Elena Kagan and a "Lament for American Protestantism"

Wow, I'm starting to think that President Obama is crazy like a fox - he's picked a Supreme Court nominee who drives everyone crazy! Diana Butler Bass laments the fact that if Kagan is confirmed, there will be no Protestants on the Supreme Court.

Elena Kagan will be a fine and fair justice. President Obama has made a thoughtful, considered choice. But, on this day, I am a little sad. Missing from the bench upcoming years will be someone who empathizes with the Protestant worldview in a visceral way. As religious cases multiply in an increasingly pluralistic world, I can't help but think that losing the lived memory of American Protestantism will be a loss for all of us indeed.

The little facts that a) three-quarters of all the people who have served on the Supreme Court have been Protestants; and b) there has only ever been one non-Protestant President of the United States (John F. Kennedy), make Bass's claim that having six Catholics and three Jews on the court means that the "lived memory of American Protestantism" will be lost complete nonsense.

CNN has a far saner article about how and why the court has come to have a majority of non-Protestants, despite the fact that a majority of the country is still Protestant.

Many religion scholars attribute the decline of Protestant representation on the high court to the breakdown of a mainline Protestant identity and to the absence of a strong tradition of lawyering among evangelical Protestants. "Mainline Protestantism isn't a pressure group," said [Steve] Prothero, "It's not like the National Council of Churches is lobbying Obama to get a Lutheran appointed to the Supreme Court."

And while Judaism and Catholicism have their own sets of religious laws that date back millennia, many branches of Protestant Christianity do not. For much of the last 150 years, evangelical Christianity has stressed an emotional theology of heart over head -- not a recipe for producing legal scholars with eyes fixed on the Supreme Court.

"Evangelicals have put more effort into getting elected than in getting onto the bench," said Michael Lindsay, a Rice University professor who has studied evangelical elites. "Electoral politics is more similar to the style of rallying of around revival campaign than it is to the arduous journey of producing intellectual giants that could be eligible for the Supreme Court."

One explanation of Catholics' and Jews' high court hegemony is that members of both traditions have long pursued legal degrees as a way to assimilate into a majority Protestant country. "Most American Catholic law schools were not formed to be elite institutions of lofty legal scholarship, but as a way to respond to the fact that other law schools were excluding Catholics," said Richard Garnett, a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. "It was a vehicle to get Catholics into the middle class."

"Early on, those schools admitted a lot of Jewish students who were being discriminated against," Garnett said.

Today, Catholic law schools at Georgetown University, Fordham University and Notre Dame are considered among the best in the country.

Evangelical Protestant colleges, meanwhile -- including Regent University and Liberty University, founded by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell respectively -- have had law schools only since the 1980s.

And law schools with Protestant roots, like Harvard and Yale, shed their religious identities a long time ago, part of the broader fading of a distinct mainline Protestant identity in the U.S.

Some legal and religious scholars say the dearth of qualified evangelical candidates for the Supreme Court came into sharp relief in 2005, when President George W. Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to the high court. An evangelical Christian whom the White House promoted strenuously among evangelicals, Miers had her nomination brought down largely by conservatives -- nonevangelicals, mostly -- who said she was not qualified for the position.

In the last couple of decades, however, more evangelicals have begun pursuing legal degrees, some at elite colleges. "There are now vibrant Christian fellowships at Harvard and Yale," said Lindsay. "Ten years from now, it will be entirely possible to see an evangelical Protestant on the Supreme Court."

Rachel Heflin, a senior at Patrick Henry College -- a Virginia school whose students are mostly evangelicals from homeschooling backgrounds -- said many of her friends are heading to law school next year. "When your circle of friends is comprised of aspiring lawyers, the joke is about who's going to make it to the high court first," said Heflin, an evangelical Christian who will be attending George Washington University Law School on scholarship.

Which means that a Protestant Supreme Court resurgence may not be too far off.

Ten years from now? If someone is just now attending Harvard or Yale, they're not going to be nominated as Supreme Court judges in ten years! Elena Kagan is considered young to be nominated, and she's 50.

Her Sexual Orientation Above All

Andrew Sullivan cites some homophobes (Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Americans for Truth - what an assembly of oxymoronic names!) as the reason that Elana Kagan should come out - that is, if she is a lesbian.

Her Sexual Orientation Above All

The days are past when this could be brushed under the rug. Let's have an honest debate, can we? The way to counter prejudice is through truth - not avoidance. For the right to oppose Kagan merely because she is gay - if she is - would be one more step toward their self-destruction. By staying mum, the Obamites may be playing yet another rope-a-dope. I just cannot see how in 2010, ambiguity is an option. I mean: who would claim that John Roberts' heterosexuality is somehow private? It is a demonstrably reported fact that there would now be no Protestants on the court - just Catholics and Jews. Why is this not an invasion of privacy, if asking someone about their sexual orientation is?

But why should Elana Kagan (or anyone else for that matter) come out because of the lies and twisted sexual identities of a bunch of right-wing homophobes?

Elana Kagan's sexual orientation (or her religion) are not "above all." I believe that they are not relevant to whether she would be a good Supreme Court justice. I simply do not like Sullivan's attitude that everything about one's identity must be politicized - one's sexual orientation, one's religion.

I would have thought that a real conservative, which is what Sullivan claims to be, would be willing to accept some realm of privacy in an individual's life. He reminds me of the people I used to know when I was a student at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1970s - if you weren't sure what your sexual orientation was (especially if that uncertainty meant that you were going out with both men and women), you were condemned as giving in to the heterosexist patriarchy. Remember - the personal is political? Remember - feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice? Sullivan, in my opinion, is acting all too much like the self-righteous, holier-than-thou, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist pseudo-radicals of the 1970s. In short, not anything like the conservative he claims to be.

And yes, my third post of the day on Andrew Sullivan. Definitely becoming an obsession.

Methinks the man doth protest too much

Perhaps I'm becoming as cranky as Marty Peretz - but I think it's time for Andrew Sullivan to examine the beam in his own eye, rather than concentrate on the mote in other people's: Something Much Darker, Ctd

And yes, I am picking on him today.

Andrew Sullivan wants to "out" Elena Kagan

I don't have a real opinion on whether President Obama should have nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court as opposed to the other realistic possibilities - I'm not an expert in this area.

But I can say one thing - I don't care what her sexual orientation is. I don't think it's relevant. I also don't think that it's relevant what her religion is.

Therefore, I find Andrew Sullivan's post, So Is She Gay? deeply offensive.

He writes:

It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay ... and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively.

In a word, this is preposterous - a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should mean nothing either way. Since the issue of this tiny minority - and the right of the huge majority to determine its rights and equality - is a live issue for the court in the next generation, and since it would be bizarre to argue that a Justice's sexual orientation will not in some way affect his or her judgment of the issue, it is only logical that this question should be clarified.

If Kagan is not interested in telling the rest of us what her sexual orientation is, I do not think it is any of our business. Sullivan is arguing that it is necessary for Kagan to out herself as gay (if she is gay) to fit his political agenda (which among other things is to get rid of DADT and approve gay marriage). I don't disagree with his political agenda (although I'm nowhere near as passionate about gay marriage as he is - ENDA is more important to me personally, since I'm single and likely to remain that way).

It's clear from Kagan's own history that she's opposed to DADT - judging from what she did as dean of Harvard Law School to oppose military recruiting at Harvard because of opposition to DADT. She only permitted military recruiting when it became clear the federal government would take away hundreds of millions of dollars from the Harvard budget if she persisted in her opposition. (And if she had persisted, I cannot imagine that the president of Harvard and the Harvard Corporation would not have insisted that she step down as dean).

And I don't know what dream world Sullivan's been living in. Does he think that Kagan could have reached her current position of solicitor general if she had not presented herself with ambiguity? (I don't mean that Obama wouldn't have nominated her, but that the trajectory of her career would probably not have occurred the way it did if she had been completely out, so that she wouldn't have been in the situation to be nominated for solicitor general). We have not yet reached the stage where being completely out is possible in all situations. I wish it were true, but it is not. For Kagan not to talk about her sexual orientation is not a matter of cowardice - it is a matter of prudence.

Mark Falcon Lesses - medical research

My grandfather, Mark Falcon Lesses, was a doctor who did research in a number of areas of medicine. I discovered, through the miracle of the internet, that it's possible to find several of his articles. Here are some links:

1927, Archives of Internal Medicine, Glycolysis in Normal and in Leukemic Blood

1928, JAMA, The Vegetarian Diet (a letter to the editor)

THE VEGETARIAN DIET

To the Editor: In a recent editorial you conclude that "optimal nutrition of human beings cannot be obtained with purely vegetarian diets," on the basis of experimental feeding of such diets to rats. May I note two important exceptions to this conclusion?

1. With regard to human beings, Hindhede demonstrated clearly in his lecture given at the Third Race Betterment Conference held at Battle Creek, Mich., in January, that optimal nutrition of human beings can be secured on such a simple regimen as potatoes and vegetable margarine even if continued for several years. Furthermore, he presented valuable evidence to show that children of the school age may grow and be in proper nutrition with vegetables as the only source of protein. Hindhede has worked solely with man rather than with the rat and perhaps that is why we disregard his work.

2. The second point has to do with feeding of a vegetarian diet to a rat. The failure of a rat to grow optimally on such a diet may mean either (a) that the diet is adequate but that the rat has not eaten enough of it to grow properly—Lusk has pointed out that, ceteris paribus, growth proceeds proportionally to ingested calories—or (b) that the diet is inadequate although the rat has eaten enough calories.

The rejection in part or in whole of a thoroughly adequate diet by a rat is not uncommon ; the rat demands "flavor" in the food just as do we. In The Journal, Nov. 19, 1927, p. 1770, Cogwill presents striking evidence of the adequacy of a cereal diet for the rat from the standpoint of growth and nutrition. One of the diets, which yielded 93 per cent of if s calories in the form of cereals, also contained 3 per cent of liver and gave excellent growth and nutrition. It is true that a small amount of animal protein was thereby included, but the effect of such a small amount probably lay more in the "flavor" it lent to the diet rather than to any other significant contribution. Rats do prefer diets containing even small amounts of liver or beef protein, especially the former. In other words, vegetable diets or any other diet will fail with rats if they do not happen to like it well enough to ingest the proper calories. We should not confuse the flavor of a diet with its nutritional adequacy.

Mark Falcon-Lesses, M.D., Department of Nutrition, University Hospital, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

1930, Journal of Nutrition - The Cause of the Laxative Action of Bran

1930, JAMA, The Menace of the Meat Diet (a letter to the editor)

THE MENACE OF THE MEAT DIET
To the Editor:

In a recent editorial (Is a Meat Diet a Menace? The Journal, September 20, p. 866) you conclude by inference that a meat diet will not injure the kidneys and cite the observations at the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology on two arctic explorers as experimental support for your views. So far as I can see, the only conclusion properly deducible from these observations is that an average intake of meat protein of from 100 to 140 Gm. daily for one year causes no detectable kidney damage. What might happen after two or more years on such a diet remains unknown.

The experiment of Newburgh, Falcon-Lesses and Johnston (Am. J. M. Sc. 179:305 [March] 1930), in which evidence of kidney damage in man was obtained on a diet containing 330 Gm. of meat protein per diem in less than six months, indicates that renal injury may be caused by diets sufficiently high in meat protein. Further, Newburgh and his co-workers (Newburgh and Curtis: Arch. Int. Med. 42:801 [Dec] 1928) have succeeded in producing chronic nephritis in laboratory animals by high meat diets.

However, it remains to be determined (1) whether the animal nephritis produced by meat protein is pathologically analogous to chronic nephritis in man, (2) whether human beings ordinarily, or even occasionally, eat enough meat protein to cause chronic nephritis, and (3) whether the meat consumption of patients with chronic nephritis has been at such levels as might cause nephropathy. Meat protein might cause chronic nephritis and yet not be the usual etiologic agent because not ingested at appropriate levels.

In contrast to the studies of Thomas and Heinbecker, who found no unusual incidence of kidney disease among Eskimos, must be placed the investigations of Hindhede, who finds that chronic nephritis is most common in people who eat much animal food.

The entire problem, I believe, should be kept sub judice until the foregoing questions are more fully answered.

Mark Falcon-Lesses, M.D., Boston.

1938, JAMA - Bezedrine Sulfate (a letter to the editor). The first paragraph is:

To the Editor:—

No one who has the advance of medicine and the safety of the public at heart can fail to agree with the main tenets of the editorial which appeared in THE JOURNAL March 19 entitled "Benzedrine Sulfate—A Warning." No powerful drug should be sold over the counter, nor should it for any purpose whatsoever be self administered. This reproach does not apply, of course, merely to benzedrine sulfate but to the wide and indiscriminate use of bromides, barbiturates and even the apparently innocuous vitamins.

1955, Diseases of the Thyroid Gland (written by Samuel L. Gargill and my grandfather, Mark Falcon Lesses, who was an instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the blood bank at Beth Israel Hospital); it was published by Oxford University Press. The review in the Archives of Internal Medicine 46 (1957) is very complimentary:

Drs. Gargill and Lesses have drawn from their clinical experiences over the past 25 years in order to present this comprehensive and well arranged text which encompasses three important eras in thyroid disease....

1965, JAMA - Transfusion Complications

In the April 11, 1938 edition of Life magazine, he had a letter published:

Botticelli's Young Man

Sirs,

The "limpid flexibility" of the fingers in Botticelli's Portrait of a Young Man, reproduced in your issue of March 21, is much more obviously due to the arthritis which the subject of the portrait suffered from rather than to playing the lute. Very characteristic is the spindle-shaped deformity of the middle joints of the fingers. I happen to have a copy of the portrait myself and have had many physicians comment on the arthritic deformity of the hand of this young man.

• Doctors are given to less romantic theories than artists. Neither can speak with certainty in this case. -- ED.

An article on antidepressants in A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry (by Edward A. Shorter, Oxford University Press published in 2005) cites a work by my grandfather on the use of amphetamines for the treatment of obesity:

The amphetamines started to become drugs of abuse when they were widely prescribed for obesity; an article in 1938 by Mark Falcon Lesses (1903- ), a research associate at Boston State Hospital, and Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), director of research at the hospital, on "Benzedrine Sulfate as Aid in the Treatment of Obesity" in the New England Journal of Medicine launched this rather fateful evolution.

I haven't been able to find this article on line, but there is a New York Times article from 1938 on this research.

Are you a "righteous Jew" or a "New Afrikaner"?

John Mearsheimer's talk yesterday at the Jerusalem Fund, The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners does make one good point: that if a Palestinian state is not created alongside Israel, increasingly the "one-state" solution will occur of its own accord, leaving Palestinians in the West Bank totally disenfranchised. This is why I support two states, and oppose the current right-wing Israeli government, which seems to be totally unwilling to recognize reality and work towards the creation of the Palestinian state. As Mearsheimer says, if a Palestinian state is not created, then the Zionist dream of a Jewish state is dead as well. These are harsh words but I do not object to this part of his talk.

I do object, however, to the antisemitic part of his talk, the part where he has decided to take the gloves off and put the Jews of America on trial.

American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories. The first two are what I call “righteous Jews” and the “new Afrikaners,” which are clearly definable groups that think about Israel and where it is headed in fundamentally different ways. The third and largest group is comprised of those Jews who care a lot about Israel, but do not have clear-cut views on how to think about Greater Israel and apartheid. Let us call this group the “great ambivalent middle.”

Righteous Jews have a powerful attachment to core liberal values. They believe that individual rights matter greatly and that they are universal, which means they apply equally to Jews and Palestinians. They could never support an apartheid Israel. They also understand that the Palestinians paid an enormous price to make it possible to create Israel in 1948. Moreover, they recognize the pain and suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967. Finally, most righteous Jews believe that the Palestinians deserve a viable state of their own, just as the Jews deserve their own state. In essence, they believe that self-determination applies to Palestinians as well as Jews, and that the two-state solution is the best way to achieve that end. Some righteous Jews, however, favor a democratic bi-national state over the two-state solution.

To give you a better sense of what I mean when I use the term righteous Jews, let me give you some names of people and organizations that I would put in this category. The list would include Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Tony Karon, Naomi Klein, MJ Rosenberg, Sara Roy, and Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss fame, just to name a few. I would also include many of the individuals associated with J Street and everyone associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as distinguished international figures such as Judge Richard Goldstone. Furthermore, I would apply the label to the many American Jews who work for different human rights organizations, such as Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.

I guess by Mearsheimer's reasoning I might qualify as a "righteous Jew," since I support a two-state solution. But who is it that Mearsheimer qualifies as "righteous Jews"? Almost all of the individuals he names are anti-Zionists (e.g., Chomsky, Falk, Finkelstein, Judt, Klein, Roy, and Weiss). Some of them (like Finkelstein and Weiss) traffic in anti-Jewish stereotypes (when William Safire, the New York Times columnist, died, Weiss engaged in the most bizarre attacks on the press, saying that not mentioning Safire's Zionist convictions in his obituaries was as a result of "Jewish power" over the press). Chomsky has defended Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson, and has a disgraceful record of whitewashing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Why would I regard these people as "righteous"? I certainly don't want to be in their company. I do not think that other American Jews should follow them.

On the other side we have the new Afrikaners, who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state. These are individuals who will back Israel no matter what it does, because they have blind loyalty to the Jewish state. This is not to say that the new Afrikaners think that apartheid is an attractive or desirable political system, because I am sure that many of them do not. Surely some of them favor a two-state solution and some of them probably have a serious commitment to liberal values. The key point, however, is that they have an even deeper commitment to supporting Israel unreservedly. The new Afrikaners will of course try to come up with clever arguments to convince themselves and others that Israel is really not an apartheid state, and that those who say it is are anti-Semites. We are all familiar with this strategy.

I would classify most of the individuals who head the Israel lobby’s major organizations as new Afrikaners. That list would include Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, just to name some of the more prominent ones. I would also include businessmen like Sheldon Adelson, Lester Crown, and Mortimer Zuckerman as well as media personalities like Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Peretz of the New Republic. It would be easy to add more names to this list.

So even someone who supports a two-state solution can be called a "New Afrikaner" because he or she does not meet Mearsheimer's qualifications for being a good Jew? I do not like some of the people he names - Morton Klein in particular, who is extremely right-wing, or Hoenlein, who does his level best to pull the Conference of Presidents to the right as much as he can. But Foxman? Harris? Peretz? And how does he know what would they would think or do if Israel did "cross the line" into apartheid? He doesn't know. But because these people do not agree with him on Israel, he is willing to smear them as "New Afrikaners."

The key to determining whether the lobby can protect apartheid Israel over the long run is whether the great ambivalent middle sides with the new Afrikaners or the righteous Jews. The new Afrikaners have to win that fight decisively for Greater Israel to survive as a racist state.

There is no question that the present balance of power favors the new Afrikaners. When push comes to shove on issues relating to Israel, the hardliners invariably get most of those American Jews who care a lot about Israel to side with them. The righteous Jews, on the other hand, hold considerably less sway with the great ambivalent middle, at least at this point in time. This situation is due in good part to the fact that most American Jews – especially the elders in the community – have little understanding of how far down the apartheid road Israel has travelled and where it is ultimately headed. They think that the two-state solution is still a viable option and that Israel remains committed to allowing the Palestinians to have their own state. These false beliefs allow them to act as if there is little danger of Israel becoming South Africa, which makes it easy for them to side with the new Afrikaners.

This situation, however, is unsustainable over time. Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Greater Israel is a reality, the righteous Jews will have two choices: support apartheid or work to help create a democratic bi-national state. I believe that almost all of them will opt for the latter option, in large part because of their deep-seated commitment to liberal values, which renders any apartheid state abhorrent to them. Of course, the new Afrikaners will fiercely defend apartheid Israel, because their commitment to Israel is so unconditional that it overrides any commitment they might have to liberal values.

Mearsheimer's "righteous Jews," have in part, already made the choice he taxes them with - some of them already support the one-state solution (Chomsky, Finkelstein, Roy, and Weiss). All of the ones he names (not J-Street) already fiercely oppose Israel and its right to exist. What Mearsheimer labels "righteous" in a Jew is the willingness to see the state of Israel dismantled. He is living in a dream world if he thinks that a democratic bi-national state can be created under these conditions. And of course, missing entirely from Mearsheimer's supposedly "realist" viewpoint is any reference to the violence that Palestinians have inflicted upon Israelis. Hamas has disappeared from his world. The Palestinian-nationalist fantasy that a Jewish Temple never stood in Jerusalem doesn't exist.

The critical question, however, is: what will happen to those Jews who comprise the great ambivalent middle once it is clear to them that Israel is a full-fledged apartheid state and that facts on the ground have made a two state solution impossible? Will they side with the new Afrikaners and defend apartheid Israel, or will they ally with the righteous Jews and call for making Greater Israel a true democracy? Or will they sit silently on the sidelines?

I believe that most of the Jews in the great ambivalent middle will not defend apartheid Israel but will either keep quiet or side with the righteous Jews against the new Afrikaners, who will become increasingly marginalized over time. And once that happens, the lobby will be unable to provide cover for Israel’s racist policies toward the Palestinians in the way it has in the past.

Again, if the "righteous Jews" are represented by the figures he names (again, not J-Street, which is "pro-peace" and "pro-Israel"), I cannot imagine that the bulk of American Jewry will follow them. Most American Jews have enough decent self-respect not to follow the twisted ways of the so-called righteous Jews whom he names.

What Mearsheimer has done in this speech is to create a standard by which American Jews will be judged to be "good" Jews or "bad" Jews. In this, he follows in the dishonorable steps of Charles Lindbergh in September, 1941, when he made an antisemitic speech for America First which ruined his reputation. See this contemporaneous report by Time Magazine:

Hitler showed how attacks on the Jews can be used as a prime device for promoting discord, inciting bitterness, destroying tolerance and ultimately overthrowing the basic principles of civil liberties and personal freedom. Last week, continuing to divide the nation, Hero Lindbergh attacked the Jews as being one of the "three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war.'' The other two groups: the British and the Roosevelt Administration.

It is no news that Jews heartily dislike Hitler and would gladly see him frazzled. They would be less than human if they did not. Hero Lindbergh, piously declaring that "no person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany," offered U.S. Jews advice: they should suppress their natural opinion. He added: "The Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it [war] ... for they will be among the first to feel its consequences." The plain implication was that the Jews will be blamed for war if it comes and will be persecuted because of it when opportunity arises. If this was not a threat it was the next thing to it.

Next to blaming the Jews for a war (especially if lost), the most effective anti-Jew talk is to accuse Jews of having more than their share of wealth and influence. Hero Lindbergh did not accuse the Jews of financial and industrial dominance. That charge, as he may have learned from his late father-in-law, Morgan Partner Dwight Morrow, is too easily disproved. But Lindbergh did accuse the Jews of undue success in other fields: "Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government."

Mearsheimer has already accused the Israel Lobby of strangling all debate on the issue of Israel/Palestine in the United States - a more subtle version of the old lie that Jews control the media. Now he seems to be playing the role of Lindbergh in warning American Jews that they must follow those whom he considers "righteous" in order not to be equated with the arch-racists of apartheid South Africa. We must suppress our "natural opinion" (natural at least for most of us) to support Israel - not blindly, not in all of its actions, often critically - in order to retain our status as "righteous," and therefore, acceptable to Mearsheimer and "right-thinking" opinion.

If this is not antisemitism, then I do not know what antisemitism is. Mearsheimer has publicly crossed the line that Lindbergh crossed. May he be discredited as Lindbergh was.

For other takedowns of Mearsheimer, see:

David Schraub of The Debate Link: Mearsheimer Lists His Good Jews.

Judeosphere: John Mearsheimer Labels Jews as "The New Afrikaners"

Solomonia: Mearsheimer's List

Hussein Ibish: Mearsheimer's unhelpful, unrealistic, and disempowering message to the Palestinians.

Volokh Conspiracy: Some "realism" about John Mearsheimer

Noah Pollack: Mearsheimer makes a list

Meryl Yourish: John Mearsheimer’s speech on Jews: Echoes of the 1930s

Ken Walzer: Righteous Jews, Not So Righteous Jews and Just Damn Jews 

David Harris: Mearsheimer's Mere Slime

Just a note - today is the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, which I wrote about in early April.

The Secret Annex Online

I just discovered, through a blog link, that the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has just created an online 3D tour of The Secret Annex. It's quite amazing - you can enter every room of the building, both those where Anne Frank and her family and the other Jews live in hiding, and in the rest of the building.

Northern Lights appear above ash plume in Iceland

The Daily Mail online has posted some spectacular photos of the Iceland volcano with the aurora borealis shimmering above it: Iceland volcano: Northern Lights appear above ash plume.

A sample:

From Reuters

Police State in Arizona

Scary Crooks and Liars headline: Gov. Jan Brewer makes it official: Arizona is now nation's first police state for immigrants

Actually, it's worse than that. It's a police state for everyone in Arizona now.

Media Matters reports:

AZ Bill "Requires Police" To Determine A "Person's Immigration Status." The Los Angeles Times reported that the newly passed Arizona immigration "bill, known as SB 1070, makes it a misdemeanor to lack proper immigration paperwork in Arizona. It also requires police officers, if they form a 'reasonable suspicion' that someone is an illegal immigrant, to determine the person's immigration status." The legislation passed 35 to 21. [Los Angeles Times, 4/14/10, emphasis added]

Those "Unable To Produce Documents Showing They Are Allowed To Be In The United States Could Be Arrested, Jailed For Up To Six Months And Fined $2,500." According to the Seattle Times, under the Arizona immigration bill "the police would be authorized to arrest immigrants unable to show documents allowing them to be in the country and the legislation would leave drivers open to sanctions, in some cases for knowingly transporting an illegal immigrant, even a relative. Immigrants unable to produce documents showing they are allowed to be in the United States could be arrested, jailed for up to six months and fined $2,500. Currently, officers can inquire about someone's immigration status only if the person is a suspect in another crime. The bill would allow officers to avoid the immigration issue if it would be impractical or hinder another investigation." [Seattle Times, 4/14/10, emphasis added]

AZ Bill "Makes It Illegal For Anyone To Transport An Illegal Immigrant, Even A Family Member." ABC News reported that the Arizona immigration "measure allows police to detain people on the suspicion that they are illegal immigrants, outlaws citizens from employing day laborers, and makes it illegal for anyone to transport an illegal immigrant, even a family member, anywhere in the state." [ABC News, 3/26/10, emphasis added]

So if the police don't like something about me (I'm white, not Latino), they can lie about forming a "reasonable suspicion" and also require me to prove that I'm an American citizen or legally able to stay in the U.S. And if I happen to pick up a hitchhiker who is an illegal immigrant, and the police stop my car, I get to spend time in jail along with the person I picked up. Obviously, this law will be used to harass Latinos in general and immigrants, legal or otherwise, in particular, but it could be used against anyone. Say, for example, white-looking people at a pro-immigration rally. Or white-looking people handing out leaflets supporting immigrants. Or someone who gets angry at a police officer's high-handedness at a traffic stop.

And what are the documents that will satisfy the requirement of proving that one is legally in the U.S.? Is a driver's license from another state enough? A birth certificate? A social security card? If I ever have the misfortune of going to Arizona while this law is still on the books, I'll make sure to bring my passport with me.

Volcano in Iceland

The Fimmvoruhald volcano erupting at Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull glacier, earlier this week. (Don't ask me to pronounce either name - when I listen to Eyjafjallajökull being pronounced via Slate or Wikipedia, it sounds very little like what it looks like).

I was living in Seattle in 1980 when Mount St. Helens blew (see the website for the Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument for more information).

The winds never blew the ash cloud into Seattle, but Portland was hit several times by the ash when the wind blew in the right direction. It was still very dramatic - you could see the huge column of ash for a long time from Seattle. I never did visit the volcano, but one of the tourist souvenirs one could buy soon afterwards were little glass vials of volcano ash. I bought one but have no idea what happened to it.

"Among the Righteous" updated

I just finished watching "Among the Righteous" - it's a very interesting film, not only telling the stories of some Arabs who saved Jews in North Africa, but also asking the question of why this has not been researched and remembered. These are my notes on the film:

Among the Righteous

More than one hundred concentration camps were set up in North Africa, by the Vichy French, the Nazis, and the Italians. A camp in Libya named Giado was where the most Jews died of all of the camps. An interesting point made by Satloff is that even though knowledge of these camps had been forgotten for a long time, the movie Casablanca (made during the war) mentions concentration camps at a couple of points, so their existence was certainly known at the time.

One example of a righteous person whom Satloff found was an Arab nobleman named Ali Sikkat, in Tunisia. During fighting in 1943, sixty Jews were being kept in a labor camp fled the camp in the middle of a battle between the Allies and the Axis. Their lives were saved by Ali Sikkat, whose story was published already fifty years ago.

Satloff said that his search for a righteous Arab was politically loaded: why don’t we know these stories? Arabs don’t want to be found – it became toxic in many Arab countries to let it be known that you’d helped Jews. The problem is that Arab sympathy for the Palestinian people has prevented these stories from being unearthed and told, in order not to give support to Israel.

Historically speaking, Jews in Muslim lands lived as second class citizens (admittedly, usually better than the situation of Jews living in Christian countries). Jews were under legal prescriptions (as dhimmis who had to pay the jizya to gain legal protection), and from time to time there was violence against them. In the 1930s, the Jews of North Africa faced a new threat – fascism and antisemitism.

The only Holocaust memorial monument in all of North Africa commemorates a group of Tunisian Jews who were deported and killed in Europe – Joseph, Gilbert, Jean Scemla. Gilbert went to the Ecole Polytechnique (highest French university), and fought with the French against the Nazis in 1940.

France’s Vichy government was almost as antisemitic as the German government. After the fall of France, Gilbert rejoined his family in Tunis, since he was no longer at home in France. But North Africa was becoming less hospitable to Jews – the film shows images of Petain, and the fascist salute.
The strict quotas of France’s antisemitic laws were imposed in French North Africa. Jewish businesses were confiscated, Jews were barred from the professions, Jewish children were kicked out of schools, and Jews were stripped of their citizenship.

The Vichy government established harsh internment camps in Algeria and Morocco, in the Sahara. The
Jewish prisoners were mostly from central Europe, people who had fled to North Africa from the Nazis in Europe. Satloff relays testimonies from Polish Jewish survivors who were liberated by the British. One of the tasks laid upon the prisoners was to build the trans-Sahara railway. A couple of the camps in Morocco were in Bergen and Tendrara, where people died of starvation, insects, exposure, and illness.

In beginning of 1942, Rommel (general of the Afrika Korps) entered Egypt. Hitler ordered him to hold North Africa. Operation Torch, the beginning of the Allied counteroffensive against the Nazis, landed American and British troops in North Africa. The video shows the war cemetery in Tunis, with the graves of 6,000 American troops (I never knew this).

German troops invaded Tunisia - it was the only Arab country to be occupied by the Nazis. Once the Germans entered Tunisia, they began the usual routine of persecuting the Jews. The SS commander in Tunis was Walter Rauf, the Nazi commander who had been involved in organizing the mobile gas killing vans in eastern Europe. In December, 1942, Rauf rounded up Jews in Tunis. Jewish laborers were forced to wear the yellow star.

How did Arabs react to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors? Most were bystanders, a few made their hatred heard – “you Jews, you Yids, will all have your throats cut.” Some Arabs enlisted in the German army, others volunteered to guard the camps, and a few rescued Jews from Nazi persecution.

Joseph Naccache said that his neighbors had shielded him. Satloff found his house and the hammam (bathhouse) where he had been protected. Why did they protect the Jews? Because Jews and Muslims were like brothers (speaking to the son of the man who protected Naccacche).

Satloff showed the marble mausoleum of King Mohammed V of Morocco, who was king during WWII. He defied the Vichy authorities and said that in his kingdom there were no Jews or Muslims – only Moroccan citizens. The Vichy authorities wanted Moroccan Jews to wear the yellow star, but the king refused, saying that he too would wear the yellow star. In Algeria there were Muslim religious objections to Vichy laws against the Jews. An announcement was made in the mosques forbidding any Muslim believer from serving as a custodian of confiscated Jewish property. The newly crowned king of Tunisia under Nazi rule told the Jews he thought of them as part of his family.

To return to the Scemla family. They moved to the seaside town of Hammamat. Gilbert and Jean decided to fight with the French resistance. They then tried to escape, with the help of Hassan Vergany, who was a friend of the family. Vergany turned them into the Germans, and they were arrested outside of the German headquarters of Rommel himself. Joseph Scemla and his two sons were sent to the old Turkish prison in Tunis. In April 1943 they were sent to Dachau in Germany with 50 other prisoners.
It was a year before the Germans decided on their fate.

Satloff then recounted the story of Khaled Abdul Wahad, who owned a farm in Tunisia. Annie Bouqris told of this Arab landowner who saved her life and the life of her family. His daughter is still alive, and she said that at that time she knew that there were some Jewish families on the farm.

Edmee Masliah was told that her family’s home was being taken by the Nazis. Her family took refuge in an abandoned olive oil factory along with other Jewish families. Khaled wined and dined the German soldiers and learned that one of them had his eye on a Jewish girl. Khaled went to the oil press factory and told the Jews they had to leave immediately, and he led them to his farm, where they stayed in the stables. This should have been a perfect hiding place for the Jews, but soon after they arrived, a German regiment pitched its tents right on the edge of his property. Khaled told them not to wear their Jewish stars, so no one would know they were Jewish. One night when the men were away doing forced labor, the women and children almost came to grief. Khaled was still entertaining Germans to keep informed; a drunken German wandered off into the Bouqris family’s bedroom and threatened to rape one of the girls. He told them he was going to kill them that night. At that moment Khaled showed up and led away the German from the Jews.

That spring the German army was caught in a pincer between the British and American armies. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were captured. The ordeal of North African Jews was almost over. Satloff showed a film clip of Jews in Tunisia taking off the yellow stars.

To return to Joseph Scemla and his sons: they were transferred to the prison at Halle, Germany, and all were condemned to death. (Vergany was also condemned to 14 years in jail when the Free French took over Tunisia after the defeat of the Germans in 1943).

When Satloff lectures in Arab countries about the Holocaust, some Arabs yell at him, and say why are we talking about the Holocaust of 60 years ago instead of the Holocaust of the Palestinian Arabs today (he shows a clip of man who left his lecture yelling at him). A Palestinian Arab woman says we can now make a choice for peace, but many Arabs don’t want to recognize the Holocaust out of the fear that it means the acceptance of Israel.

In Israel – Satloff asks why haven’t we looked for Arab rescuers? He presents more stories from Tunisian survivors – about how they were saved from Germans by Arab neighbors. Satloff is trying to get Khaled Abdul Wahad recognized as one of the Righteous – but Yad Vashem has refused, out of doubt that he risked his life for Jews (which is required to declare someone a Righteous Gentile).

Yom HaShoah

Yesterday I went to two events for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance day). My synagogue, Temple Beth El of Ithaca, hosted a speaker, Professor Marc Dennis (who teaches art at Elmira College). The topic of his presentation was "Under the Floorboards – Hidden Art from the Holocaust." (The image at left is one that he showed; it is a drawing by Josef Szajna, “Waiting to be Called for Execution," 1944, Buchenwald, pencil on paper, 8 x 12).

To quote from the Temple website:

Inmates of concentration camps made thousands of clandestine drawings and paintings. In fact some 5,000 drawings and paintings survived the war – each one revealing a human dimension – providing us with a rare glimpse of the daily existence in the camps.... It reveals the little-known work of artists who left expressive evidence of what they witnessed. Mr. Dennis states, "We cannot understand it and appreciate it say in the same way we might a Rembrandt…. Victims of the Holocaust risked their lives to make art so that others may understand what they had to endure. There are very few situations where so much art can offer this unique perspective on history. It should always be a priority to study how others have suffered and survived, sacrificed and endured, and left their creative mark on history." Marc Dennis is an award winning professor and nationally recognized artist and Holocaust researcher. He teaches drawing, painting and digital imaging, as well as a course on the history of the Holocaust with a specific focus on the art of Europe from 1933-1945.

In the evening, I went to a staged reading of the play "Kindertransport," written by Diane Samuels. It was performed by On the Verge, a joint effort by the English and Theater Departments at Ithaca College, which puts on staged readings once or twice a year. The New York Times review of the performance in New York City in 1994 said of the play:

Yet another investigation of the Holocaust and its continuing reverberations, "Kindertransport," which opened last night, approaches the subject from the unusual perspective of a child who escaped the immediate horrors but paid a heavy price anyway. Kindertransport was the plan formed in 1938, in reaction to Kristallnacht and the rising Nazi threat, to evacuate children from Germany and Eastern Europe. Before World War II erupted, nearly 10,000 youngsters, most of them Jewish, had made it to England.

Ms. Samuels, an Englishwoman, has set her play in the attic of a suburban London house in the 1980's. Evelyn (Dana Ivey), a brusque middle-aged housewife, and her daughter, Faith (Mary Mara), are sorting through the cardboard boxes and steamer trunks. Theirs is a touchy relationship, although we're not to find out why for a while, and the air is charged with animosity.

At the same time, in a series of flashbacks, we follow the progress of Eva, a frightened 9-year-old Jewish girl (Alanna Ubach). Tagged like a piece of luggage, she leaves her mother in Hamburg and travels to England, where the well-meaning Lil (Patricia Kilgarriff) takes over her upbringing. Little by little, the distraught child grows into a reserved young woman. Her accent fades. And so, presumably, do the old traumas.

The performance was excellent, I thought - even though the actors had only rehearsed twice, they did very well, and I found it moving.

When I got home from the performance, I watched the latest staging of the life of Anne Frank, produced in Britain and broadcast on Masterpiece Theater (PBS). The show had the same effect that the story always does on me - it makes the life of Anne Frank vivid and real, and then at the end we discover what happened to her - she died in Bergen Belsen only two months before the war ended.

Tonight I'll be watching another PBS production - Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands. From the website:

Did any Arabs save Jews during the Holocaust? That's the question author Robert Satloff had in mind when he set out to discover the lost, true stories of survival, courage and betrayal in Arab lands during World War II. The history of the Holocaust in Europe is well-documented, but the history of what happened to the Jewish people of North Africa has been mostly forgotten, even in the very towns and cities where it occurred. The truth is remarkable: not only did Jews in Arab lands suffer many of the same elements of persecution as Jews in Europe -- arrests, deportations, confiscations and forced labor -- but there were also hopeful stories of "righteous" Arabs reaching out to protect them.

I'm glad that this film has been made - most American Jews (or for that matter, American non-Jews) don't know anything about what happened to the Jews in North Africa during WWII. I think it's important for people to know this history, so that they don't imagine the Holocaust was simply a European story. If the Germans had succeeded in holding North Africa and then conquering Palestine, the Jews there would also have been killed like those in Europe. (The Nazi advance towards Egypt was halted at the first battle of El Alamein in July, 1942; the second battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 was the first significant Allied victory against Axis forces and the beginning of the retaking of North Africa). We can see from how thoroughly the Nazis killed the Sephardic Jews of Greece, the Greek islands, and the Balkans, how they would also have killed the Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews.

Secret Agents and the Rule of Law

Further on Anat Kam - see Haim Watzman of South Jerusalem on Secret Agents and the Rule of Law.

Hanan Eshel has passed away

I just learned from Paleojudaica (Jim Davila's blog) that Hanan Eshel, the great Israeli scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Jewish literature, has just died. I saw him last summer when I was in Jerusalem and learned then that he was ill with cancer. He and his wife Esti spoke about his hopes at that point that he would recover from the disease. I first met him, I think, in 1987 or 1988 when I was a graduate student studying at the Hebrew University. I can't remember if we took a class together or not (or if he was already teaching at that point). He was always gracious, helpful, and often quite funny. May his memory be for a blessing.

An obituary on him can be found at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136903

Gila Swirsky on the Anat Kam story

Gila Swirsky, whom I first met in Israel in 1987 as we were both protesting against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the weekly "Women in Black" demonstrations at Paris Square in Jerusalem, has sent a letter to her mailing list about the latest big scandal to hit Israel, which you can read about in all of the Israeli newspapers today.

Friends,

This story is a testament to the Internet. And to Anat Kam, the whistleblower, who is widely regarded in Israeli security circles as a traitor and will probably soon be charged with treason.

Anat (I’ll use her first name, though I don’t know her) is a 23-year old journalist who wrote for the popular Israeli portal Walla. Some months ago, Anat did the unthinkable: she passed on information that was decidedly newsworthy, but that the Shin Bet – Israel’s security services – did not want outsiders to have. It was a”hit list” – the names of Palestinians living in the West Bank who were on the Shin Bet’s “wanted” list. And it was a copy of the Shin Bet protocol stating that if these “wanted” figures are identified during the course of a military action, permission is granted to carry out “an interception”. Nice language for execution without trial. Reports are that Anat photocopied this classified information while serving in the IDF.

Anat allegedly passed on this classified information to Uri Blau, a journalist, who published it months ago as a major scoop in Ha’aretz. Now Ha’aretz has whisked Uri away to London to protect him from the Israeli authorities, who would love to interrogate him about his informant. Meanwhile, Anat has been under house arrest and held incommunicado for at least three months.

This is a big story, but until today no Israeli newspapers could publish it because a judge issued a gag order at the Shin Bet’s request. But go ask Henry Miller about banned books. Thanks to the ban and Israel’s inability to control cyberspace, the story has taken on vastly greater proportions. Every news outlet in Israel – newspapers, radio, TV, news portals – has front-paged the story now that the gag order was lifted. It would never have received such widespread attention had the Israeli authorities not tried to hide it in the first place. And had the Internet not cloned the story through every webpage eager to expose state secrets.

This is not the first time the Israeli authorities have arrested suspects and held them incommunicado for extended periods. It happens to Palestinians all the time. The best known case of an Israeli is Mordechai Vanunu, who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear warfare capabilities 24 years ago and was tried behind closed doors. More recently, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Yaakov, an Israeli citizen now living in the U.S., was arrested on a visit to Israel in 2002, and a gag order placed on news of his month-long detention and interrogation. Yaakov, a key scientist in the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, was suspected of divulging some of Israel’s secrets, but eventually released without charge.

So Israel has managed to draw widespread international attention to a story it wanted to hush up. But why conceal the fact that the Shin Bet has a “hit list” and gives license to its commando units to carry out field executions? After all, doesn’t the U.S. do the same thing in its own so-called war against terror?

Israel, in my view, wanted to hide this information to avoid the legal and diplomatic ramifications of disclosures that its soldiers were once again breaking international law. Israel has been playing defense ever since the Gaza Campaign, trying to keep its senior politicians and officers out of European courts on charges of war crimes. Most recently (December 2009), opposition leader Zipi Livni cancelled a trip to London out of fear she would be arrested, thanks to universal jurisdiction of human rights violations. Similar arrest orders were deflected by other senior Israelis (Barak, Mofaz, and Almog). Publicity about a hit list and hit squads could only add fuel to the growing criticism of Israel and the fear among its leaders of being arrested on a visit to Europe. Not to mention the fact that Israel’s own Supreme Court outlawed such unprovoked assassinations just months ago.

But really, isn’t Israel still the “only democracy in the Middle East”? Concealing someone’s arrest and the charges against her are clearly pages from the annals of dark regimes. And the broader context is the growing McCarthyite culture inside Israel – the silencing of its critics, the squirreling away of its whistleblowers. We see this in the hate campaign against Israeli human rights organizations, which has now reached a new peak – a bill before the Knesset that would severely hamper these organizations from receiving funds from foreign states, one of their only sources of support as the Israeli government is not about to fund human rights activity.

What’s not to love about secrecy, lies, and human rights violations? Praise the whistleblowers and all those who turned on the Internet lights, making it impossible for the authorities to turn them off again.

Gila Svirsky
Jerusalem / Nahariya

___________________
Gila Svirsky

http://www.GilaSvirsky.com

New York Times on the establishment of Dachau, March, 1933.

In my Jews in the Contemporary World course we are discussing the Holocaust this week, and I took a look at some New York Times articles, first about the establishment of Dachau as a concentration camp for political prisoners in March 1933, then about how it was freed by the American Seventh Army on April 30, 1945, and then another article which seems to give one of the first estimates of the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust. I think it would be appropriate to reproduce these articles, as Yom Ha'Shoah is coming up in a week.

The first one is a report by a Times reporter about Dachau a couple of months after it had been established, when most of the prisoners were Communists who had been rounded up by the Nazis soon after their takeover of Germany. When compared with the article about the liberation of the camp in 1945, the camp seems to have become a much more harsh and dreadful place in the ensuing twelve years.

TIMES WRITER VISITS REICH PRISON CAMP

Taken through entire place at Dachau in Bavaria except possibly disciplinary cells

2,000 inmates gloomy

Incautious word has landed many there – machine guns and rifles bar escape

From a special correspondent
Wireless to the NEW YORK TIMES

DACHAU, Bavaria, July 25. The name of this idyllic little town, situated about a half-hour’s automobile ride from Munich, has become a word of dread throughout Bavaria.

All the Bavarians, noted for their racy unreservedness of speech, pray these days with a mock drollery designed to beguile genuine apprehension:
“Please, Lord, make me dumb,
So I won’t to Dachau come.”

For high on the edge of Dachau is the big Bavarian concentration camp for political prisoners. Many a man has landed there, because of an incautious word or too much confidence in supposed comrades or friends. The Nazi Secret State Police, like the Cheka of Russia, has agents everywhere, and any criticism of the new regime and even lack of proper enthusiasm for it are punished as “sabotage” of the Nazi up-building program.

Sentences Indefinite

Such “saboteurs and killjoys” are sentenced to an indefinite period of training and education in the new and only true dogma of national salvation and for this purpose are sent to what are euphemistically called “educational camps,” where in rigid discipline and hard labor they are converted from egotistical Marxists or liberals to good Nazis who place service to the State above service to themselves.

Your correspondent spent a day at the “educational camp” at Dachau, where there is a steady coming and going, but where the average number of prisoners remains around 2,000. He inspected the whole camp, except possibly the disciplinary cells, of which he got a hint; he talked with them and heard their grievances, at least in so far as they dared express them in the presence of the camp’s deputy commander, who showed the correspondent around.

It is necessary to distinguish between a system that imprisons men for their political opinions and the methods with which the imprisonment is administered. In the latter respect the prisoners might have repeated the famous saying of the man about to be hanged that he was as well off as could be expected under the circumstances.

Clashes at the outset

This, both the prisoners and the camp’s commander, Herr Eicke, agreed, was truer now than before; when the concentration camps were first opened, the political passions still aflame led to numerous clashes between the prisoners and guards in which the guards naturally had the advantage.

Now camp life has settled into the organized routine of any penal institution, the guards consist of approximately 275 men, and Chancellor Hitler’s black-uniformed elite guards and not the ordinary brown-shirted storm troops perform this duty. It is somewhat boring but not much different from regular army life.

The prisoners accept their confinement as a blow of revolutionary fate against which it is futile to rave. The older prisoners and “trusties” soon break in the new ones and the latter quickly learn that, in view of the indefiniteness of their stay, good behavior and the quickest possible conversion to Nazism are their only chance of release. The intellectually honest are out of luck.

The camp is located on the site of huge war-time munition works. The machine shops and machinery were blown up on the orders of the Allies. Scattered remnants of these are mute testimony of Germany’s defeat and additional confirmation to the Nazis that they are right.

Assails destruction of works

“The senseless destruction of such tremendous values belonging to the German people is a shame,” exclaimed Deputy Commander Michael Lippert, the correspondent’s guide. “It is an object lesson for our Communists which they quickly comprehend.”

Some of the sheds of the administration building, especially the concrete one-story barracks which formerly housed the munition workers, were left standing and they constitute the concentration camp. In this respect the Dachau prisoners are probably better off than in most camps.

Surrounding the camp is a seen-foot wall topped off with barbed wire and a short distance beyond have been placed barbed-wire entanglements. Between the wall and the entanglements there are patrols of guards clad in gray green service denim. They are armed with rifles while machine guns are strategically placed and manned by alert crews with fingers at the triggers ready to mow down the rebellious or check any flight.

Asked whether there had been many escapes the guide said: “No, only one that was staged from a workshop outside the camp.”

Labor gangs repair road

Dachau is ruled by both prison regulations and rules of military discipline. That is apparent on every hand. On approaching the camp, after satisfying the challenging patrols with a pass obtained from the secret State Police, the correspondent saw labor gangs at work repairing a road under the supervision of armed guards and under the muzzles of machine guns. It was a blazing hot day and the men were stripped to the waist. Most of them were sunburned a dark brown, but the red of some betrayed recent arrivals.

They seemed to work with a sort of fury within them, betrayed in part by the vehemence with which they dug up the earth, but most of all by the tortured looks on their faces, which ranged all the way from rage and bitterness to bewildered hopelessness.

Later your correspondent learned that most of them had been put to work under the burning sun as a disciplinary measure, for the day was so hot that most of the prisoners had been relieved of all outside work. This was evident as soon as the camp gates were passed. Stretched out over the entire campground were about 1,500 idling men. They ranged from boys of 17 to white-haired old men.

All types were represented – sturdy peasants, manual laborers and bespectacled intellectuals, and there were also faces usually attributed to a city’s underworld. All were clad only in grey trousers or just in bathing suits, having taken off as much of the grey prison uniform as possible.

Most Do Nothing

Most of them were lying in the grass and some were in the shade of the few available trees. A few were bathing in a makeshift swimming pool. The rest were visible between the rows of barracks, some playing chess, a few reading books, most simply doing nothing. It was an almost idyllic picture of a rest camp. That it was not a rest camp, however, was evident very soon.

The disillusioning thing, besides the grim, efficient-looking guards and their rifles, was in the faces of the prisoners. Under a smiling sky, there was not a smile in the 2,000. They looked sour, grim, sullen, sad or merely apathetic. Thoughts of other things than the beauty of nature and the peacefulness of scene obviously engaged their minds. And dark were the looks which greeted the Deputy Commander accompanying the correspondent.

Nevertheless, as soon as they were approached, all groups quickly sprang to attention. Caps were whipped off the many heads and heels clicked. When the correspondent and his guide entered a barracks room, corporals bawled out, just as in the army, “Attention!” Then reported “Corporalship So-and-So. Twelve men. Everything in order.”

Herr Lippert explained that the prisoners were organized in companies and corporalships, each under a leader selected among the prisoners themselves, who were responsible for the order of the men and the cleanliness of the barracks.

“For their own comfort, the men see that any pig among them is cleaned up and stays clean,” Herr Lippert asserted.

Barracks are clean

Indeed, the barracks were as clean as a whistle. Each room contained four tiers of three bunks each, one atop another, crude wooden affairs filled with straw, but covered by clean, blue-white bedclothes neatly folded.

The correspondent found the guards had precisely the same accommodations. In fact, their quarters were more cramped, the rooms smaller and lower, allowing only two bunks atop each other.

Both prisoners and guards eat the same kind of food. That is a principle Chancellor Hitler is enforcing for himself as well as his men, namely, that all Germans are comrades, even if political enemies, and should live more or less alike. Some of Herr Hitler’s lieutenants are less meticulous than others in carrying out the principle, but it is certainly enforced at Dachau.

All was not idleness within the camp. Some sheds had been converted into artisan shops, and here the skilled prisoners worked. Tailors sewed grey prisoners uniforms, bootmakers built boots, carpenters made doors and windows and locksmiths made the necessary fastenings. Even an arts shop was created where woodcarvers and sculptors were busy and a studio with a proper skylight housed an artist making crayon sketches. But all the art work had reference to the Nazi movement – there were Hitler and Goering medallions, swastika cross emblems and Hitler and Goering pictures, sold at fifty pfennings apiece. Other art work apparently is prohibited as contrary to Nazi pedagogics. Yet the artist was among the most satisfied-looking in the entire camp.

The Order of the Day

Following is the order of the day: 5 A.M. arising time, 5:30 coffee, 7 to 10:30 work, including a twenty-minute pause; then the midday meal and a rest; 2 P.M. to 5 work, including a twenty-minute pause; 6 supper, 8 counting assembly when every prisoner must be accounted for, and 9 lights out and bed.

The prisoners may write two letters a month, although there is no limit on letters addressed to the prisoners and they may receive two parcels a month, but only clothes and laundry. Food shipments, except sweets, are prohibited because of the danger of smuggling arms. The prisoners may also receive money from home, but only up to 5 marks a week, with which they may buy additional food from the canteen. This sells everything, including near beer, but no alcohol. Finally, good work is rewarded by an additional allotment of bread.

April 30, 1945 - liberation of Dachau (New York Times)

This second New York Times article is about the liberation of Dachau.

Dachau captured by Americans who kill guards, liberate 32,000

DACHAU, Germany, April 30 - Dachau, Germany's most dreaded extermination camp, has been captured and its surviving 32,000 tortured inmates have been freed by outraged American troops who killed or captured its brutal garrison in a furious battle....

Prisoners with access to records said that 9,000 captives had died of hunger and disease or been shot in the past three months, and 14,000 more had perished during the winter. Typhus was prevalent in the camp and the city's water supply was reported to have been contaminated by drainage from 6,000 graves near the prison.

39 Cars Full of Bodies

A short time after the battle there was a train of thirty-nine coal cars on a siding. The cars were loaded with hundreds of bodies and from them was removed at least one pitiful human wreck that still clung to life. These victims were mostly Poles and most of them had starved to death as the train stood there idle for several days. Lying alongside a busy road near by were the murdered bodies of those who had tried to escape.

Bavarian peasants - who traveled this road daily - ignored both the bodies and the horrors inside the camp to turn the American seizure of their city into an orgy of looting. Even German children rode by the bodies without a glance, carrying stolen clothing....

The camp held 32,000 emaciated, unshaven men and 350 women, jammed in the wooden barracks. Prisoners said that 7,000 others had been marched away on foot during the past few days. The survivors went wild with joy as the Americans broke open their pens, smothering their liberators with embraces.

Bodies were found in many places. Here also were the gas chambers - camouflaged as "showers" into which prisoners were herded under the pretext of bathing - and the cremation ovens. Huge stacks of clothing bore mute testimony to the fate of their owners.

A French general was slain last week as he walked toward a truck, believing that he was to be evacuated, prisoners reported. They said that Elite Guards [SS] had shot him in the back.

The Americans stormed through the camp with tornadic fury. Not a stone's throw from a trainload of corpses lay the bleeding bodies of sixteen guards shot down as they fled....

When Lieut. Col. Will Cowling of Leavenworth, Kan., slipped the lock in the main gate, there was still no sign of life inside this area. He looked around for a few seconds and then a tremendous human cry roared forth. A flood of humanity poured across the flat yard - which would hold a half dozen baseball diamonds - and Colonel Cowling was all but mobbed.

Rescued by soldiers

He was hoisted to the shoulders of the seething, swaying crowd of Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Czechs, and Austrians, cheering the Americans in their native tongues. The American colonel was rescued by soldiers, but the din kept up.

Flags appeared and waved from the barracks. There was even an American flag, although only one American was held there. He is a major from Chicago captured behind the German lines when he was on special assignment for the Office of Strategic Services [predecessor of the CIA during WWII - RL].

New York Times, June 10, 1945 - Estimate of number of Jews murdered

The New York Times reported on June 10, 1945, about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Since this is such an early report, some of the information in this article was later known to be inaccurate, but this is the first version of what happened to the Jews of Europe under the Nazis.

80% OF REICH JEWS MURDERED BY NAZIS
All Those Left in Europe were Marked for Death by 1946, AMG [Allied Military Government] Investigation Shows
Only 150,000 Survived
Extermination Plan Revealed - Russians Estimate Several Million Died in East

FRANKFURT ON MAIN, Germany, June 8 (Delayed) (U.P.) - The Nazis exterminated at least 80 percent of Germany's Jews, and every remaining Jew in occupied Europe was marked for murder before the summer of 1946, it was revealed today.

It now is possible to give the full story of the Nazis' plan to wipe out all of Europe's 12,000,000 Jews. Allied Military Government authorities, after a painstaking study, reported that a majority of the Jews in Germany met death between 1939 and 1942. Russian officials estimate several million Jews were exterminated at concentration camps in Poland and White Russia during the German occupation.

On the basis of this information, it is believed that less than 20 percent, or about 150,000 of the original group in the Reich, survived the reign of terror. These survivors are being returned to their homes as soon as possible. Germans who dispossessed them are being ousted. In most cases, this is done without serious friction, despite the years of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda.

Synagogues Reopened

In several cities, including Aachen, Cologne, and Frankfort on Main, synagogues have been reopened and Jewish services conducted for the first time since November, 1938.

Some homeless Jews are cared for by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Included are 500 Jewish children, mostly between the ages of 15 and 17, but some as young as 10. They were rescued from the Buchenwald camp and now are at Thionville in Lorraine, in the French zone.

The Nazis' master plan was engineered by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, reportedly an Allied prisoner. He was aided by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler. The plan originally called for a "Jew-free Reich" by April 1, 1942, as a birthday present to Adolf Hitler, but it was slowed down by transportation difficulties.

Its first stage began after Poland fell in 1939. Jews were to be used as slave laborers in war factories built in that country. They were to die gradually of starvation,  disease and cold. The first contingent of Jews from Germany was rounded up in Stettin, Cologne and Frankfort on Main - about 50,000 in all. They were shipped to Lublin in October and November, 1939. Transportation trouble set in and only a few thousand were deported eastward during the next two years.

Few left unmolested

The drive began in earnest in September, 1941. It continued full blast until scarcely a Jew was left unmolested in Germany or any occupied country. In Berlin the Nazis began in 1941 to deport about 20,000 persons eastward each month. They were stripped, searched, robbed and then packed in trucks and rail cars. Some worked in airplane and textile plants. Others were thrown into ghettos. Thousands went straight to extermination camps.

Relatives and friends in the Reich seldom if ever heard of them again. More than once the trains were stopped and all Jews were ordered out and massacred.

The third stage of the program was launched early in 1943, well after the original deadline for the whole plan. The Nazis rounded up and deported Jews from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Some were sent to Poland and others to concentration camps in Germany. Tens of thousands were killed monthly in these camps. The Nazis in 1943 began emptying the ghettos of Warsaw, Riga, Lublin and other large cities, and started systematic extermination by gas.

UNRRA officials expressed the belief that if the war had lasted another year, the Nazis might have come very close to their objective of wiping out all Jews in Europe.

Starvation Still Reported

The Vaad Hatzala Emergency Committee, with headquarters at 32 Nassau Street, disclosed yesterday that Jewish survivors of Nazi horror camps, freed but temporarily residing there until they can be repatriated or emigrated, "are living under conditions bordering upon starvation." The committee said that it had received word of the plight of the Jewish survivors from Isaac Sternbuch, its representative in Switzerland, who made a cabled plea for relief funds.

Mr. Sternbuch said all available food stocks purchased abroad with Vaad Hatzala funds already had been dispatched on International Red Cross trucks to concentration camps at Landsberg, Dachau, Mauthausen and Theresienstadt.

Human Rights Watch - Obsession with Israel

The Sunday Times (London) has just published an article on Human Rights Watch's most controversial ex-employee, Marc Garlasco (whose hobby was collecting Nazi memorabilia). The article also nails HRW on their obsession with Israel/Palestine above other conflict zones in the world.

Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700 press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for The Independent.

Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.

I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named because “we operate in a very small world and t’s not done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”

Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in 2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing 30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never produced a report.

Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down that shook HRW in October. It came from the organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open and democratic societies rather than closed ones. (Originally set up as Helsinki Watch, the group’s original brief was to expose abuses of human rights behind the iron curtain.)

“Nowhere is this more evident than its work in the Middle East,” he wrote. “The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human-rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel… than of any other country in the region.”

Bernstein pointed out that Israel has “a population of 7.4m, is home to at least 80 human-rights organisations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government…and probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world… Meanwhile the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350m people and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic”.

Bernstein concluded that if HRW did not “return to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it… its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished”. HRW’s response was ferocious — and disingenuous. In their letters to the paper, Roth and others made it sound as if Bernstein had said that open societies and democracies should not be monitored at all.

It turns out that even Garlasco was not as enthused about the anti-Israel line of HRW as his bosses in New York wanted him to be:

Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line. Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments even when they turned out to be incorrect.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.

Emphasis mine.

Israel - the "faith homeland" of Jews?

A columnist for the Dallas Morning News, Mark Davis, has written an article where he also presumes to tell American Jews what we should think about Israel and the Obama administration - American Jews and the Israel conundrum.

His article reveals a deep misunderstanding about the nature of Israel and what it means to most American Jews.

He writes:

There is something fundamentally wrong when I care more about Israel than the American Jewish community.

As a Christian, I have the most fundamental of differences with my Jewish brothers and sisters. I believe Jesus is the Son of God, and they don't. But when it comes to the precious value of Israel as an ally that needs protection and support, we have another disagreement. I am passionate about it, and they are not. 

I mean that collectively. To the Jewish readers who truly care about their faith homeland: I know you exist. And I ask you: Why aren't you in the majority?

The basis for my observation is the whopping 77 percent of the Jewish vote garnered by Barack Obama in 2008. This is roughly the same percentage won by Democratic presidential nominees John Kerry and Al Gore. 

I have no problem absorbing the apparent fact that America's Jewish population leans sharply liberal. Fine. So do America's black community and its Hispanic community. But in siding with Democrats– and this president in particular – Jewish voters placed a leftist agenda above the interests of the nation that is their faith homeland.

Mr. Davis appears to be unaware that the Democratic Party has, historically, been just as supportive of Israel as the Republican Party. President Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel minutes after its founding in 1948. It was President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) who in 1956 told the Israelis that they had to leave the Sinai Peninsula (after they seized it in collusion with the British and the French). Richard Nixon, who seems to have been an anti-semite, airlifted arms to Israel after the Yom Kippur War broke out. President George H.W. Bush threatened to withhold loan guarantees from Israel in order to get Prime Minister Shamir to the negotiating table. President Bill Clinton tried to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians at the end of his term in 2000. President George W. Bush supported almost everything the Israeli government wanted, but refused Israel permission to fly over Iraq on the way to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations. But all of these presidents, and the U.S. Congress, have for many decades supported Israel, regardless of their party affiliations.

Barack Obama may be more liberal than the current crop of hard-right Republicans, but that doesn't make him any less supportive of Israel. And unlike them, he recognizes that the settlements are an obstacle to peace negotiations with the Palestinians. (On their side, the Palestinians also have many obstacles to peace negotiations with Israel, including the fact that they are split into Hamas and Fatah).

The second problem with his essay is his reference to Israel as the "faith homeland" of American Jews. I must admit this is the first time I have heard this curious phrase. In all of my reading about Zionism, Israel is referred to as, among other things, the national homeland of the Jewish people, or as the state of the Jewish people. That is, all the Jewish people, regardless of whether they are religious or not. Being Jewish does not mean that one belongs to a particular "faith." There are Jewish atheists and agnostics who are Zionists. Being Jewish may mean that one practices the Jewish religion - but unlike Christianity, Judaism as a religion is not centered around faith. From the Protestant standpoint, in fact, Judaism is centered around works, which classic Protestant theology has a lot of problems with.

By calling Israel the "faith homeland" of the American Jewish community, Mr. Davis is denying the way that many Jews define themselves - as members of a worldwide people, as members of the Jewish nation. He is trying to force Jewish identity into a Protestant model. There are some Jews who probably would agree with him - this was certainly the model of the classic Reform movement in the United States - but I suspect that most Jews would find this term as strange as I do.

Obama not an insult to all Jews

Zionist Organization of America: Obama's Israel stance 'an insult' to all Jews.

Well, no. Maybe an insult to very right wing Jews who don't want to compromise at all to make peace, but not an insult to all Jews.

I'm going to Tartu!

I just made my plane reservations for my summer journeys this year. I'm going to Israel for a little over a month, and then I'll be heading north - very far north - to Latvia, Estonia, and Denmark. The reason I'm traveling there is because the international Society of Biblical Literature conference is in Tartu, Estonia, in the last week of July. My paper proposal was accepted and I decided to go. I haven't been to the international SBL yet and thought it would be interesting.

When I called my travel agent yesterday, she had quite a job on her hands, trying to figure out a reasonable itinerary for me that wouldn't break the bank. When I leave Israel on July 21, I'll be flying on Air Baltic to Riga (there's a direct flight from Tel Aviv, who knew), staying there for a couple of days, and then flying to Tartu, where I'll be spending about a week. After the conference, I'll be taking another Air Baltic flight to Copenhagen, where I'll spend another couple of days, and then back to Ithaca, New York.

I was looking online for some interesting photo of Tartu to include in this post, and stumbled across an amusing blog about Estonia written by Justin Petrone, an American who lives there and is married to an Estonian - Itching for Eestimaa. He's also written a book about his experiences in Estonia - My Estonia: Passport forgery, meat jelly eaters, and other stories.

Malkin Award Nominees - Hagai Ben-Artzi and Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan gives Netanyahu's brother-in-law the Malkin Award nomination, which he richly deserves for his idiotic statement that Obama is an anti-semite. But Sullivan himself equally deserves it for his own idiotic statement about the fact that Hagai Ben Artzi's interview was on Army Radio. He says: "Army Radio? Not good. But it's only a matter of time, I have learned, between anyone actually criticizing the policies of Israel and being deemed a you-know-what."

What does Ben-Artzi's interview being on Army Radio have to do with anything? Sullivan is revealing his abysmal ignorance of Israeli society with this remark. Army Radio (Galei Zahal) is staffed by young draftees who are often challenging to authority and by no means always follows the government "line" on an issue. It is not a rigidly government-run radio station that interviews people like Ben-Artzi in order to covertly express government policies or opinions, which seems to be what Sullivan is implying.

I wouldn't accuse Sullivan of being anti-semitic, but I do hold him responsible for his headlong run into the right-wing/left-wing convergence that believes that Israel can do no right. I wonder when he'll start blogging about the U.S.S. Liberty - when he does, we'll know he's disappeared into the black hole of reflexive anti-Israelism.

He is increasingly revealing his real ignorance of Israel, Israeli society, and the complex history of Palestine/Israel in the 20th century. Before he shoots off his mouth more, he needs to sit down and do some serious reading for a few months. He should take a hint from his fellow Atlantic blogger, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who when he wants to write about something serious, like the Civil War, sits down, reads a lot, visits Civil War sites, talks to people who know a lot, and then writes very insightful and thoughtful posts about contentious topics.

Day of Rage over the Hurva?

Apparently there's something truly offensive about Israel rebuilding a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter: Jerusalem on high alert after Hamas announces 'day of rage.'

Warnings of widespread violence in Jerusalem on Monday proved to be unneeded, but police say the real test will be Tuesday.

Hamas announced a "day of rage" in response to the dedication of the restored Hurva synagogue in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, police said. Large forces will continue to be deployed throughout the city, with 3,000 police and border police officers stationed in East Jerusalem and neighboring villages.

Police on Monday attributed the relative quiet to the limitations placed on entry to Temple Mount and to the extensive police work. Palestinian commentators said Monday the general Palestinian public seems to disapprove of the leadership's attempts to fan the flames.

The quiet does not appear to have been affected by attempts of senior Hamas and Fatah officials to ratchet up the violence. On Sunday, Fatah's Mahmoud Dahlan and Hatem Abdelkader called on residents of East Jerusalem and Israeli Arabs to arrive and defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

Palestinian Liberation Organization Executive Committee chairman Yasser Abed Rabo called on Israel to refrain from dedicating the Hurva synagogue. Hamas, too, warned of bloodshed if the synagogue is dedicated, and similar warnings have been made by Egyptian and Jordanian diplomats.

So let me get this - Hamas, Fatah, Egypt, and Jordan all say that if a synagogue is dedicated, it will lead to bloodshed. Why? Nobody pretends that the Hurva was anything but a synagogue, and that it was destroyed in the fighting in 1948. Why should its rebuilding and rededication cause anyone a problem? It's nowhere near Al-Aqsa, it's in the middle of the Jewish Quarter. Any final status agreement, regardless of what else it says, will give the Jewish Quarter to Israel. It won't be under Palestinian sovereignty.

I think that Jeffrey Goldberg is right:

The fact that Hamas -- and even some in Fatah -- are protesting this rededication means that we might still be at square one, which is to say, where Arafat was in 2000, when he denied the historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem. This is not about building apartments for Jews near Arab villages on the outskirts of Jerusalem. I think Arab East Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine, and if the price of peace is turning over those apartment buildings to the Palestinian Authority, then so be it. But this is about denying the right of Judaism to exist in its holiest city.