret and sunglasses while posing with an assault weapon.

A peaceful guy!

Churchill has also responded to his critics:

For his part, Professor Churchill said in an interview, "My reaction is astonishment. This is a three-year-old piece that has been spun mercilessly and distorted. The comparison was of technocrats. Eichmann is someone who, after all, killed no one. He made the trains run on time." . . . "Of course I have sympathy for the World Trade Center victims," he added, "the same sympathy I have for victims who are Iraqi and Palestinians."

Among other things, Churchill is abominably ignorant about Eichmann's role - he was a prime organizer of the Final Solution, and as such, one of the Nazis' greatest mass murderers. And as I said before, how could one regard the restaurant workers, cleaners, and illegal aliens in the WTC as any kind of equivalent to Nazis? (Not that I regard any of the people working there in that way!)

Ward Churchill, due to speak at Hamilton College this week, resigns as department chair amid furor over 9/11 remarks. He said, "the present political climate has rendered me a liability in terms of representing either my department, the college, or the university." His resignation comes a couple of days after an editorial in the Denver Post which asks, "If Churchill is so out of sync with the chancellor and the campus, we have to wonder why is he chairing an academic department at the University of Colorado?" Principles of academic freedom and free speech certainly protect his job as a professor at the University of Colorado, but his opinions are repugnant.

Churchill's opinions haven't changed since the original essay, published on the web right after 9/11/01 - as reported in the Rocky Mountain News, "In a 2004 interview, he made the remark, 'One of the things I've suggested is that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary' for Americans to realize the long-term ramifications of some of the country's policies and practices." As also reported in this article, Hamilton may be acting disingenously about whether officials there knew about Churchill's essay. "Barrie, the Hamilton spokeswoman, said 'When Ward Churchill was invited, last summer, no one here was aware of those 9/11 comments.' But the small liberal arts college was aware when it started advertising his appearance, sponsored by its 'Kirkland Project,' a program 'for the study of gender, society and culture.' It states that the title of Churchill's talk is to be 'Some People Push Back' - the very title of his controversial essay." (On the other hand, the title was probably suggested by Churchill, who didn't necessarily share the text of the essay that the title came from).

Another dubious indication about the way the event was originally planned was that it was billed as a panel discussion on the "Limits of Dissent," including Churchill, Hamilton philosophy professor Richard Werner, and another University of Colorado ethnic studies professor, Natsu Saito, who as it happens "is married to Churchill, although that relationship is not noted on the Hamilton program."

From the New York Times last week, a report on Daniel Barenboim's (the conductor and pianist) recent speech at Columbia University in which he Criticizes Israeli Views: "Mr. Barenboim said that the failure of the Israeli government to accept the Palestinians' 'narration' had led to a new wave of anti-Semitism, and that suicide bombings in Israel had 'to be seen in the context of the historical development at which we have arrived.'" Doesn't this sound like a justification of suicide bombings? I find it amazing that an Israeli could possibly say such a thing - hasn't he had friends or relatives either injured or killed by suicide bombings? The Times article also reports that "Mr. Barenboim said Wagner's anti-Jewish vitriol had to be placed in the context of 19th-century European nationalist feeling. He said that he understood the pain of Holocaust survivors but that it was hypocritical to keep Wagner off the concert stage when audio and video recordings of his work were available, and even cellphones in Israel rang with 'The Ride of the Walkyries.'" Doesn't Barenboim understand that the same people who are offended by listening to Wagner are unlikely either to listen to Wagner recordings or have cellphones with a Wagner ring? And what is this about placing Wagner's anti-semitism in the context of 19th century European nationalism? In that context, Wagner is one of the originators and popularizers (in his essay "Jewry in Music") of racial anti-semitism! That doesn't make him a Nazi - but it does mean that he is part of the intellectual stream that led into the development of Nazi racial anti-semitism.

It does seem rather amazing that Iraq and Palestine, two Arab nations currently under occupation by foreign forces, are the two that have managed to conduct elections that were fairly free and had large turnouts. I know that the news about the Iraqi election is preliminary, but this does give me hope that eventually Iraq will be a democratic and (hopefully) peaceful country.

The Kirkland Project website at Hamilton explains their rationale for including Ward Churchill as a speaker. He is appearing as part of a year-long lecture series on "Class in Context: Intersections of Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nationality," on a panel entitled "Limits of Dissent?"

Ward Churchill to Speak at Hamilton College on Feb. 3, 2005

A nearby upstate college, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, is hosting Ward Churchill as a speaker on Feb 3. After Sept. 11, 2001, Churchill wrote about the victims in the World Trade Center, "As for those in the World Trade Center," ... "well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."

He continues:

Churchill's essay argues that the Sept. 11 attacks were in retaliation for the Iraqi children killed in a 1991 U.S. bombing raid and by economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations following the Persian Gulf War.

This is despite the fact that bin Laden himself said that the attacks were motivated by anger at the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.

The essay contends the hijackers who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 were "combat teams," not terrorists. It states: "The most that can honestly be said of those involved on Sept. 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course."

The essay maintains that the people killed inside the Pentagon were "military targets."

....The essay goes on to describe the victims as "little Eichmanns," referring to Adolph Eichmann, who executed Adolph Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews during World War II.

So even the illegal immigrants working in the restaurants in the WTC were Nazis? As were the folks who worked at Windows on the World? And the people who cleaned the offices in the building? And the police and firemen who tried to save people? Churchill is the head of the University of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department and should know better about poor people, undocumented workers, and working class workers in general. (This is not to justify his remarks about ANY of the people killed in the WTC - as far as I'm concerned, all the people who died that day were innocent victims, and the attackers were terrorists).

For more on Churchill, see here.

Families of the Sept. 11 victims, including a student at the college who lost his father in the attacks, are outraged. The student, Matt Coppo, said "Knowing that I'm paying for a person to disrespect my father, it doesn't go over too well in my mind," Coppo told The Post-Standard of Syracuse (cited in an article in New York Newsday).

Hamilton is defending its choice of speaker with the usual set of academic excuses:

Administrators defended Churchill's appearance, even while admitting his views are considered "repugnant and disparaging" by many people.

"Hamilton, like any institution committed to the free exchange of ideas, invites to its campus people of diverse opinions, often controversial. The opportunity to encounter and respond to people from outside academia in their intensity and their immediacy is among the key attributes of a liberal education," the school said in a statement issued by college spokesman Michael DeBraggio.

The academic program that has invited Churchill also invited another controversial speaker to campus, but was ultimately forced to uninvite her:

Churchill's panel discussion is part of a series sponsored by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture, a college-funded program that tried to bring 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg to Hamilton. Rosenberg, who served 16 years in federal prison for possessing explosives and was linked to a 1981 armored car robbery in which two police officers were killed, was to teach a half-credit memoir-writing course this month but withdrew from the position in December after weeks of debate and protest on campus.

I do wonder why it's considered "educational" to invite such people to speak and teach on campuses. Do the parents who are paying the bills for their children to go to Hamilton know what their money is going towards?

Cancer is the top killer for those under 85

As I mentioned in my last blog post, Cancer [is] the top killer for those under 85 - outpacing heart disease for all but the oldest people. This is the latest report from the American Cancer Society, and the statistics are for 2002. Some comparisons between types of cancer:

• Lung cancer remains the biggest killer, projected to claim 163,510 lives this year.
• Some 232,090 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and it will kill 30,350.
• About 211,240 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and it will kill 40,410.

Last Sunday night two of my friends died of cancer - one, Anna Vargo, was someone I had been friendly with many years ago, when I lived in Seattle from 1979 to 1981. She was a very important person to me at that time, because she gave me a crucial piece of advice. My mother was ill with lung cancer, and in the spring of 1981 my parents very reluctantly told me that she had abandoned attempts to treat the cancer with chemotherapy. I asked them if I should come home at that time, and they were unwilling to say - wishing to allow me my freedom of decision as a young adult (I was 24 at the time). I spoke to Anna and she told me that of course I should go home, that they were trying to leave the decision in my hands, but that they wanted me to go. I took her advice and left Seattle (as it happens, forever, except for a couple of visits). It was a life-changing decision. I was at home when my mother died, in October of 1981, and went on to become religious, keep Shabbat and keep kosher, and join Havurat Shalom, in Somerville, MA, where I was a member for almost 15 years.

Also on Sunday night a friend of mine from New York City, Sam Kayman, died of lung cancer. I knew him from the West Side Minyan, beginning in the fall of 1996, when I moved to New York City for two years on a post-doctoral fellowship from Columbia University. Sam was an important person for me - he and his family befriended me when I came to New York, not knowing very many people - I spent many enjoyable Shabbats at their table, and kept visiting after I left New York in the summer of 1998. He became ill in the summer of 2004 but was only finally diagnosed in November with cancer. It was very sudden. I will miss him. I last saw him in New York just before I flew to Israel for my recent visit. He was in the hospital then, with pneumonia, and I spent about an hour with him. When I flew back to the U.S. yesterday, I stopped in New York again, this time to pay a shiva call to his family. I hope to visit New York in the near future again to spend more time with them and other people from the minyan.

When I found out that Sam was ill with lung cancer, I felt not only sad but also angry - about what it seems to me to be the too many people whom I have known who have died of cancer in the last few years. I was talking to one of my colleagues in the Anthropology department about this, because it always seems as if we're being told by various health authorities that heart disease is the great killer in the U.S. At this point in my life, I've known only two people who died of heart disease - my grandmother, at age 98, and my grandfather, in his mid-60s. I wondered why my own personal experience was so different from the statistics, and he showed me a chart that shows that for people from the mid-30s to the mid-70s, the number one killer is cancer, and that even in the late 70s, cancer is the number two killer in the U.S. The disease really is ubiquitous, and the type of cancer with the largest number of deaths each year is lung cancer. And while 87% of people with lung cancer had previously smoked, the remaining 13% had no history of smoking - which was also true of Sam.

Today I went to the first day's session of the Orion Center's 10th annual conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls, called "New Perspectives on Old Texts." Of the talks that I heard, the one that most interested me was Paul Mandel's, When a Scribe is Not a Scribe: A Second Look at the Enochic Scribal Traditions. He spoke about how the meaning of the Aramaic sappar goes beyond merely one who is skilled in writing and copying documents of various kinds, and also includes one who is skilled in understanding the divine will through divining or through the interpretation of texts, or one who is a kind of envoy of the divine will - for example, like Enoch in 1 Enoch.

The conference is being held in the faculty club of the Hebrew University - Beit Meiersdorf, on the Mt. Scopus campus, and has a beautiful view of the city of Jerusalem, especially the Dome of the Rock with its golden dome (see my photo below). It was pleasant to meet with various scholars, including Professor Rachel Elior, with whom I studied the Hekhalot literature at Hebrew University and who advised me and was a reader for my dissertation on the Hekhalot texts, and Philip Alexander, who has written extensively on the Hekhalot texts (including the translation and commentary on 3 Enoch for the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J.H. Charlesworth. I am not sure I will have a chance to go to more sessions tomorrow and the next day, since I am leaving Israel on Wednesday and have still scarcely worked on my syllabi for next semester! It has been very nice to be on vacation.

I had not been to the Mt. Scopus campus for a couple of years, and the increase in security was quite noticeable. At each entrance to the campus there are guards to whom one must show identification. I had to show both my passport and a copy of the conference program to prove my bonafides. (This security is a consequence of the bombing attack at the Frank Sinatra cafeteria on July 31, 2002, in which nine people were killed).

Our Secretary of State (for at least a little while longer) demonstrates his moral cowardice in Sudan: Powell Avoids Question on Sudan Genocide (washingtonpost.com).

But with Sudan's first vice president, Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha, at his side, Powell sidestepped a question by a reporter about to whether he believed Sudan is still conducting genocide in the region. "It was my judgment that genocide was taking place," said Powell, who is in Nairobi to witness the signing Sunday of a comprehensive accord to end an unrelated conflict in southern Sudan. "I haven't seen the Secretary-General's latest report, but I look forward to examining it."

So now we're deferring to the UN on whether genocide has been and continues to be committed in Sudan?

This Ha'aretz article warns about what might happen during the evacuation of Gaza settlements: The 3rd Intifada: Settlers take on their own army.

This week, in a disconcerting dress rehearsal for the prime minister's initiative for dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip and a portion of the West Bank, soldiers who had been confronting Arabs for years in the Second Intifada found themselves under rock barrage in a new uprising conducted by Jews.

The troops were there to back up police dismantling an outpost, one of many in the West Bank with as many names as it has buildings. The forces were there to take down two caravans in Shalhevet, also called Givat Lehava [a satellite settlement of Yizhar].

The other day I paid a visit to the Old City of Jerusalem, and tried to get to the Temple Mount, but unfortunately, the gate was closed before I could get through the security. (The Temple Mount, with the two mosques on it, is open only a few hours a day to non-Muslim visitors). I did manage, however, to get a good picture of the Dome of the Rock from a place high up in the Jewish Quarter.

I've been in Israel for about a week and a half, and on this very rainy day I visited the Israel Museum with a friend. We went to the Shrine of the Book (dedicated, for the most part, to the Dead Sea Scrolls) and saw the Aleppo Codex - a very important 10th century codex of the entire Tanakh (although unfortunately some of it has been lost, including most of the Torah). It was quite moving to see this very finely written Bible that had been consulted by Maimonides when he wrote his own Torah scroll. I went through the Judaica section of the museum and visited the Cochin synagogue - an entire synagogue that was transported from Cochin, Kerala, India, and reconstructed inside the museum - very beautiful, with a particularly finely-carved Torah ark. I also walked through the historical section of the museum and saw some of my favorite exhibits, including several mosaics from synagogue floors (one, from a Samaritan synagogue, is the most detailed mosaic of a Torah ark that I've seen).

Before I went into the museum, however, I took a look at the demonstration across the street. The Knesset (Israel Parliament) and other government buildings are across the street from the museum, and in front of the Knesset, settlers and others opposed to the government's evacuation of Israeli settlements from the Gaza Street have set up protest tents. Hundreds of people arrived today from various settlements to protest the proposed evacuation, which is supposed to happen next summer. They put up signs with slogans like: "The transfer will not succeed," or "Jews don't expel Jews." (The term "transfer" is usually applied in Israeli politics to the idea of expelling all Arabs either from the state of Israel or from all of Palestine - it's politically provocative to use it to refer to the Israeli government uprooting Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank). On the one hand, I can understand why people don't want to leave homes that they might have lived in for up to 30 years - but on the other hand, I don't think that there should be Israeli settlements in Gaza. If Israel completely withdraws from Gaza, it means that Israeli soldiers will no longer risk their lives defending the settlements.

On Monday the Israeli army took down two caravans at a settlement on the West Bank, Yizhar, that had been put up without government approval. Many settlers from Yizhar opposed the soldiers and fought with them, but in the end the army brought in bulldozers and destroyed the caravans. Below is a photo from Yizhar. Such scenes when trying to remove only two caravans definitely raise the fear that the removal of settlements with 8,000 people living in them will bring pitched battles.

protest at Yizhar

protest at Yizhar
Originally uploaded by reb-lesses.

Protest on January 3, 2005, against the Israeli army taking away two caravans from the Yizhar settlement.

My thanks to Rua da Judiaria for naming my blog on his "Magen David'Ouro Os Melhores Blogs de 2004." I appreciate the boost - now, can you tell me what this means in Portuguese?

And then, for the really important news: At least 24,000 people killed by the Southeast Asian earthquake and tsunami catastrophe. "The wall of water up to 10 meters tall flattened houses, hurled fishing boats onto coastal roads, sent cars spinning through swirling waters into hotel lobbies and sucked sunbathers, babies and fishermen off beaches and out to sea. Worst affected were Sri Lanka where over 12,000 were killed, India where officials reported as many as 5,600 could be dead, Indonesia with 4,991 drowned and the southern tourist isles of Thailand where at least 866 were feared to have lost their lives. Many of the dead were foreign tourists."

I'm visiting Israel right now, and Ha'aretz reports that an Israeli medical team went to Sri Lanka today.

To give aid for emergency relief, go to the American Jewish World Service website, among many others.

AJWS is sending humanitarian aid to the people affected by the tsunami caused by the world's largest earthquake in 40 years. More than 22,000 people are known dead and thousands are still missing in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Burma, and Maldives. For several years, AJWS has partnered with 22 non-governmental, community-based organizations in the region on sustainable community development projects. AJWS is working with these local groups to assess needs and provide emergency relief - food, water, shelter and medicine - and long-term development support.

Donations for this relief effort are being sought and can be made by mail, phone or Web site: American Jewish World Service, Asia Tsunami Relief, 45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10018, 800-889-7146.

.

To donate on-line to AJWS, go to: AJWS secure website.

West Bank Settlers to Wear Orange Stars

And DovBear also comments on the story about the WEST BANK SETTLERS TO WEAR ORANGE STARS. On this point, Ha'aretz points out that this particular tactic seems to have backfired.

In Israel, home to the world's largest number of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, opposition to the orange patch was fierce, cutting with ease across ideological lines.

Perhaps the clearest, most potent voice in opposition came from a most unexpected source, the army's highest-ranking religiously observant officer, a major general who is himself the child of Holocaust survivors."They belong to Holocaust deniers, those settlers who wear the star," IDF Personnel Branch commander Elazar Stern said. "This truly plays into the hands of those who say that the Holocaust was just some legitimate phenomenon that happened in history, the result of a people taking a democratic decision," Stern said. "If what was done during the Holocaust resembles what we are doing to them, then apparently the Holocaust was not all that bad, not all that unique, especially in our own history."

Stern spoke poignantly over the weekend of his parents' experiences in the death camps, where his mother lost her twin sisters, mother and grandmother at the whim of Nazi death camp doctor Joseph Mengele, and his father was forced to eat horse carcasses to survive.

Appearing on Channel Two television's highly-rated "Meet the Press," he quoted his parents as having called the idea of the orange patch "madness." Asked what he himself thought of the idea, he replied, "I think that it is madness."

I have a hard time feeling sorry for Gaza settlers who will receive many thousands of dollars when they leave Gaza, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis don't have enough to eat EVERY DAY. And those same poor Israelis within the Green Line will be paying for the ample compensation for Gaza settlers. There was a harrowing article in the most recent Jerusalem Report about poor elderly people in Israel - the most horrifying example was a 105-year old woman who is fed every day by other (slightly less) elderly people from Ezrat Avot, since the maximum old-age pension one gets from the National Insurance Institute is about 1400 NIS per month.

William Donahue - the Jews control Hollywood!

As pointed out by DovBear, William Donahue, the president of the Catholic League, has finally revealed his anti-semitic beliefs - the Jews do control Hollywood! On the show "Scarborough Country," for December 8, the question was whether "Fahrenheit 9/11" or "The Passion" should win an Oscar in 2005 (my hope is that neither will get it...). On the show were, among others, Pat Buchanan (acting as the antisemitic host), Shmuely Boteach, defending the Jews but also making sure we understood his conservative bonafides, and William Donahue.

Who really cares what Hollywood thinks?  All these hacks come out there.  Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.  It‘s not a secret, OK?  And I‘m not afraid to say it.  That‘s why they hate this movie.  It‘s about Jesus Christ, and it‘s about truth.  It‘s about the messiah. 

Hollywood likes anal sex.  They like to see the public square without nativity scenes.  I like families.  I like children.  They like abortions.  I believe in traditional values and restraint.  They believe in libertinism.  We have nothing in common.  But you know what?  The culture war has been ongoing for a long time.  Their side has lost. 

You have got secular Jews.  You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group, and these people are in the margins.  Frankly, Michael Moore represents a cult movie.  Mel Gibson represents the mainstream of America.

Read the whole transcript for many other fine sentiments from Donahue, Buchanan and other sterling guests.

AJS 2004: How to Expel Demons with Pictures

I am currently trying to finish my paper for the Association for Jewish Studies meeting, which is occurring this coming weekend (panic!). Abstract of my paper follows:

How to Expel Demons with Pictures:
Performance Theory and the Aramaic Incantation Bowls

The Aramaic incantation bowls (4th-8th centuries C.E.), used by Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and others in Sassanian Babylonia, are inscribed earthenware bowls whose purpose was to exorcise demons, cure illness, protect against evil spirits, and save one’s children from Lilith and other demons. Most studies of the bowls, found in archaeological excavations in present-day Iraq and Iran, have concentrated on the written texts and not on the bowls’ pictorial depictions. In fact, the remains of the incantation bowls are filled with images – of demons, the person to be exorcised, and weapons directed against evil forces. The images also include what the ancient texts call “charakteres” – letter-like figures that appear to belong to unknown alphabets. This paper examines the images found on the bowls and their relation to the bowl texts and discusses why those who made the bowls and other amulets found it meaningful to use pictures and characters in concert with words, and explores how the pictures and characters cross cultural and political boundaries. The paper explores the use of performance theory, as exemplified by the work of Stanley Tambiah and J. L. Austin, to understand these images in their material and ritual context. Were the images considered efficacious when used alone, or was it necessary to accompany them with words? This paper concludes that it is important to analyze the pictures along with the words in order to fully appreciate this aspect of ancient Jewish material culture.

Instead of working on the paper today I sat and read many papers for my modern Jewish history course - some of them even well-written - mostly on the founding of the state of Israel and the history of the Holocaust (these were two different topics). I would have preferred that the students not write about the Holocaust but most of them opted for this as a paper topic. Perhaps the next time I teach the course I will speak about the way that fascination with the Holocaust has become a mainstay of American Jewish identity and question perhaps whether this is healthy or justifiable.

Next semester in my introduction to Judaism course we will be reading Elie Wiesel's Night, as part of a unit on Jewish theology. Afterwards I intend to introduce the idea that the committing of genocide did not end with the Shoah, and provide information about the slaughter in Darfur and some of the contemporary Jewish responses to it. A couple of years ago when I taught the book for the first time we discussed the meaning of the slogan "Never Again," and it became clear to me that the students (mostly Jewish) had learned it from their synagogue educations, but that it was essentially devoid of content for them. Perhaps if we pay attention to a currently-occurring genocide (which the world seems to be doing its best NOT to prevent) then the real meaning of "Never Again" will become clear to us.

Impossible Introspection

It’s amazing that the semester leaves so little time for any real introspection – it seems to me that it simply dies away with no encouragement. I spend all my time thinking about my students, what will work in class, grading papers, preparing myself to stand in front of the class, worrying about what they think about me – and often feeling that I don’t present myself as I truly am to them or to anyone else. But how much would I want to reveal about myself to them? I don’t know, I’m not sure – but sometimes it seems to me that better teachers actually reveal more, not necessarily in words & personal details, but in the way they embody their teaching. And then at the same time they make it more possible for the students to be honest about themselves, their motives, their motivations.

I was just thinking of that passage in the fourth Harry Potter book where the fake “Mad-Eye Moody” is saying that he disabled his truth-telling devices, because there was so much outright lying that students did – lying to teachers about why their essays were late or were not handed in or why they had not done the work, etc. I think the same sort of device would also have to be disabled at any college I’ve ever taught at! It’s frustrating, the level of artifice and dissimulation that exists between the students and us.

And then the semester just seems to eat up any motivation to do something other than teaching, or doing research (which definitely runs a poor second). This summer I was very upset about Darfur and really wanted to do something about it – but now? I went to one meeting about it and had a couple of conversations with students. I tried to raise the topic with friends, usually unsuccessfully. I don’t know why I was so unsuccessful – perhaps the presidential election just soaked up everyone’s political energies. But now at least there does seem to be some activism about it in the Jewish community. Our rabbi spoke about Darfur during this Shabbat’s service, and in the most recent issue of the Temple newsletter there was a page about Darfur.

The Klezmatics came today to give a Hanukkah concert – singing the Hanukkah songs of Woody Guthrie (who would have thought it?!). It was beautiful, energetic music. Their last song was called “On Holy Ground” – about the experience of revelation, when God demands we take off our shoes because we are standing on holy ground. Because this was an afternoon concert with songs meant for children, and many of those who came brought their kids, there was a lot of dancing down in front. I went to dance during the next to last, incredibly energetic song, and then during “On Holy Ground” a young man took off his shoes very elaborately (they were hiking books with lots of hooks and the laces took a long time to get off) and danced a gorgeous dance, as if no one else was there.

Exorcisms and Amulets in the Israeli elections of 1996 and 1999

For the last class meeting of my Jewish Magic and Ritual Power course, we watched part of the 1937 Yiddish move, Der Dibek, after having finished reading Yossi Chajes' fascinating book on spirit possession in 16th century Jewish communities, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism.

In order to illustrate how acts of ritual power can become part of modern politics, I also handed out articles on a case of modern-day dybbuk possession that roiled the Israel elections in the spring of 1999. One contemporary account (from the right-wing Israeli radio station, Arutz Sheva) reported (April 27, 1999):

MODERN-DAY EXORCISM IN JERUSALEM

The media in Israel have widely reported the removal ceremony of a "dybbuk" [wandering soul] that was performed by kabbalist Rabbi David Batzri, together with some 30 other rabbis, in a Jerusalem yeshiva in mid-April. The event has aroused reactions from many quarters, ranging from total scorn to a desire to repent. It was broadcast live over haredi radio stations, and many people were invited to the ceremony, in order to "publicize the sanctification of G-d's Name, and to cause more people to believe in the existence of an afterlife" -- according to Rabbi Batzri's son, Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri. The younger Rabbi Batzri told Arutz-7 radio that an "unbelievable amount of people have called and expressed the desire to observe the commandments as a result."

Rabbi Batzri [the son] related that a woman whose husband had died three and a half years ago had recently been plagued by the soul of her husband, which "entered her body and spoke from within her in his own voice to his sons and friends....The woman underwent terrible suffering. Finally, after great hesitations, my father agreed to perform this ceremony, feeling that the life of the woman was at stake -- for the dybbuk had threatened to kill her by choking." In a subsequent conversation with an Arutz-7 correspondent, the younger Rabbi Batzri explained that a "wandering" soul suffers more than one that faces immediate divine punishment. In the exorcism ceremony, Rabbi Batzri is heard talking forcefully with the dybbuk, whose short answers are delivered in a raspy and sometimes unclear voice. "My father told the dybbuk over and over that he has no right to harm anyone....The dybbuk said he had committed many sins, but did not want to elaborate....My father then performed a "tikkun" [sublimation of the soul], and forced the dybbuk to exit the woman's body through her toe. She later felt great pain there for a few hours, but now, thank G-d, she is perfectly healthy." The entire ceremony [in Hebrew] may be heard on the Arutz-7 website....

[I checked the Arutz-7 website and it appears to have been taken down].

A Christian Science Monitor article, A world of trinkets and tombs reported on how the dybbuk exorcism had become part of the Shas election campaign. In a previous election, that of 1996, Shas used another technique taken from the world of Jewish ritual power - amulets - to induce people to vote for them.

Just days before national elections in 1996, Shas distributed thousands of amulets - religious good-luck charms - in the form of mystic prayer keepsakes personally written by Kabalist Rabbi Yitzhak Kadourie. The nonagenarian Mr. Kadourie is the spiritual mentor of Shas - sort of their living patron saint. Followers say he is the only Kabalist in this generation with the power to write amulets that include the secret names of angels and arcane abbreviations that can protect a house from evil. But these particular amulets were given out to recipients with the instruction that Kadourie wanted people to vote for Shas - and for Likud candidate Benjamin Netanyahu. In an election upset in which Mr. Netanyahu won by only 0.5 percent of the vote, the amulets provoked outrage among secular Israeli politicians. Last fall, a judge ruled that the distribution of such items at election time constituted gift-giving and was thus illegal.

This time around, Shas's campaign distributed and screened two videotapes at rallies in the weeks before the May 17 election. The tapes, say some analysts and Shas activists, contributed to the party's electoral triumph. One was of a recent exorcism by a Kabalist rabbi with close ties to Aryeh Deri, who resigned recently as leader of Shas, after he was convicted on charges of fraud and bribe-taking during his tenure as a government minister. The rabbi, David Batzri, has declined all requests for interviews. But his son, a young rabbi who has permission to speak on his father's behalf, was willing to explain their philosophy in a meeting at their new four-story yeshiva in Jerusalem. "We didn't prevent anyone from taping [the exorcism] because we knew that seeing it could make all the world believe in life after death," says Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri. The need for exorcisms is rare, he says, and as such, it was the first time his father ever performed one. "My father didn't want this tape to focus on politics or Deri, but to prove the existence of the afterlife," says Mr. Batzri. "We don't get involved in politics, but it's true that Shas is a spiritual movement. And if someone sees this tape, he may become a more spiritual person and, naturally, vote Shas. Many people who saw this tape said they [decided] to vote Shas." Despite that, he says, he and his father don't support the use of amulets or candidate endorsements before elections. Although his father studied with the premier Kabalist himself - Rabbi Kadourie - Batzri says they shun any direct involvement in politics.

Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri's claim that this was the first exorcism his father had ever performed appears to be false, because an earlier article from the Jerusalem Post (August 8, 1996) reported that he had advertised for a mass exorcism of dybbuks in 1996.

A GROUP of kabbalists are to gather next week to conduct a mass public prayer to exorcise "dybbuks" from people suffering from mental and emotional problems. This will be the first time such prayers are held in public. The prayers will be conducted on Monday in Yeshivat Hashalom in Jerusalem, which is headed by Rabbi David Batzri, a leading kabbalist. The date marks the yahrzeit of Batzri's grandfather, Rabbi Yehuda Fetaya, who was known for his ability to heal people with severe emotional problems.

I will be visiting Israel later on this month so the possibility of terror attacks is more on my mind than usual. I'll be there for almost three weeks to visit friends, tour around a little, and get some research done at the National Library in Jerusalem. Our semester is about to end, so I have the time to do some traveling. While there I expect to continue working on an article that I gave a presentation on at the Society of Biblical Literature conference last month.

What follows is an abstract of my SBL paper, ""He Shall Not Look at a Woman": Gender in the Hekhalot Literature."

The Hekhalot literature contains many ascetic prescriptions that the mystic must follow to invoke angels or enter the hekhalot – prescriptions which imply that the world of the Merkabah was a male-only world. The male adepts must avoid any contact with women, including not looking at women and not eating food prepared by women. A distant contact with menstrual impurity suffices to recall Rabbi Nehuniah b. Ha-Qanah from his Hekhalot vision. This paper examines the Hekhalot requirements of ritual and sexual purity that prohibited the male mystic’s contact with women, and the concomitant assumption in the Hekhalot texts that only men can engage in mystical practices. It attempts to answer the following question: Why were there no female Hekhalot mystics and why was the visionary experience "gendered male" in the Hekhalot literature? This question arises because the comparative evidence from early Christianity and early Islam differs so much from the Jewish sources. Early Christian texts present literary expressions of women's ability to receive revelation from angels. In Luke 1, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that she will have a son; in 1 Cor. 11–14, Paul refers to both women and men speaking "the tongues of angels. The Montanists’ female prophets received wisdom from angels. Women participated in early Christian ascetic and monastic movements. The woman mystic Rabi'a, whose teachings are revered by later Sufis, was a prominent figure in early Sufism. Why, in contrast, were Jewish women’s mystical experiences not recorded and their absence required from Hekhalot circles?

Despite the hopeful signs after the death of Arafat that another window for peace is opening, Hamas is doing its best to prevent any peaceful possibilities with its latest attack - 5 IDF soldiers killed in Gaza tunnel blast.

On another note, the E. Jerusalem terror cell suspected of committing the Cafe Hillel bombing (on Emek Refaim) in September 2003 has been seized. This was the attack in which Dr. David Appelbaum and his daughter Naava, along with five others, were killed.

This is an utterly fascinating story from the Jerusalem Post - B'Tselem and the IDF: Unlikely partners - the Israeli army has been hosting lectures by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, which relentlessly criticizes the army.

Publicly, the army has long followed a practice of either responding to some of B'Tselem's flow of allegations with a robust defense of its actions, or choosing to ignore them. Privately, and remarkably, however, it has gradually been exposing more and more of its soldiers directly to their B'Tselem critics.

B'Tselem staff have been delivering lectures to the IDF, at the Military Educational Academy at Har Gilo, south of Jerusalem, on a sporadic basis since the mid 1990s. But over the past two years, precisely as B'Tselem's critiques of the army have reached new heights, the frequency of such lectures has increased dramatically.

In close coordination with senior officers from the IDF's Educational Corps, B'Tselem staffers now lecture at least two or three times a month to a broad spectrum of IDF soldiers including Border Police, the officers who staff the District Coordination offices handling entry permits for Palestinian civilians, officers training for the Educational Corps, and members of a new checkpoint unit.

Would that the U.S. army was sponsoring similar lectures by Amnesty International and the International Red Cross!

On a much lighter note than the previous two posts: if you've ever had a hankering to own the Ark of the Covenant, a small scale model is now available for only $12.95: Welcome to Archie McPhee Online.

More evidence of prisoner abuse by American troops in Iraq, this time by Navy SEALS: Navy Probes New Iraq Prisoner Photos.

This is disgusting -- Israeli officer: I was right to shoot 13-year-old child.

An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old.

More on this from Ha'aretz: Officer on tape says he 'confirmed kill' of Gaza girl

Channel Two's documentary show Fact broadcast last night the army communications network tape recording of the real-time events, including videotape, in which R. is heard explicitly stating he "verified the kill." The tape showed that the soldiers at the outpost kept firing at the girl even after she had been identified by soldiers as "about 10 years old."

The October 5 event took place around 7 in the morning, when a soldier on duty at the outpost spotted a "suspicious figure" about 100 meters from the outpost. Soldiers immediately began firing at the figure while R., the outpost commander, together with some officers and soldiers, left the outpost and took up a position behind a sand rampart next to the outpost.

The soldiers said they thought she was planting a bomb. The girl's family said she was on her way to school when she was shot. According to the indictment, R. charged the girl after she was shot and fired two rounds at her from close range. He began walking away, then turned around and shot her again.

"The accused stood similarly to the way he stood when he shot her twice - pointed his weapon downward and shot, this time on automatic, approximately 10 bullets until he emptied his magazine," the indictment says. It is not known whether the girl was already dead when he shot her. At the time, Palestinian hospital officials said the girl was shot at least 15 times, mostly in the upper body.

Here's another Ha'aretz article on the same horrible incident Analysis / Absolutely illegal:

But that is far from the key question in the case. At least from the moral aspect, the main question is why the company commander and his soldiers fired at the girl who was 100 meters away from the outpost, was not armed, was not a danger to the soldiers inside the protected outpost, and when at least some of the soldiers knew that it was a little girl. A soldiers is explicitly heard saying "it's a little girl," and that she is "scared to death." Nonetheless, the shooting went on. Moreover, R. himself reports later that he shot "the girl."

No less important is the tone of the voices on the tape. Officers trying to explain what happened constantly said that the areas is dangerous, and that the soldiers were under threat. But that does not come across in the voices of the soldiers. They don't sound worried or pressured, but almost apathetic. They seem to be shooting because those are the orders - to shoot at anyone who comes close, even if some know it's only a girl, and there is no sense of fear. It seems, at least, that the order to shoot is blatantly illegal, and therefore the soldiers should have refused it. The question becomes, therefore, why only the company commander is being prosecuted, and only for illegal use of his weapon and not for manslaughter at the very least.

And so is this: Torture Can Be Used to Detain U.S. Enemies.

U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday.

The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for up to three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

And so is this: Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said.

So tell me, what does differentiate us from our enemies?

Anti-semitic editorial from the Duke University student newspaper

Via Bloghead, an anti-semitic editorial from the Duke University student newspaper, The Jews . The author, using classic anti-semitic tropes, objects to Jews and others organizing on the Duke campus against the latest conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

One part of his argument seems to be calling, in an underhanded way, for the return of the "Jewish quota" for American elite colleges and universities:

It is well known that Jews constitute the most privileged “minority” group in this country. Among the top 10 universities, Jews enjoy shocking overrepresentation: Only the California Institute of Technology has an undergraduate Jewish population below 10 percent, and four schools have particularly stark Jewish advantages—Harvard (30 percent), Yale (23 percent), UPenn (31 percent) and Columbia (25 percent). Keep in mind that, at best estimate, no more than 3 percent of all Americans are Jewish.

Another part condemns Jews for gaining acceptance in the United States because we are now seen as "white":

While Jews undoubtedly lay claim to a long history of racism and genocide that continues across the world today, this characterization does not transport perfectly to the United States. After World War II, overt anti-Semitism gradually subsided, in part because of American response to Hitler’s murderous regime, but largely due to Jewish association with whiteness and the privileges white skin affords. In short, Jews can renounce their difference by taking off the yarmulke. Clearly, this is not a luxury enjoyed by all minority groups.

He continues by condemning President Clinton for appointing two Jews as Supreme Court Justices, and to argue that Jews "have the right to move seamlessly between the majority and minority."

When former President Bill Clinton nominated his first two judges to the Supreme Court, both were Jews.  Remarkable in the slightest? No, of course not. But the American public still can’t get over Clarence Thomas’s cultural heritage, after being appointed by Bush 41. To be Jewish is to have the right to move seamlessly between the majority and minority, without constraint. Thus, Jewish-American appropriation of the “oppressed” moniker is disingenuous, belying the reality of America’s social hierarchy.

This vile editorial, which displays some of the classic arguments of both rightwing and leftwing anti-semitism (right: there are too many of those Jews in our universities; left: how dare those Jews pretend they're oppressed?), is a depressing example of the entrance of classic anti-semitism into the elite American university. I haven't followed this controversy in detail, but this certainly is a mournful sign of the times.

Another chilling Nicholas Kristof op-ed on Darfur - As Humans Are Hunted. He says that the Sudanese government was unwilling to give him a visa, so he snuck over the border from Chad.

The area is desolate and throbs with malevolence, with villages burned and abandoned and survivors hiding from the Janjaweed and the Sudanese Army. Tearing across the desert in a pickup truck, I see more gazelles than humans. When survivors see my vehicle, they tend to hide. And, frankly, when I see a man, my impulse is to hide as well. That makes interviews difficult....

It's progress that the world has denounced the genocide without waiting the customary 10 years before wringing its hands in regret. But there are many other steps the United States could take: a no-flight zone, an arms embargo, an asset freeze on businesses owned by Sudan's ruling party, and greater teamwork with African and Islamic countries to exert more pressure on Sudan.

President Bush is already in the forefront of the world leaders who have addressed the slaughter in Darfur, and he has done far more than President Clinton did during the Rwandan genocide. But there is so much more the United States can still do.

Mr. President, you pride yourself on your willingness to stand up to evil - so why do you remain so passive in the face of such evil?

Here in Ithaca I see the first public stirrings of concern. Professor John Weiss of the History Department at Cornell made a documentary over the summer about the genocide in Darfur, which will be shown next Tuesday, October 19, at 4:30 in the Willard Straight Hall Cinema. Cornell Hillel is also exhibiting photographs at Cornell next week "to raise awareness and promote discussion."

At the same time, there will be a panel discussion sponsored by the Institute for African Development: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, African Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania will speak on "Genocide in Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan". The web site says that he is the 'the founder of "Darfur Information Center', an on-line source for information about Darfur region of western Sudan." This will be in Auditorium D, Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell.

Our intrepid Secretary of State makes his views known: Powell Says Saudi Women Should Have Vote. He says: "It is a decision for the Saudis to make, Powell said, but 'in every society in the world women have to be able to play their full role.'"

I am struck by this story, in which the Saudi government claims it can't organize local elections with women participating,
Saudi Women Can't Vote, Run in Elections, while in Afghanistan many women voted in the Presidential election (about 40% of the voters were women, apparently). When watching the news story yesterday, there were many shots of long lines of women voting, or of women officials dealing with the ballot boxes. If the Afghans, living in a poor, still war-torn country, where women are definitely not equal to men, can manage to organize women's voting, then what excuse do the Saudis have? And these people are our allies!

Via another Jewish blog, I just found a new and very delightful blog by a Renegade Rebbetzin. For obvious reasons she's anonymous, but she writes beautifully and is also very funny!

The sad cost of Israel's attacks in Gaza: The High Cost of Israel's Gaza Mission: Innocent Victims. And why does Sharon not evacuate all Israeli settlers and soldiers as rapidly as possible from Gaza? Why must the withdrawal happen next summer? And how many more people, Israelis and Palestinians, will have to die before Israelis leave Gaza?

And obviously, this is not the first attack on Israelis abroad, as the New York Times reports: A Bleak History: 3 Decades of Attacks on Jewish Targets and Israelis Abroad.

1008MIDEASTmap

1008MIDEASTmap
Originally uploaded by reb-lesses.

These maps, from the New York Times, show where the attacks in Egypt were.

One of the stories on Israel Radio was about the hundreds of people who showed up to donate blood for the wounded from the terror attacks in Egypt. One young man was quoted saying that he had to go to donate blood because he had himself visited the places that had been attacked - it could have easily been him or his friends who were victims. The Sinai desert, especially the beach resorts, are favorite places for Israelis to go on vacation. On one trip I made to Israel a friend convinced me to go to Sinai with her. We stayed at a rather run-down resort at Nuweiba, in a hut by the sea, and went snorkeling together. It was beautiful but the accommodations were rather uncomfortable. Also, it was during Passover (a favorite time for Israelis to visit Sinai, paradoxically enough), and I had to carry a lot of matzoh with me. Apparently one of the attacks last night was near Nuweiba, at a place called Ras al-Shaitan.

It's not known yet who the attackers were - some organization called the "World Islamic Organization" took responsibility, but this organization is not known. The Israeli newspapers were raising the possibility that Hamas or possibly Al-Qaeda were responsible for the attacks.

I've been listening to Israeli Radio's "Reshet Bet" (their news and music station) for more news on what's happened in Egypt - if you want to listen, go to Reshet Bet and click on "Bet Live" - it will make a connection via Windows Media Player.

Note: of course, it's in Hebrew. There are English broadcasts from Israel Radio available on line, but you couldn't get them live because they are much less frequent.

I was about to go to synagogue tonight for the Simhat Torah service when I heard on the radio that there had been a terrorist attack at the Taba Hilton Hotel - At least 35 dead in three Sinai explosions. I watched the ABC television news and saw a rather disgusting report that attempted to blame this attack on the current fighting in Gaza - despite the fact that an attack like this would have taken quite a lot of planning and that on September 9 the Israeli security services "published a severe terror threat, warning Israelis against travelling to Egypt and Sinai."

Perhaps the ABC bureau chief in Jerusalem was getting his opinion from the Egyptian government spokesman, who "linked the blasts to the Israeli military operation against the Palestinians in the neighboring Gaza Strip, where 84 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli offensive that began on Sept. 29 to stop militants from firing homemade rockets into Israel. 'I think the explosions are very related to what is going on in Gaza,' Rady told AP. 'We condemn these attacks, which have harmed many people...I think it is very probable that there is a link between these three explosions.' he added. 'It is very unlikely they happened by chance.'" This, of course, completely ignores the fact that the Israelis had warned long before the Isareli offensive in Gaza.

The terrorist attack definitely put a damper for me on the Simhat Torah service - I kept thinking about the people who had been killed and injured in Egypt. It made it harder to have the proper spirit of celebration.

I found another interesting Saudi blog (via Mahmood's blog) - Saudi Jeans. It's written by a college student in Riyadh. Thus far, highly recommended.

On another topic - I didn't watch the Kerry-Bush debate, but I did listen to much of it - and it certainly sounded to me as if Kerry was speaking better and more clearly than Bush. And now Newsweek is reporting that he's gained back his losses in the polls since the Republican Convention. May this continue to be true!

I just read the NYTimes magazine article in today's newspaper about political weblogs - and was disgusted to discover that they only pay attention to the high-profile left-wing blogs. They don't even mention Little Green Footballs, which was one of the blogs that was instrumental in proving that the memos Dan Rather had received about President Bush's service in the National Guard were faked. Much as my liberal heart wishes the memos had been real, they weren't, and Dan Rather and CBS blew it.

I certainly don't always agree with LGF (and certainly not with many of the commenters there), but on the other hand, this is just ridiculous! The article is crowing about how wonderful the left-wing blogs are and how they are acting like right-wing talk radio in their political impact - but how can you just ignore the importance of the right-wing blogs as well? This was not a news story, it was advocacy journalism masquerading as a news story. Charles Johnson at LGF is absolutely correct to say, "The New York Times, with help from Matthew Klam, is trying to make us all disappear." I have thought for many years that the NYTimes Magzine has gone way down hill from its glory days, but this is a particularly egregious example. As far as I'm concerned they should stop pretending it's a newsmagazine, and turn it into what they obviously really want it to be - a style magazine that operates as an appendage to the fashion industry.

For those of you interested in the Zayed Centre in the United Arab Emirates Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica.com has a long report on how the UAE government is trying to pretend that never had anti-semitic speakers or sponsored anti-semitic conferences. The Centre has been closed down for a while, but in its heyday it ran a conference on "Semitism," i.e., the evil things that Jews do that has to be combated by "anti-semitism."

I am apparently Purple and Proud of It (washingtonpost.com), as Richard Cohen argues in the Washington Post.

I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush or, as someone here told me, to consider his possible reelection as a reason to leave the country. In fact, Bush haters go so far they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue, pushing me by revulsion into a color I otherwise would not have. For instance, I have just read Nicholson Baker's novel "Checkpoint," an audacious and repellent work about whether the assassination of Bush would be warranted. What concerns me is not one man's loss of perspective but the milieu, the zeitgeist, that produced it. Lots of people must have told Baker he had a capital idea -- a book that just had to be published -- and with alacrity. He was Paul Revere in print.

I bump into these anti-Bush alarmists all the time. Recently an extremely successful and erudite man I much admire told me he viewed the upcoming election as something akin to September 1939, the time when World War II started and, among other things, European Jewry was all but snuffed out. I add that bit about the Holocaust because the man I was talking to had been born a European Jew. I could hardly believe my ears.

This is not the place to examine why Bush is so hated by some people, though the war in Iraq surely takes pride of place. But even before that particular war, I heard people denounce the one in Afghanistan, that Taliban-controlled horror that harbored Osama bin Laden. These people are infected with a corrosive doubt about their own country. A recent Pew Research Center poll found, for instance, that 51 percent of Democrats agreed with the proposition that "U.S. wrongdoing" contributed to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (only 17 percent of Republicans agreed). Those are astounding numbers, an indictment not really of America (for what?) but of those people who compulsively blame their own country for the faults of others. You can believe that U.S. support of Israel and the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, but the term Pew used was "wrongdoing." In this respect, these people and Osama bin Laden are in agreement.

The demonization of Bush is going to cost John Kerry plenty if it hasn't already. It so overstates the case against Bush that a levelheaded listener would be excused for thinking that there isn't one in the first place. It squeezes the middle, virtually forcing moderates to pick which bunch of nuts they're going to join. It's hard to know whom to loathe more -- religious zealots who would censor my reading and deny me the fruits of stem cell research or fervid hallucinators who belittle Saddam Hussein's crimes (or even Sept. 11) and wonder, in the throes of perpetual adolescence, whether the assassination of the president would not amount to a political mercy killing. It's all pretty repugnant.

But some of us cherish moderation, recoil from conspiracy theories and would like, if possible, to stick to the facts. We may dislike Bush's policies, but we do not vitriolically hate the man, think he stole the election or blame our own country for the crimes of Sept. 11. We are the proud Purples -- once the royal color, now the tattered banner of common sense.

I don't like many of President Bush's policies, and certainly don't agree with his prejudices (for example, his insistence that we need an amendment to the Constitution to protect the U.S. from gay marriage), but I do not hate him as an individual person.

Rabbi Yossi Dayan, who said that he would be willing to perform the Pulsa Denura ceremony against Prime Minister Sharon, may be indicted for inciting to murder, according to the Jerusalem Post.

I named this weblog "Mystical Politics" in part to discuss the nexus between mysticism and politics. For the most part, I have sometimes discussed mysticism, and often politics, but rarely together. Today a news story from Israel expresses the connection between them very acutely. The Pulsa Denura curse is back, this time potentially targeting Israeli Prime Minister Sharon. A rabbi from Kiryat Arba, a settlement next to Hebron, is calling for Sharon's death.

Rabbi says would hold Kabbalah ritual calling for PM's death
By Haaretz Service

Jerusalem police are stepping up their probe of phoned threats to murder Prime Minister Ariel Sharon if the Gaza disengagement plan is not called off. On Tuesday night Rabbi Yossi Dayan, a former member of the outlawed Kach party, declared on Channel 2 that he would be prepared to carry out a ceremony putting a curse on Sharon.

The ceremony, called Pulsa Denura, was carried out before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995.

Dayan, a resident of Kiryat Arba, said that he would be willing to conduct the ceremony if other rabbis instructed him to do so, and added that when he was asked to perform the ceremony against Rabin, he did so. The rabbi said that the security services and the police had questioned about this. "We are forbidden from talking now. We cannot pray. We cannot think. We cannot feel," Dayan said. "The head of the Security Service, [Avi] Dichter says that there are people wishing that Sharon would die. I am among them. What? Can't I wish?" he said.

Following Dayan's statements, the Judea and Samaria police are initiating an investigation against him of incitement to murder. Ilan Franco, chief of the capital's police, said priority has been raised of investigations into telephone threats against Sharon and Yonatan Bassi, who is in charge of implementing the disengagement plan. Franco also said that the police were tightening the security around the offices of the Disengagement Directorate in Jerusalem. He added that the police are also making preparations for securing the Temple Mount against extremists as the date for the implementation of the disengagement plan approaches.

"We intensified the security around the Temple Mount, security that was already in place. We certainly took into account the fact that extremist elements on both sides, not necessarily Jews, will seek to carry out an attack, in an effort to block the diplomatic process," Franco said.

Police and State Prosecutor officers are also continuing to examine the statements made and posters carried during the rightist mass rally in Jerusalem on Sunday for illegal incitement. "We culled banners during the rally that we thought should be examined by the Prosecutor's Office. If the prosecutor sees fit to instruct us to do so, we will initiate an investigation into the matter," Franco said.

When I read this, I went to the Lexis-Nexis database to try to find out about the Pulsa Denura curse carried out against Prime Minister Rabin before his assassination.

In the November 16, 1995 issue of the Jerusalem Report, in an article obviously written before Rabin's death, Peter Hirschberg reported on the ritual directed against Rabin, which was also invoked earlier, during the 1991 Gulf War, against Saddam Hussein. Although he does not name him in this article, Rabbi Yossi Dayan was apparently the rabbi who conducted the ceremony against Rabin, as this Reuters story points out.

YITZHAK RABIN DOES NOT have long to live. The angels have their orders.

Suffering and death await the prime minister, or so say the kabbalists who have cursed him with the pulsa denura - Aramaic for "lashes of fire" - for his "heretical" policies. "He's inciting against Judaism," says the Jerusalem rabbi who, clad in tefillin, read out the most terrifying of curses in the tradition of Jewish mysticism - opposite Rabin's residence on the eve of Yom Kippur.

"And on him, Yitzhak son of Rosa, known as Rabin," the Aramaic text stated, "we have permission... to demand from the angels of destruction that they take a sword to this wicked man... to kill him ... for handing over the Land of Israel to our enemies, the sons of Ishmael."

The rabbi, who won't have his name published but identifies himself as a member of the far-right Kach movement, says the curse generally works within 30 days. That put the expiry date - for Rabin or the curse - in early November.

For Jewish mystics of both North African and East European descent, curses taken from the tradition of "practical Kabbalah" are heavy weaponry - not to be used every day, but certainly available in wars, religious struggles and even political battles. Not only the ultra-Orthodox but many traditional-leaning Israelis regard them with the utmost seriousness.

Curses like the one against Rabin, explains sociologist Menachem Friedman, an expert on the ultra-Orthodox, are ways for the powerless to deal with impotence. "Magic," explains Friedman, "isn't used by the regime or the group in power. It's used by the powerless. When they do abracadabra ceremonies it shows that they're terrified. Magic gives them a sense of power."

Invoking the pulsa denura is a perilous undertaking, for if the ceremony is not performed in a strictly prescribed fashion, it can strike the conjurers themselves.

Before Rabin, the last person so cursed was Saddam Hussein. One day during the 1991 Gulf War, as Scuds rained down on Israel, a minyan of fasting kabbalists gathered at the tomb of the prophet Samuel just outside Jerusalem. There they entered a dark cave, where one of the holy men placed a copper tray on a rock and lit the 24 black candles he'd placed on it. As the mystics circled the candles, they chanted the curse seven times, calling on the angels not merely to visit death upon "Saddam the son of Sabha," but to ensure that his wife was given to another man.

That done, small lead balls and pieces of earthenware were thrown on the candles and the shofar was sounded. "The black candles," explains Yediot Aharonot journalist Amos Nevo, who documented the ceremony, "symbolize the person being cursed. When they're put out, it's as if the person's soul is being extinguished." Lead, he says, is for the ammunition in the war against the cursed one, earthenware symbolizes death, and the shofar opens the skies so the curse will be heard.

Saddam Hussein is still alive, although in prison, but Rabin is dead.

WTC

WTC
Originally uploaded by reb-lesses.

In commemoration.

Once again, Sudan: The Passion of the Present reports superbly on what is happening in Darfur. My friend Gary Farber also has links to a very interesting article by Alex de Wall in the London Review of Books for August 5, 2004: Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap. One of the interesting points that the author makes is that the distinction between "Arabs" and "Africans" that often comes across as a "racial" distinction is relatively new in Sudan itself (new meaning in the last 20 years), as a result of political and ideological changes. He says, "Despite talk of 'Arabs' and 'Africans', it is rarely possible to tell on the basis of skin colour which group an individual Darfurian belongs to. All have lived there for centuries and all are Muslims." I am reminded of the "racial" distinctions between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, created in large measure through Belgian colonial policy in the early 20th century. Or of what happened when Yugoslavia was falling apart - people who under the Communist regime had married people of other religions or ethnic groups who now had to choose which one they belonged to, because they had to know which side of a war to fight on.

On the day that we Americans are mourning over 1,000 Americans, mostly soldiers, who have died during the Iraq War, the AP reports that Thousands of Iraqis Estimated Killed. As with Vietnam, we mostly gaze inwards at our own losses, but to know the true cost of this war, we must notice all of the Iraqi dead as well.

A year ago, I supported this war. But then, a year ago, I thought that there would be no Iraqi insurgency right now, and that the U.S. military would not have lost control of important cities in Iraq like Fallujah. I thought that we were genuinely bringing a better life to Iraqis. Even though it seemed that there had not been weapons of mass destruction, the war was still justified by the fact that it destroyed a horrible dictatorship.

Now, I am not so sure. I cannot imagine turning the clock back to the regime of Saddam Hussein -- but what are we doing in Iraq? Do we have any goals? It seems that the Bush Administration is just hoping that things will turn around. I hate to say it, but this is starting to remind me of Vietnam.

My parents were initially supportive of the Vietnam War - I remember talking to them at the time (I was 12 at the time). In 1968 my mother turned against the war and worked for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. I'm starting to understand how her thinking turned around.

This self-criticism is very good, in reaction to the mass killings at the school in Beslan, Russia - School Siege in Russia Sparks Self-Criticism in Arab World - but one wonders if there would be the same reaction if Hamas had besieged an Israeli school and killed an equal number of children and their parents. I notice that in this article, it says that "A Palestinian columnist, Hassan al-Batal, wrote in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Ayyam that the 'day of horror in the school' should be designated an international day for the condemnation of terrorism. 'There are no mitigating circumstances for the inhuman horror and the height of barbarism'" at the school, he wrote. Has he ever condemned terrorism against Israeli civilians (for example, the two recent bus bombings in Beersheva?). If any of my readers have evidence that he has, I would be happy to post it.

I was watching a PBS Nova program tonight on how the World Trade Center towers collapsed. I was marveling again at the people who had the presence of mind to videotape what was happening - especially the people who videoed the planes crashing into the towers. And I thought again about those who deny that the planes were hijacked, and who blame Israel for the attacks.

Carol Valentine, the notorious Holocaust denier who put up the site Come and Hear to demonstrate the wickedness of the Talmud, has many articles on her web site Public Action that purport to prove that Al Qaeda did not carry out the attacks and that it's the Mossad's fault. This article, Operation 911: NO SUICIDE PILOTS, claims to show that the four planes hijacked on 9/11/01 were actually piloted by robots and were not passenger planes.

LGF calls our attention to another version of this vicious slur.

For a slide show of the towers and the attack on them, see this LGF slide show.

And here are a series of stories from 9/11/01, collected last year by LGF.

The Black Day provides a different slide show of photographs from 9/11/01.

The New York Times has put online all of its Portraits of Grief, biographies of all the 9/11 victims that originally appeared in the newspaper in the months after the terrorist attacks.

CNN has a very useful site of all their stories about the terrorist attacks and the fight against Al Qaeda, including links to the 9/11 Commission report.

The lies and anti-semitism of the conspiracy theorists should not blind us to those who perpetrated these attacks and who still want to attack the United States. One does not have to accept what the Bush administration says about Iraq or the war on terror (for example, Vice President Cheney's ridiculous charge today that it will encourage Al Qaeda to attack again if Kerry is elected President) to recognize that we are, in fact, at war.

On this same note of why certain things become causes -- the Catholic Worker in Ithaca has taken up the issue of the separation fence in Israel/Palestine. In the last week of August, they erected a sham "wall" on the Ithaca Commons with slogans on it, saying things like "end Israeli apartheid." I wish someone here could explain why this has become one of the "causes" of the local Catholic Worker group, especially because they deal with it in such a one-sided way. (on the wall was also written a slogan about something like "angels in Palestine") Why, for example, has the Sudan not become an issue for them?

This story -- The Scene: 52 Hours of Horror and Death for Captives at Russian School -- is truly horrifying. I don't know how the story is going to shake out -- i.e., how much the Russian security services are responsible for the high death toll, and how much the terrorists themselves -- but in any case this makes me feel that our world is sliding further into barbarism. Of course, there's also what the Russian government and military have been doing to the people of Chechnya over the last ten or so years - also truly horrifying, and with a much higher death toll, thus far.

I wonder why our good American left and right have not gotten exercised about what's happening in Russia and/or Chechnya. Is it simply because the U.S. is not involved, except through inaction? Why is it that certain causes become "fashionable," while others, in which thousands or millions of people die, remain totally unknown to most people except those who read the page 18, bottom of the page stories in the New York Times or Washington Post?

The Passion of the Present reports that the UN has concluded that the Sudan has done nothing to stop the Janjaweed in Darfur from killing, raping, and driving people out of their homes. The report, however, does not recommend sanctions against Sudan, instead calling for a peace-keeping force of African Union troops to make humanitarian aid possible.

This is how genocide happens. Power politics between states prevents any action to help people in mortal danger. Does anyone remember the Evian Conference, in 1938? That was the conference where the U.S. and European countries discussed what to do with the Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, and with Jews who desperately sought to flee those countries. No state raised its immigration quotas to permit more Jews to enter. In fact, during the 1930's, the US immigration quotas for Germany were filled only one year to allow Jews from Germany to enter.

There's a poster available from Passion of the Present about the genocide in Darfur, plus a fact sheet.