UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Pope Francis and the Argentinian dictatorship

UPDATE AND CORRECTION

The story recounted below in Hugh O'Shaughnessy's article names Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) as the one who hid political prisoners from a human rights commission when they came to investigate during the time of the Argentinian military junta. Actually, it was the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires at the time, Aramburu, who is accused of doing this. Bergoglio is accused of an entirely different act of complicity with the Argentinian junta - withdrawing his support from two Jesuit priests and allowing them to be arrested and tortured by the junta. See transcript of interview with Horacio Verbitsky on Democracy Now after the incorrect blog entry.

Three years ago, Hugh O'Shaughnessy wrote in the Guardian about the Sins of the Argentine Church during the period of military rule in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the people he discussed was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who has just been chosen as the pope to succeed Benedict. He cites Horacio Verbitsky, author of the book El Silencio, who wrote about Bergoglio's complicity with the junta in his book.

The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.

I would like to know more about Bergoglio's actions during the junta - is Verbitsky the only person to accuse him of collusion with the regime? Has Verbitsky's account been confirmed by other authors? If his accusations are true, it is indeed very troubling that Bergoglio has just been chosen to be the next pope.

Interview on Democracy Now of Horacio Verbitsky, March 14, 2013:

Introduction:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: For more on the new pope, we turn now to one of Argentina’s leading investigative journalists, Horacio Verbitsky, who has written extensively about the career of Cardinal Bergoglio and his actions during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. During that time, up to 30,000 people were kidnapped and killed. A 2005 lawsuit accused Jorge Bergoglio of being connected to the 1976 kidnappings of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. The lawsuit was filed after the publication of Verbitsky’s book, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. ESMA refers to the former navy school that was turned into a detention center where people were tortured by the military dictatorship. The new pope has denied the charges. He twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court to testify about the allegations. When he eventually did testify in 2010, human rights activists characterized his answers as evasive.

The arrest and torture of the two Jesuit priests.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about that and some of the things that—because you’ve been a leading investigative reporter uncovering the relations between the church and the government in terms of the dirty wars? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Of course. He was accused by two Jesuit priests of having surrendered them to the military. They were a group of Jesuits that were under Bergoglio’s direction. He was the provincial superior of the order in Argentina, being very, very young. He was the younger provincial Jesuit in history; at 36 years, he was provincial. During a period of great political activity in the Jesuits’ company, he stimulated the social work of the Jesuits. But when the military coup overthrow the Isabel Perón government, he was in touch with the military that ousted this government and asked the Jesuits to stop their social work. And when they refused to do it, he stopped protecting them, and he let the military know that they were not more inside the protection of the Jesuits’ company, and they were kidnapped. And they accuse him for this deed. He denies this. He said to me that he tried to get them free, that he talked with the former dictator, Videla, and with former dictator Massera to have them freed. 

And during a long period, I heard two versions: the version of the two kidnapped priests that were released after six months of torture and captivity, and the version of Bergoglio. This was an issue divisive in the human rights movement to which I belong, because the president founding of CELS, Center for Legal and Social Studies, Emilio Mignone, said that Bergoglio was a accomplice of the military, and a lawyer of the CELS, Alicia Oliveira, that was a friend of Bergoglio, tell the other part of the story, that Bergoglio helped them. This was the two—the two versions. 

But during the research for one of my books, I found documents in the archive of the foreign relations minister in Argentina, which, from my understanding, gave an end to the debate and show the double standard that Bergoglio used. The first document is a note in which Bergoglio asked the ministry to—the renewal of the passport of one of these two Jesuits that, after his releasing, was living in Germany, asking that the passport was renewed without necessity of this priest coming back to Argentina. The second document is a note from the officer that received the petition recommending to his superior, the minister, the refusal of the renewal of the passport. And the third document is a note from the same officer telling that these priests have links with subversion—that was the name that the military gave to all the people involved in opposition to the government, political or armed opposition to the military—and that he was jailed in the mechanics school of the navy, and saying that this information was provided to the officer by Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, provincial superior of the Jesuit company. This means, to my understanding, a double standard. He asked the passport given to the priest in a formal note with his signature, but under the table he said the opposite and repeated the accusations that produced the kidnapping of these priests. 

AMY GOODMAN: And these priests—can you explain, Horacio, what happened to these two priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes. Orlando, after his releasing, went to Rome. 

AMY GOODMAN: How were they found? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Sorry? 

AMY GOODMAN: How were they found? In what condition were they? What had happened to them? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Well, he was released—both of them were released, drugged, confused, transported by helicopter to—in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, were abandoned, asleep by drugs, in very bad condition. They were tortured. They were interrogated. One of the interrogators had externally knowings about theological questions, that induced one of them, Orlando Yorio, to think that their own provincial, Bergoglio, had been involved in this interrogatory. 

AMY GOODMAN: He said that—he said that Bergoglio himself had been part of the—his own interrogation, this Jesuit priest? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: He told me that he had the impression their own provincial, Bergoglio, was present during the interrogatory, which one of the interrogators had externally knowledge of theological questions. And when released, he went to Rome. He lived seven years in Rome, then come back to Argentina. And when coming back to Argentina, he was incardinated in the Quilmes diocesis in Great Buenos Aires, where the bishop was one of the leaders of the progressive branch of the Argentine church opposite to that of Bergoglio. And Orlando Yorio denounced Bergoglio. I received his testimony when Bergoglio was elected to the archbishop of Buenos Aires. And Bergoglio—I interviewed Bergoglio also, and he denied the charges, and he told me that he had defended them. 

And Orlando Yorio got me in touch with Francisco Jalics, that was living in Germany. I talked with him, and he confirmed the story, but he didn’t want to be mentioned in my piece, because he told me that he preferred to not remember this sad part of his life and to pardon. And he was for oblivion and pardon. That he was, during a lot of years, very resented against Bergoglio, but that he had decided to forgot and forget. And when I released the book with the story, one Argentine journalist working for a national agency, [inaudible], who has been a disciple of Jalics, talked with him and asked him for the story. And Jalics told him that he would not affirm, not deny the story.

The second subject is who was responsible for hiding the political prisoners when the human rights commission came to Argentina. It was not Bergoglio, but the then Cardinal Archbishop Aramburu.

AMY GOODMAN: Ah, let me ask you a question. We thought we lost you for a minute. We’re talking to Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine investigative journalist, well known for his human rights investigations. I wanted to ask you about this issue of hiding political prisoners when a human rights delegation came to Argentina. Can you tell us when this was, what are the allegations, and what was the role, if any, of Bergoglio, now Pope Francis? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: No, in this episode, Bergoglio has no intervention. The intervention was from the cardinal that in that time was the chief of the church in Buenos Aires. That is the position that Bergoglio has in the present. But in that time, he was not archbishop of Buenos Aires. When the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights came into Argentina to investigate allegations of human rights violations, the navy took 60 prisoners out of ESMA and got them to a village that was used by the Cardinal Aramburu to his weekends. And in this weekend property were also the celebration each year of the new seminarians that ended their studies. In this villa in the outskirts of Buenos Aires were the prisoners during the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And when the commission visited ESMA, they did not find the prisoners that were supposed to be there, because they were— 

AMY GOODMAN: ESMA being—ESMA being the naval barracks were so many thousands of Argentines were held. So where were they? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes, but Bergoglio has no intervention in this—in this fact. Indeed, he helped me to investigate a case. He gave me the precise information about in which tribunal was the document demonstrating that this villa was owned by the church. 

AMY GOODMAN: He said that they were hidden in a villa that was owned by the Catholic Church? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes. And the prisoners were held in a weekend house that was the weekend house of the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires in that time. And Bergoglio gave me the precise information about the tribunal in which were the documents affirming this relationship between this property and the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

Young soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

There's a really interesting article in the Guardian (of all papers!) about life as a young female soldier in the IDF: Young gun: life in the Israel Defense Forces. It's written by Shani Boianjiu, who is the author of the novel, The People of Forever are not Afraid. It's not a political article, but rather it's about her own personal experiences as a weaponry instructor in the IDF.

Marc Goldberg, who writes a blog for the Times of Israel, is chronicling his experiences training in the IDF on his own personal blog, Marc's Words. He's not as polished a writer as Boianjiu, but he's pretty good and is hoping to publish a book about his experiences.

Meir Javedanfar on "Is Israel An Apartheid State?"

Good discussion by Meir Javedanfar which expresses my views, for the most part: Is Israel An Apartheid State?

Anti-Israel agitation at Harvard University

The anti-Israel campaign reached my alma mater some time ago, but this manifestation of it really angers me.

The ostensibly "pro-Palestinian" Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee has celebrated "Israel Apartheid Week" by putting mock eviction flyers (Mock Eviction Flyers Incite Debate) on the doors of some Harvard suites in order, supposedly, to make Harvard students feel like Palestinians who are being evicted from their homes in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. Palestine Solidarity Committees like Harvard's are, in actuality, anti-Israel groups that want to see the destruction of the state of Israel in favor of a "one state solution" that will make Jews once again a minority in every country of the world.

For a good student response, see this article by Ariella Rotenberg and Ariel Rubin, "The Wrong Type of Engagement."

As two seniors writing theses on aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have actively sought out views that oppose our own and continue to work in an effort to understand contradicting narratives. Through our research and combined eight months of living experience in Israel over the past year, we found barriers to peace attributable to both Israel and the Palestinians. We realize the importance of employing a framework that engages with multiple perspectives. There are limits to this framework, however, when words are based in hatred rather than facts. The Palestinian Solidarity Committee has reached this limit in its portrayals of the conflict as one-sided, revealing either a lack of understanding of history or rejection of an honest, albeit challenging, conversation about the complicated reality. 

The PSC’s use of the word “apartheid” is ahistorical, polarizing, and preventative of informed, fact-based dialogue. The implication of the comparison to “apartheid” is that the Israelis are racist totalitarians ruling over blameless Palestinians, with no consideration for the nuances and details of the conflict. Israel’s Declaration of Independence guarantees equal rights to all citizens irrespective of religion, race, or sex. It is a country where a Palestinian citizen of Israel serves as a Supreme Court Justice; where political discourse includes Arab elected officials who are hyper-critical of Israel; and where all citizens are guaranteed the same right to education. It is a country committed to peaceful coexistence, not a country with a systematic policy of racism. By using the misnomer of “apartheid,” the PSC explicitly demonizes Israel by squeezing the complicated Arab-Israeli conflict into the same racially driven mold that existed in South Africa. We take issue with certain Israeli policies and recognize that the state is not perfect, but we base our criticism in historically accurate facts. It takes only a very rudimentary understanding of the situation to appreciate the PSC’s gross misuse of the word “apartheid.” 

The PSC as an organization consistently projects a dishonest voice that distorts the reality of the conflict. Last November, the group staged a “die-in” to show solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza under what the PSC deemed a so-called “unprovoked assault” from Israel. It is one thing to show solidarity with the people of Gaza, but labeling the operation as “unprovoked” is a deliberate neglect for the more than 10,000 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel over the previous decade. The PSC bases its activism in the Veritas Handbook, a 347-page “guide to understanding the struggle for Palestinian human rights.” Crimson columnist Daniel Solomon described it last week as “glib dismissals of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism...indulg[ing] in conspiracy theories, that Mossad agents, not government-sanctioned campaigns of violence and terror, were responsible for the exodus of Jews from Arab lands.” The PSC’s mission statement states that it “does not prescribe a solution to the struggle; rather...believe[s] in supporting and amplifying the voices of those working against injustice.” If an organization is devoted to a struggle, that struggle should at least aim for a peaceful resolution built on mutual respect and understanding. Instead, the PSC polarizes the campus discourse through misinformation and inflammatory tactics.

"Hekhalot Literature in Context" to be published by Mohr Siebeck

The papers from the "Hekhalot Literature in Context" conference, which was held at Princeton a couple of years ago, are going to be published this spring by Mohr Siebeck. I have a paper in this volume, "Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature."

Hekhalot Literature in Context: Between Byzantium and Babylonia 

Edited by Ra'anan Boustan, Martha Himmelfarb and Peter Schäfer 

Over the past 30 years, scholars of early Jewish mysticism have, with increasing confidence, located the initial formation of Hekhalot literature in Byzantine Palestine and Sasanian or early Islamic Babylonia (ca. 500–900 C.E.), rather than at the time of the Mishnah, Tosefta, early Midrashim, or Palestinian Talmud (ca. 100–400 C.E.). This advance has primarily been achieved through major gains in our understanding of the dynamic and highly flexible processes of composition, redaction, and transmission that produced the Hekhalot texts as we know them today. These gains have been coupled with greater appreciation of the complex relationships between Hekhalot writings and the variegated Jewish literary culture of late antiquity, both within and beyond the boundaries of the rabbinic movement. Yet important questions remain regarding the specific cultural contexts and institutional settings out of which the various strands of Hekhalot literature emerged as well as the multiple trajectories of use and appropriation they subsequently travelled. In the present volume, an international team of experts explores—from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (e.g. linguistics, ritual and gender studies, intellectual history)—the literary formation, cultural meanings, religious functions, and textual transmission of Hekhalot literature.

Survey of contents:

Ra‘anan Boustan: Introduction 

I. The Formation of Hekhalot Literature: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Contexts 

Noam Mizrahi: The Language of Hekhalot Literature: Preliminary Observations. Peter Schäfer: Metatron in Babylonia. Michael D. Swartz: Hekhalot and Piyyut: From Byzantium to Babylonia and Back. Alexei Sivertsev: The Emperor’s Many Bodies: The Demise of Emperor Lupinus Revisited. Klaus Herrmann: Jewish Mysticism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Merkavah Mysticism in 3 Enoch. David M. Grossberg: Between 3 Enoch and Bavli Hagigah: Heresiology and Orthopraxy in the Ascent of Elisha ben Abuyah. Moulie Vidas: Hekhalot Literature, the Babylonian Academies and the tanna’im.

II. The Transmission and Reception of Hekhalot Literature: Toward the Middle Ages

Peter Schäfer: The Hekhalot Genizah. Gideon Bohak: Observations on the Transmission of Hekhalot Literature in the Cairo Genizah. Ophir Münz-Manor: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Hekhalot Traditions in European Piyyut.

III. Early Jewish Mysticism in Comparative Perspective: Themes and Patterns 

Reimund Leicht: Major Trends in Rabbinic Cosmology. Rebecca Lesses: Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature. Andrei A. Orlov: “What is Below?” Mysteries of Leviathan in the Early Jewish Accounts and Mishnah Hagigah 2:1. Michael Meerson: Rites of Passage in Magic and Mysticism. Annette Yoshiko Reed: Rethinking (Jewish) Christian Evidence for Jewish Mysticism.

Where and when was this photograph taken?

Temple Mount in the news today

Palestinians clash with Israel Police at Jerusalem's Temple Mount

Palestinian protestors hurled stones at Israeli Police forces following the conclusion of Friday morning prayers at the Temple Mount. In a rare move, police forces entered the area and used stun grenades to disperse the crowd. 

Palestinian officials reported that ten protesters were lightly wounded by the stun grenades, and also said tension has increased in the surrounding area. The Jerusalem Police have said that Palestinians also threw firecrackers. After the crowd was dispersed, the police left the area, and relative calm was restored.

From Ynet:

Following Friday prayers at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Palestinians began hurling stones at security forces at the Old City's Mughrabi Gate. The forces stormed through the gate and dispersed the rioters with the use of stun grenades. Firecrackers were thrown at security forces as they entered theTemple Mount compound. Police said there were no injures. Order was restored a few minutes later, but at the same time much fiercer clashes erupted in Hebron and other locations across the West Bank.

There have been protests all week in the West Bank about Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, some of whom are hunger-striking. The clashes in Jerusalem seem to be part of this.

Effects of bullying last into adulthood

Effects of Bullying Last Into Adulthood, Study Finds

Great article, with heartbreaking comments. I was bullied in elementary school, and to a lesser extent in high school, but the worse memories are from when I was younger. I'm not surprised that the researchers found that the effects of bullying last into adulthood. In the comments some people in their sixties and seventies have written to testify that the effects of being bullied have lasted their whole lives.

One legacy from being bullied is that I've never believed that people are "inherently good," and that if it weren't for the strictures of society children would grow up unblemished. We all have the capacity within ourselves to be cruel to other people. We need to be taught to regard other people as precious, with valid needs of their own. I think it's a matter of learning that other people are as human as ourselves, and as deserving of care. I don't think we realize this "naturally," since there is a good deal of selfishness in human nature - what the rabbis called the יצר הרע, the inclination to evil.

And if children aren't taught to be kind to each other, because the adults in charge stand back and don't do anything when they are cruel to each other, then how can they learn? In my elementary school, the teachers rarely interfered when children abused other children. This allowed all sorts of horrible behavior to persist. I wanted to transfer to another school but wasn't able to. Things only got better in high school, when I was in a much bigger school and the bullies I had had to deal with 7 or 8 years were outnumbered by the other kids.

On the other hand, there were new kinds of bullying that I saw being inflicted on other students. The first day of freshman year the first year students were basically attacked by the upperclass students, especially freshman boys. Some boys knew this would happen - that the older boys would try to tear their clothes off - and they wore a bathing suit underneath their clothes so they wouldn't end up entirely naked. In later years, the school did try to stop this by having the first year students start school a few days earlier than the upperclass students, but I don't know if it really helped.

After the last day of high school I never saw any of my classmates again, except on rare occasions, nor did I want to. I've never been to a reunion - the thought fills me with horror. From reading the comments on the article, I now know that I'm not alone in this. The effects of being bullied last for a very long time.

Two lesbian scholars on "pinkwashing": Lillian Faderman vs. Sarah Schulman

I thought that it would be useful to my readers to learn about these notions of "homonationalism" and "pinkwashing" from Sarah Schulman, one of the academic initiators of these concepts. On November 22, 2011, she published an op-ed in the New York Times - "Israel and Pinkwashing," and on November 29, 2011, she published a longer version of the op-ed as "A Documentary Guide to Pinkwashing," in Prettyqueer.com. The comment thread beneath the Pretty Queer article is quite interesting, with a fierce back and forth between those defending the concepts and those defending Israel against charges of pinkwashing.

One of those who defended Israel is Lillian Faderman, who is a noted scholar of lesbian history and literature. This is her comment:

Sarah Schulman suggests that Israel, in its diabolically cunning way (now where have we heard that before about the Jews?), started a cynical campaign in 2005 to improve its image, and that campaign included an appeal to progressives who support LGBT rights. Yet the fact is that LGBT rights in Israel go back LONG BEFORE 2005. Since the 1980s and 1990s, Israeli LGBT people have enjoyed rights that predated or exceeded those rights given to LGBT people in America–and almost anywhere else in the Western world. And the struggle for them in Israel has been nowhere near as prolonged or difficult as it has been in America and most of Europe. 

I’ll limit myself to just a few examples of those rights enjoyed by ALL LGBT citizens of Israel, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim: 

–In 1988, all sodomy laws were abolished in Israel. 

–In 1992, Israel passed a law protecting any LGBT citizen (Jewish, Christian or Muslim) from employment discrimination. 

–In 1994, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled on favor of spousal benefits for same-sex couples— regardless of whether they were Jewish, Christian, or Muslim . 

–In 2004, Israeli lesbian or gay couples (Jewish, Christian or Muslim) were given the right to qualify for common-law marriage status. 

–In 2005, the same year that Schulman says Israel began its suspicious attempts to show that LGBT people were welcomed there, Israeli legislation recognized all same-sex marriages performed abroad. 

The only place in the Middle East that Arab LGBT people can organize OPENLY is Israel. Al Qaws holds its “Palestinian Queer Parties” in a gay bar in Tel Aviv. Aswat, the Palestinian lesbian organization, held its conference at Tel Hai College in Northern Israel. Jerulaselem Open House hosts meetings of Arab Israeli LGBT people and organizations. 

Since 2002, the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University has been fighting for asylum for LGBT Palestinians who fear for their lives in the territories. A 2008 academic report NOWHERE TO RUN, on gay Palestinians who seek asylum in Israel, records experiences of, for example, a gay man living in the West Bank who was set on fire as punishment for his sins; another who was immersed for days in filthy water up to his neck; another who was sodomized with a coke bottle by West Bank police who taunted him, asking whether it was as good as a cock up his ass. 

Regardless of how much Sarah Schulman and her ilk disapprove of Israel, what else but insane, irrational, obsessive hatred would cause them to see diabolic cunning in social decency? What else but insane, irrational, obsessive hatred would keep them from acknowledging that Israel is an oasis for LGBT people in a region of absolute horror?

Faderman also wrote an opinion piece for the Advocate several months before Schulman's article (August 4, 2011), making the same argument: "If You Take Down Israel, What Else Goes With It?"

More on the absurdities of the "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing" conference

Elder of Ziyon quotes from an announcement about the upcoming CUNY conference on "homonationalism and pinkwashing" that does not appear to be on the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies website, and it contains even more outrageous statements about how gay people in the US have gained "full equality." (Note: it's available on the Internet Wayback machine). To quote:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in all configurations around the world have always experienced dramatic differences in representation and power. Today, after generations of sacrifice and organization, some LGBT people have won full legal rights with different degrees of implementation. Once hard to imagine, protection from discrimination, full relationship recognition, and inclusion in representation are now daily possibilities for some. In the United States, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have been invited into an equality defined, not by rights, but by the ability to participate openly in immoral wars.

I would like to know which LGBT people, where, have won "full legal rights." This is certainly not true in the United States. Even in those states which have legalized same-sex marriage, same-sex couples are not able to gain the full advantages afforded to heterosexual couples. The Defense of Marriage Act forbids federal recognition of same sex marriages, and has been a particular barrier to married gay people in the military. Once again, the authors of this announcement do not seem to countenance the idea that belonging to the US military is anything but "participating in immoral wars." I wonder if the authors think that any of the wars that the US or other countries have ever participated in can be defined as justifiable.

The announcement continues:

The co-opting of some LGBT people by anti-immigrant and in particular anti-Muslim political forces is widespread and growing. Rutgers Professor Jasbir Puar has coined the term “Homonationalism” to define collusion between LGBT people and identification with the nation state, re-enforcement of racial and national boundary, and systems of supremacy ideology no longer interrupted by homophobia. 

I wish I knew what Professor Puar is talking about. Which LGBT people in the US have been co-opted by "anti-immigrant and in particular anti-Muslim political forces"? Do the likes of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer really welcome the participation of gay people in their anti-Muslim crusade?

From looking at Geller's website, Atlas Shrugs, it seems that she condemns Muslims when they oppress gays, but isn't particularly supportive of gay people in other contexts. One article that I found, from May 9, 2011, starts,

"HOMOSEXUAL SENSITIVITY TRAINING" AND GAY MARRIAGE IN THE MILITARY" Why would this become a priority of the military? Frankly, I don't care what two consenting adults do behind closed doors or when it doesn't affect anyone but oneself, but this is something else entirely.

She then quotes from a letter sent to her by a Marine. It's not grossly homophobic, but it's clear he opposes equal status for gays and lesbians in the Marines.

In a June 7, 2009 article she castigates the Obama administration for appointing Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, to run the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education. The source she uses (Mass Resistance) claims that GLSEN ran a workshop in 2000 for teens (at Tufts University in Somerville) that taught various techniques of gay sex. Mass Resistance says about him, "He supports promoting homosexuailty and gender confusion as normative to even young students."

Geller comments:

You can't make this stuff up. Obama has appointed this radical to head up our "safe schools"? But who is going to keep kids safe from him? I have said this before: I don't care what you do in the bedroom - whatever rocks your boat, as long as it's two consenting adults, but don't bring it into the classroom. The left will twist this into some homophobic charge. I am not, and that is a fallacious argument. This is another terrible Obama choice. Do not traumatize children. Why can't the schools just teach reading, writing, arithmetic and civics? There is radical in every Obama appointee.

In a column entitled, "I am not a homophobe," published on May 19, 2005, Geller gets upset about sex education for teenagers that includes references to gay sex. She posts a brochure from the Massachusetts HIV/AIDS STD hotline that describes various gay sex acts and the possible risks of getting various STDs from them. The point of the brochure is to protect people engaged in these practices, not to advocate that people do them. She writes, "But this is ridiculous. When is this poisoning of the childhood waters going to stop? Can't kids be kids? Must we rip the veil of childhood oblivion  from our children's psyches?"

Geller seems to be particularly exercised when the idea of educating children about homosexuality (alongside heterosexuality) is raised - which to me certainly doesn't indicate a pro-gay rights stance.

On August 16, 2012, Geller also went along with the condemnation of the Southern Poverty Law Center by right wing groups, for its labeling as hate groups the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, among others. The "Mass Resistance" group that Geller quotes from is also on this list. The SPLC lists these criteria for including a group: "Generally, the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling. Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups." The SPLC doesn't condemn traditional religious disapproval of homosexuality.

Geller writes:

More research and exposure of the subversive, communist organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center. AFDI has long warned Americans about the disinformation and antisemitic propaganda that the SPLC was manufacturing. Last year the SPLC was named to the AFDI Threat to Freedom Index.

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) defames and attempts to marginalize conservative, pro-freedom organizations as “hate groups.” It uses its listing of “hate groups” to try to stigmatize, and ultimately criminalize, love of country and patriotism. It works to systematically destroy voices that are speaking out against oppression and persecution.

Contrary to what we might expect from reading the views of the organizers of the Homonationalism and Pinkwashing conference, gay people are not welcomed with open arms into the anti-Muslim movement by Geller, one of the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in the United States.

The Jihad Watch site of Robert Spencer also has many articles condemning Muslims oppressing gays, but as far as I can tell does not otherwise comment on gays and lesbians or on gay rights.

David Yerushalmi, who has spearheaded the creation of laws banning shari'a or Islamic law, is one of the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in the United States. Yerushalmi is also a white supremacist - in an essay named "On Race: A Tentative Discussion," he argues that whites are superior to blacks.

In an article posted to the website of Yerushalmi's organization, SANE (Society of Americans for National Existence), from the email update of September 23, 2009, he argues against the legalization of gay marriage. He writes, "Given the [Supreme] Court’s rejection of morality standing alone as a valid basis for criminalizing what most would consider aberrant or even deviant sexual conduct [in this case, sodomy between men], what does the future hold for the most “immoral” of sexual perversions, i.e., pedophilia?" He then proceeds to argue that reasoning used in the Supreme Court decision which lifted the ban on gay sodomy in Texas can (and will) be used to permit pedophilia. This rhetorical slippage between consensual sex between adults of the same sex and pedophilia is a favorite of anti-gay arguments, although in this case Yerushalmi does not single out same sex pedophilia. He ends his article by saying,

And, it is not hard to predict the future. Today, to speak in public of the moral abomination of homosexual conduct is to be set up for ridicule and, in some jurisdictions in Europe, possibly an indictment for hate-speech. But this was not always the case. Just a few years ago, it was a crime to engage in such behavior. As was the case with adultery and other such “moral offenses”. But in the science-democracy political order, we embrace “scientific advancement” as a measure of both time and social-political progress. In our new world order, we view technological advancement as human advancement simply. We have reduced “being” in human being to a historical ontology based upon the movement of matter. In a word, we have rid ourselves of what it means to be Man and replaced it with literally nothing.

It is hard to imagine gay people feeling particularly comfortable working alongside Yerushalmi in his anti-Muslim crusade. He certainly is not inviting gay people to work with him.

I haven't examined all of the anti-Muslim activists or groups in the United States for this blogpost, but this sampling of three of the most prominent anti-Muslim leaders reveals that two out of three could in no way be described as pro-gay rights, and thus it is hard to imagine that very many gay or lesbian people are involved in their anti-Muslim crusade. The authors of the Homonationalism and Pinkwashing conference's announcement have hardly proved their point that gay people who have gained "full legal rights" are flocking to join anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups because of their new-won social tolerance.

More gun deaths - Gunman kills 3 in southern California

Gunman Kills 3 in Southern California Shooting Spree

Residents of several Orange County communities awoke to streets littered with yellow crime scene tape on Tuesday, after a gunman killed three people and injured at least three more before turning the gun on himself at the end of a shooting and carjacking spree, according to law enforcement officials.

Turning language inside out: "homonationalism" and "pinkwashing"

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY are holding a conference in April on "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing." You may ask, what is homonationalism and what is pinkwashing?

To quote from the conference website:

Homonationalism occurs when sub-sectors of specific gay communities achieve legal parity with heterosexuals and then embrace racial and religious supremacy ideologies. The most obvious examples are in the Netherlands, Britain and Germany where white gays, most often males, increasingly join racist movements against immigrants and immigrations, especially from Muslim countries.

While I'm certainly not in favor of anyone, whether gay or straight, "embracing racial and religious supremacy ideologies," I don't see why racist gay people should be singled for special opprobrium over other racists. I'm also sure that gay people have always joined racist movements (like all other political movements) even before they managed to win legal equality. There were even gay men in the Nazi movement in Germany.

I would also challenge the idea that in any of the countries named above gay and lesbian people have actually "achieved legal parity with heterosexuals." The British House of Commons is only just now passing legislation to allow for same-sex marriage. Germany has repealed laws against gay sex, including the notorious Paragraph 175, which the Nazis used to persecute gay men and imprison and murder them in concentration camps. According to the Wikipedia article on LGBT rights in Germany:

There is legal recognition of same-sex couples. Registered life partnerships (effectively, a form of civil union) have been instituted since 2001, giving same-sex couples rights and obligations in areas such as inheritance, alimony, health insurance, immigration, hospital and jail visitations, and name change. In 2004, this act was amended to also give registered same-sex couples adoption rights (stepchild adoption only), as well as reform previously cumbersome dissolution procedures with regard to division of property and alimony.

There is, however, no legal same-sex marriage in Germany. There are other restrictions too -

There is no legal right to assisted reproduction procedures for lesbian couples, such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, but they are not explicitly banned either. The German Medical Association is against explicit legalization and directs its members to not perform such procedures. Because this directive is not legally binding, sperm banks and doctors may work with lesbian clients if they wish. This makes it harder for German lesbian couples to have children than in some other countries, but it is becoming increasingly popular.

Gays and lesbians are not barred from military service. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal in Germany.

And that's only one example. I would be interested to know if there is, in fact, any nation on earth where all LGBT people have complete parity with heterosexual people in law. Certainly not the United States or Israel, the two countries I know the most about, having lived in both of them. If the criterion for the existence of homonationalism is "legal parity with heterosexuals," then this category should not be applied to any to any nation where LGBT people still lack complete formal legal equality.

And what's pinkwashing? According to the conference website:

Pinkwashing is a practice by which a government points to or exaggerates gay rights in order to present itself as progressive.

I suppose this does occur. The Israeli government has run advertising campaigns aimed at showing how tolerant Israel is of LGBT people, especially in the Middle Eastern context where same sex relations are legally forbidden in all the surrounding countries. The situation in Israel certainly has really improved in the last 25 years. I lived in Israel for two years from 1987-89 and very few people were out, even those involved in the local gay/lesbian rights organization, האגודה לזכויות הפרט - The Association for Personal Rights, whose name in those years did not even allude to gay people! But in the early 1990s Israel made it possible for openly gay people to be enlisted in the Israeli army, long before the US. Now there are openly gay members of Knesset, and Tel Aviv is very welcoming to gay people and has a big gay scene.

Nonetheless, especially in religious cities like Jerusalem, there is a lot of outright bigotry from religious leaders of the three monotheistic religions. When the Worldpride gay pride march was planned in 2005 in Jerusalem, leading rabbis, priests, and imams got together at a press conference to denounce the idea as an abomination.

I cannot imagine that these religious leaders would have gotten together for anything else, except for hatred of gay people. These leaders are, from the left: Sheikh Abed es-Salem Menasra, deputy mufti of Jerusalem; the Rev. Michel Sabbagh, the Latin Patriarch; Archbishop Torkom Manoogian, the Armenian Patriarch; Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, and Rabbi Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi. The man to Metzger's left is unidentified in the New York Times article from which this photograph is taken.

To quote from the New York Times article about this rare amity:

Now major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable. 

"They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable," Shlomo Amar, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel's two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. "It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it." 

Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem."....

Interfaith agreement is unusual in Israel. The leaders' joint opposition was initially generated by the Rev. Leo Giovinetti, an evangelical pastor from San Diego who is both a veteran of the American culture war over homosexuality and a frequent visitor to Israel, where he has formed relationships with rabbis and politicians....

Neither he nor other evangelical American leaders were at the news conference in Jerusalem, which was called by the chief rabbinate of Israel. But by all accounts Mr. Giovinetti played a crucial role in spreading the first alarms among religious leaders about the gay festival. ....

Mr. Giovinetti circulated a petition against the festival, titled "Homosexuals to Desecrate Jerusalem," which he said had been signed by every member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party in the Israeli Parliament. Another American who helped bring together the opposition was Rabbi Yehuda Levin, of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, which says it represents more than 1,000 American Orthodox rabbis. At the news conference in Jerusalem, he called the festival "the spiritual rape of the Holy City." He said, "This is not the homo land, this is the Holy Land."

This disgusting exhibition of anti-gay bigotry is certainly proof that gay people have not achieved equal social recognition with straight people in Israel. A campaign which touts Israel's great gay rights record and omits information like this is certainly glossing over the considerable discrimination (legal and otherwise) and outright bigotry that Israeli gay people still face (and by "Israeli" I mean all citizens of Israel, Jews, Arabs, and anyone else). On the other hand, it does capture a certain reality in Israel - it's not completely untrue.

To continue with the definition of "pinkwashing."

Because LGBT people have been at the bottom of society for so long, many people mistakenly see some forms of “gay rights” (gay pride parades, gay people participating in military service, etc.) as an emblem of modernity. However because of Homonationalism and the shifting position of gay people this is no longer an accurate measure of social advancement.

I think is the most enraging part of the whole definition of "pinkwashing." Gay pride marches are NOT "emblems of modernity"? Do the people writing this definition have any memory of how exciting it was to go to gay pride marches in the 1970s (that's when my participation began)? Of how exciting it was to meet other gay people, in public, to take over the streets, not to be afraid to hold hands with your lover, to look defiantly at the anti-gay counter-demonstrators and overwhelm them with our loud voices? For one day a year to be out publicly and proudly? In many places in the US there has been a real, marked improvement in the lives of LGBT people, and do you know why that is? Because of the protests embodied in gay pride marches and other forms of activism (for example Act Out in the 1980s). Not because straight society graciously decided to give gay people equal rights (which we still don't have), but because we fought for our rights.

And we're still fighting for our rights. Only last year were gay and lesbian people able to serve openly in the US military. I suppose for the people who are putting on this conference it's not legitimate for gay people to want to serve in their country's military - that's a form of "homonationalism." Well, being gay is not some kind of rarefied identity that excludes one from the values of one's society - gay people have been in the US military probably from its beginning, and certainly in the 20th century, and have served honorably despite often being hounded from the service by anti-gay witch hunts. I suspect that the people putting on this conference think that no one should serve in the US military, straight or gay. In that case, why again is there a need to single out gay people who join the military as succumbing to a special form of nationalism - homonationalism? Why is homonationalism worse than other forms of nationalism? (That is, if you think that nationalism is always bad - which I certainly do not).

In some places where Homonationalism is active, gay people of the dominant racial or religious demographic may actually have far more secure social rights and political power than subordinate racial and religious communities, which of course themselves include LGBT people. This practice of obscuring or “whitewashing” racial or religious oppression with claims of “gay rights” is called PINKWASHING. Pinkwashing is of profound and engaged interest to scholars around the world who are interested in social justice and LGBT studies.

Even if there is no "homonationalism," gay people of the dominant racial or religious group will of course "have far more secure social rights and political power than subordinate racial and religious communities," because they belong to the dominant group, especially if they remain deep in the closet. What this has to do with "homonationalism" escapes me. Homonationalism has nothing to do with it - it has rather to do with (for example in the United States) our long history of white supremacy. And long before gay people in the US were close to gaining any rights, within the gay & lesbian rights movement there was certainly racism (and sexism and misogyny) - how could there fail to be? What's important is that people are trying to overcome racism while fighting for LGBT rights.

Postscript - if you look through the conference schedule, you will find an inordinate amount of attention devoted to the evils of Zionism and Israel. If homonationalism were really an international problem, why focus on one small country with no more than eight million inhabitants? The answer is obvious, of course - the organizers and speakers in many cases seem to be motivated by a general anti-Zionist and anti-Israel ideology, and a conference like this allows them to yoke LGBT identity to anti-Zionism. In fact, the conference seems intended to make it seem natural that one's sexual orientation should inevitably determine one's politics - which is the biggest lie of all.

Types of Antisemitism: "They of all people" and David Ward MP

This will be an occasional series, at times when I discover a new (to me) type of antisemitism.
One such type has just been manifested by a British Liberal Democrat MP, David Ward. The International Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust is tomorrow, January 27 - this date was chosen because on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. In a Book of Commitment placed at the House of Commons for MPs to sign, Ward wrote:

Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.

In order to publicize this statement, he wrote on his own website, as well as tweeting: "Bradford East MP, David Ward, has criticised Israel on the day he has signed a Book of Commitment in the House of Commons, in doing so pledging his commitment to Holocaust Memorial Day and honouring those who died during the Holocaust and in subsequent genocides." (Quotes taken from the article on the CST blog, by Mark Gardner).

The first offensive part of Ward's statement is that he holds "the Jews" responsible for "atrocities" committed on Palestinians both at the founding of the state of Israel and continuing to this day. He's saying that "the Jews," that monolithic entity, have been harming Palestinians since the establishment of the state. All Jews? Some Jews? Just Jews in Israel? Or perhaps just Israeli leaders, or Israeli soldiers?

Ward has issued a "clarification" explaining which Jews he really meant:

Asked if he accepted that he was accusing Jews, rather than the Israeli state, of inflicting persection on the Palestinians, he replied: "I'm accusing the Jews who did it, so if you're a Jew and you did not do it I'm not accusing you. I'm saying that those Jews who did that and continue to do it have not learned those lessons. If you are a Jew and you do not do those things and have never done those things then I am of course not criticising you."

I'm reminded of John Mearsheimer's abhorrent "New Afrikaners" speech, where he took upon himself to judge which Jews adhered to his moral standards and which were outside the pale of normal morality.

The second offensive part of Ward's statement is that he seems to regard the Holocaust not as an unparalleled attempt to exterminate an entire people, but as a kind of moral learning experience for the Jewish people, an experience which they have flunked. "The Jews" apparently should have learned particular moral lessons from the Holocaust, especially the Christian messages of "turn the other cheek," "love your enemies," and "pray for your persecutors." The Jews who survive the Holocaust should have learned these messages while their entire families were being tortured and murdered by mass shootings in the Soviet Union, while they were being forced into ghettos, starved, overworked, and vulnerable to illnesses, while they were being taken on trains from all over Europe to the gas chambers in the death camps in Poland, and there brutally murdered, with no grave to mark their bodies.

Ward doubtless believes that his words were intended to, and did in fact, help the Palestinian cause, but he is absolutely wrong. Do the Palestinians need British MPs making antisemitic remarks on their behalf? Does it help the cause of Palestinian freedom from Israeli oppression to blame "the Jews" for failing to learn the correct lessons of Auschwitz? Of course not. While Ward thought that he was helping the Palestinians, all he was actually doing was venting his spleen against "the Jews." He was expressing his resentment that for all the years since the end of the Second World War it has been outside the pale of polite society to express what he really thinks about Jews.

Chas Newkey-Burden has the best, last word about Ward's ridiculous argument:

Let us strip the "they-of-all-people" argument down to its very basics: gentiles telling Jews that we killed six million of your people and that as a result it is you, not us, who have lessons to learn; that it is you, not us, who need to clean up your act. It is an argument of atrocious, spiteful insanity. Do not accept it; turn it back on those who offer it. For it is us, not you, who should know better.

Good articles denouncing and analyzing Ward's statements:

The Soupy One has a good commentary and running update on Ward's offensive statements.

From Chas Newkey-Burden: http://www.oyvagoy.com/2013/01/26/david-ward-mp-plays-the-you-of-all-people-card/.

An earlier column by Howard Jacobson in the Independent explains Ward's rhetorical strategy very well:

Forget Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is old hat. The new strategy ....  is to depict the Holocaust in all its horror in order that Jews can be charged ("You, of all people") with failing to live up to it. By this logic the Holocaust becomes an educational experience from which Jews were ethically obliged to graduate summa cum laude, Israel being the proof that they didn't. "Jews know more than anyone that killing civilians is wrong," resounds an unmistakably authorial voice in The Promise. Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors.

Another earlier article by David Hirsh also explains this rhetorical strategy, The Jews Should Know Better.

I hate the "Jews should know better" argument on so many different levels. 

Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament for the North West of England Chris Davies is proud of the following quote, which he has put on his website:

"I visited Auschwitz last year and it is very difficult to understand why those whose history is one of such terrible oppression appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors."

The Jews "appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors". He does mean "the Jews", doesn't he? He is talking about "those whose history is of such terrible oppression", who came to his mind when he visited Auschwitz. Yes. He means Jews. Jews used to be oppressed; now they are oppressors, and they don't even care (apparently). 

This is just careless racist generalisation from a Liberal Democrat Euro MP who ought to know better. He holds all Jews collectively responsible for what he understands as the "oppressive" acts of the Israeli government. He shifts focus from acts that he understands as "oppressive" to "the Jews" that he understands as responsible for them and he calls them "oppressors". And then he adds that "the Jews" (apparently) don't care. As though "the Jews" spoke with one voice (or cared with a single conscience). 

The overwhelming majority of the Jews who were at Auschwitz (where Davies visited as a tourist, or perhaps as a VIP) left that place through the chimney. Many of them, I suspect, did not have time to sit down and ponder the lessons that they were supposed, by this smug Liberal Democrat MEP, to have been learning. 

What were the lessons being taught to "the Jews" at Auschwitz? What should "the Jews" have learnt from the Shoah experience? In an earlier post, I argued that many Jews actually did learn the central lesson that the 20th Century seemed to be teaching everybody: "If you don't have a nation state of your own, then you have no rights". 

Marc Goldberg also has written a very good op-ed piece for the Times of Israel. His last three paragraphs:

Criticising Jews for not learning enough about loving their fellow man whilst being the victims of a death machine the likes of which the world has never seen is beyond the pale. Unlike being a victim of out and out anti Jewish violence this purposeful conflation of Jews with the very worst human scum is something that I have been in contact with often in the UK. 

In short it’s not enough for a Jew to stand up and point out an incident of anti-Semitism but now they have to go get down to the nuts and bolts of every statement to which they might feel offended and explain why and then argue the point as if it is a political opinion. Uniquely among ethnic minorities in the UK Jews have to actually argue with people as to their right to feel offended and explain right down to the minutiae just why a person’s comments are offensive. 

I know that I certainly find this rather infuriating and unfair. I think MPs such as David Ward might want to remember that the Holocaust wasn’t some kind of cathartic communal learning experience nor was it the great event that allowed us to get our own country, the Holocaust was systematic death, nothing to do with Israel, nothing to do with Palestine everything to do with Jews and certainly not an excuse for him, or anyone else to label us all as Nazis.

Matthew Harris also wrote a good article denouncing Ward. His last paragraph:

Nothing that has happened in Israel/Palestine is so bad as to stand comparison with the genocidal murder of millions of Jews and other people in the Holocaust. To compare Israel's treatment of the Palestinians (or some Palestinians' hatred of Israelis) with what happened in Nazi death camps is to misunderstand the former and to trivialise the latter. Also, to suggest that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust means that Jews should now know better than to behave as badly as everyone else behaves is to hold Jews to a higher standard than others are held to, with the Holocaust thus becoming not a cause of sympathy for "the Jews", but another reason to criticise "the Jews" - and that stinks.

Paul David Evans, THE HOLOCAUST AND DAVID WARD MP. One excellent paragraph among many:

In a stroke such analogies belittle the suffering of the past, obscure our understanding of the present and most dangerously, suggest a kind of retroactive collective responsibility should be carried by Jewish people for their own suffering. “Yes,” they say “Jews suffered…” – you can smell the caveat coming, can’t you? “But look at the suffering they have caused too! Can they really be called victims? Unlike perpetrators of that genocide, Jews haven’t even learnt anything from being murdered in their millions! What is wrong with them?”. David Ward might not have meant all of that, I think he probably just thought he was being clever when his office sent out that press release. But that is the dirty subtext which he bought into – and he should be held accountable for it. 

David Curtis wrote a letter to Ward explaining how vile he thought Ward's comments were, adding himself to the list of "detractors" who have written to Ward.

CIF Watch wrote "turn David Ward's vile charge on its head."

Sarah AB of Harry's Places writes on Engage - David Ward, Israel, the Holocaust, and the Jews.

Flesh is Grass on David Ward.

Also a good oped piece in the Telegraph: David Ward's Grotesque Caricature of Israel.

Israeli election results - Update

The results of the Israeli elections today are coming in, and it seems as if the right & left will be about evenly matched in the Knesset. The national totals as of 6.08 am Israeli time are:

Likud-Beitenu - 831,212 votes - 23.24% of the vote
Yesh Atid - 507,582 votes - 14.19% of the vote
Labor - 409,468 votes - 11.45% of the vote
Shas - 315,843 votes - 8.83%
Habayit Hayehudi - 313,366 votes - 8.76%
Yahadut Hatorah - 189,666 votes - 5.30%
Tzipi Livni - 179,730 votes - 5.03%
Meretz - 164,064 votes - 4.59%
United Arab List - 135,829 votes - 3.8%
Hadash - 111,673 votes - 3.12%
Balad - 95,312 votes - 2.67%
Kadima - 74,686 votes - 2.09%

Votes still to be included in these totals are of soldiers and prisoners (prisoners in Israeli jails still have the right to vote, and there are polling stations in the jails).

A party needs to get at least 2% of the vote in order to enter the Knesset.

According to Haaretz, this translates into the following mandates for the parties (96% of votes counted):
Likud - 31
Habayit Hayehudi - 11
Shas - 11
Yahadut Hatorah - 7
Yesh Atid - 19
Labor -15
Tzipi Livni - 6
Kadima - 2
Meretz - 6
Ra'am Ta'al - 5
Hadash - 4
Balad - 3

If these figures hold, in order for Netanyahu to have even a remotely stable government, he won't be able to rely only on the rightwing parties. The right-wing total is: 60. At least 61 are needed to form a coalition. The Jewish center-left parties are: 48. The Arab parties are: 12. No Israeli government has ever been formed with the Arab parties. Netanyahu could probably get Kadima with him easily, which would give him 62 mandates, but that's also awfully precarious. His pre-election coalition was much larger. It will be interesting to watch the coalition negotiations.

This year the Israeli government website is posting the votes counted by precinct, so I thought I would look up the polling places closest to where I was living last year and see what the party breakdowns were, as of about 5:00 am Israeli time.

The polling places are in two schools, both on Yehuda St. - Pelech and Efrata, in the Baka neighborhood. The vote breakdowns do not match the national totals, especially in the much greater support for the Meretz party.

For Jerusalem polling place 460, in the Pelech school, this is the breakdown:
377 votes total
21% Meretz
20.7% Likud
16.5% Habayit Hayehudi
14.6% Labor
10.9% Yesh Atid
4% Tzipi Livni
4% Hadash
3% Am Shalem
1.8% Shas
.5% Yahadut ha-Torah

Polling place 461, also in Pelech
418 votes total
21% Likud
20% Meretz
14.2% Labor
12% Habayit Hayehudi
9.2% Yesh Atid
4.6% Tzipi Livni
4.6% Am Shalem
4.1% Shas
2.6% Hadash

Polling place 462, also in Pelech - 273 votes
24% Habayit Hayehudi
23% Meretz
13.6% Labor
13.24% Likud
8% Yesh Atid
5.5% Am Shalem
3.3% Shas
2.5% Tzipi Livni

Polling place 456, in the Efrata school
263 votes
20% Meretz
16.5% Likud
15% Labor
12% Habayit Hayehudi
10.7% Yesh Atid
6.5% Shas
3.5% Kadima
2.7% Am Shalem
2.3% Yahadut ha-Torah

Polling place 463, also in Efrata
331 votes
27% Likud
17% Habayit Hayehudi
12.7% Meretz
10.9% Labor
8.8% Yesh Atid
8.5% Shas
5.2% Otzma Leyisrael
3% Am Shalem
1.8% Tzipi Livni

Polling place 464, also in Efrata
393 votes
23% Habayit Hayehudi
27.4% Likud
15% Labor
12.3% Yesh Atid
11.5% Meretz
4.4% Am Shalem
3.5% Shas
3.3% Tzipi Livni
2.8% Otzma Leyisrael

Polling place 472, also in Efrata
426 votes
20% Likud
19% Meretz
15.6% Habayit Hayehudi
12.6% Labor
10.9% Yesh Atid
5% Tzipi Livni
4.7% Am Shalem
4.5% Shas
1.9% Kadima
1.7% Hadash

Kiryat Arba election results - 9 votes for Meretz!

More fun with Israeli election results, this time from Kiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement just next door to Hebron. Almost all of the votes went to the far right parties of Habayit Hayehudi and Otzma Leyisrael, with Likud a fairly poor third, but there were 9 votes for Meretz, one for Hadash, and two for Balad!

Polling place #1
529 total votes
51.5% to Habayit Hayehudi
30.4% to Otzma Leyisrael
10.3% to Likud
2.5% to Shas
And one vote for Balad! And a vote for Meretz!

Polling place #2
394 total votes
45% for Habayit Hayehudi
27% for Otzma Leyisrael
14.5% for Likud
3.6% for Shas
2% for Yesh Atid
2 votes for Meretz, and one vote for Balad!

Polling place #3
444 total votes
36% to Habayit Hayehudi
28% to Otzma Leyisrael
25% to Likud
3.7% to Shas
And Meretz got one vote!

Polling place #4
600 total votes
44.6% to Habayit Hayehudi
31% to Otzma Leyisrael
17.8% to Likud
all the other parties are less than 2 percent of the vote, but Meretz gets 3 votes (!)

Polling place #5
449 votes
38.8% to Habayit Hayehudi
26% to Otzma Leyisrael
23.4% to Likud
2.5% to Koach Lehashpia
1.35% to Yesh Atid (2 votes)

Polling place #6
287 total votes
32% to Habayit Hayehudi
29% to Likud
25% to Otzma Leyisrael
4.2% to Shas
And one vote for Hadash! (None for Meretz)

Polling place #7
434 votes
41% for Habayit Hayehudi
24.5% for Otzma Leyisrael
24% for Likud
2.12% for Shas
1.8% for Yesh Atid (8 votes)
And 2 votes for Meretz!

More American murders by gun

Will these stories ever end?

Five Dead In New Mexico Shooting

A teenage boy has been charged with murder after a shooting in New Mexico left five people dead, the Albuquerque Journal reports. An assault-style rifle is among the weapons police believe was used in the Saturday night shooting. 

In an email from Bernalillo County officials, a shooting took place on Long Lane SW Saturday evening. Deputies were dispatched and found an adult male, an adult female and three children dead. All victims appeared to have suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Multiple weapons appeared to have been used to include an assault-type rifle. 

The teen is charged with two counts of murder and three counts of child abuse resulting in death.

Review of Andrei Orlov, "The Enoch-Metatron Tradition"

I've just posted a new page, with my review of Andrei Orlov's The Enoch-Metatron Tradition, which I gave as a review at the 2005 SBL Annual Meeting.

Raised on Hatred - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells about widespread hatred of Jews in the Middle East - Jews, not Zionists or Israelis. I think it's important that this is finally being talked about in the New York Times, not just in Israeli or Jewish publications.

She writes:

EGYPT’S newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was caught on tape about three years ago urging his followers to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. Not long after, the then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood described Zionists as “bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians,” “warmongers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.” 

These remarks are disgusting, but they are neither shocking nor new. As a child growing up in a Muslim family, I constantly heard my mother, other relatives and neighbors wish for the death of Jews, who were considered our darkest enemy. Our religious tutors and the preachers in our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews....

All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in textbooks for children as young as three, complete with illustrations of Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper articles and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures....

It is a major step forward for a sitting U.S. administration and leading American newspapers to unequivocally condemn Morsi’s words. But condemnation is just the first move.... 

Here is an opportunity to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the attitude toward Jews in the Middle East, and how that affects the much desired but elusive peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. 

So many explanations have been offered for the failure of successive U.S. administrations to achieve that peace, but the answer is in Morsi’s words. Why would one make peace with bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and monkeys? 

Millions of Muslims have been conditioned to regard Jews not only as the enemies of Palestine but as the enemies of all Muslims, of God and of all humanity. Arab leaders far more prominent and influential than Morsi have been tireless in “educating” or “nursing” generations to believe that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” (These are the words of the Saudi sheik Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, imam at the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca.) 

In 2011, a Pew survey found that in Turkey, just 4 percent of those surveyed held a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of Jews; in Indonesia, 10 percent; in Pakistan 2 percent. In addition, 95 percent of Jordanians, 94 percent of Egyptians and 95 percent of Lebanese hold a “very unfavorable” view of Jews [pdf]. 

In recent decades Israeli and American administrations negotiated with unelected Arab despots, who played a double game. They honored the formal peace treaties by not conducting military attacks against Israel. But they condoned the Islamists’ dissemination of hatred against Israel, Zionism and Jews....

New York Times editorial: President Morsi’s Repulsive Comments Against Jews

New York Times editorial about Morsi: President Morsi’s Repulsive Comments Against Jews. Since I didn't receive yesterday's paper, I didn't realize that the article about Morsi was on the front page, and that there was an editorial today about him. Good for the Times. Here's the editorial:

When Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s president in June, he rose, unknown and untested, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the leader of the most important Arab country. He has made missteps and some truly alarming decisions, but there was still reason to hope that he might grow into the job and become the kind of leader that could benefit Egypt and the region.

His scurrilous comments from nearly three years ago about Zionists and Jews, which just came to light, have raised serious doubts about whether he can ever be the force for moderation and stability that is needed. As reported by David Kirkpatrick in The Times, Mr. Morsi is shown in a video from 2010 delivering a speech in which he urges Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a television interview months later, he described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

That kind of pure bigotry is unacceptable anywhere, anytime. But it is even more offensive in public discourse, coming from someone who became the president of a major country. Mr. Morsi’s comments deserve to be condemned unequivocally, as the Obama administration did on Tuesday. Jay Carney, the president’s spokesman, said, “We completely reject these statements.”

The problem goes deeper than just Mr. Morsi, however. The remarks were made at a time when anti-Israel sentiment was running high in Egypt and the region after the three-week Gaza conflict in 2009 between Israel and Hamas. The sad truth is that defaming Jews is an all too standard feature of Egyptian, and Arab, discourse; Israelis are not immune to responding in kind either.

Teaching children to hate and dehumanizing one’s adversaries is just the kind of twisted mentality that fuels the conflicts that torment the region.

Does Mr. Morsi really believe what he said in 2010? Has becoming president made him think differently about the need to respect and work with all people? So far, there has been no official reaction.

The White House called for Mr. Morsi to make clear that he respects members of all faiths and said the videotaped remarks run counter to the goal of peace. President Obama should also deliver that message to President Morsi directly.

New York Times admits: Egypt’s Leader, Morsi, Made Anti-Jewish Slurs

The New York Times finally reports on something that has been circulating in the Jewish blogosphere since last week, and which Jeffrey Goldberg wrote about today in his blog for the Atlantic: Egypt’s Leader, Morsi, Made Anti-Jewish Slurs.

Nearly three years ago, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood delivered a speech urging Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a television interview around that time, the same leader described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

That leader, Mohamed Morsi, is now president of Egypt — and his comments may be coming back to haunt him....

“When the leader of a country has a history of statements demonizing Jews, and he does not do anything to correct it, it makes sense that many people in Israel would conclude that he cannot be trusted as a partner for peace,” said Kenneth Jacobson, deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League....

As the chief of the Brotherhood’s political arm before becoming president, Mr. Morsi was one of the group’s most outspoken critics of Zionists and Israel. He sometimes referred to Zionists as “Draculas” or “vampires,” using demonizing language historically associated with anti-Semitism. Although he explicitly denigrates Jews in the recently exposed videos, Mr. Morsi and other political and Brotherhood leaders typically restrict their inflammatory comments to the more ambiguous category of “Zionists.”

The anti-Semitic statements that have come to light this month both date back to 2010, when anti-Israeli sentiment was running high after a three-week conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza the previous year.

In the video footage first broadcast Friday on Mr. Youssef’s television program, Mr. Morsi addressed a rally in his hometown in the Nile Delta to denounce the Israeli blockade of Gaza. “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews,” Mr. Morsi declared. Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue,” he said. “The hatred must go on for God and as a form of worshiping him.”

“The land of Palestine will not be freed except through resistance,” he said, praising the militant group Hamas as an extension of the Brotherhood.

“Who is our enemy? The Zionists. Who occupies our land? The Zionists. Who hates us? The Zionists. Who destroys our lands? The Zionists,” Mr. Morsi added, lashing out at “America, France and Europe” as “Zionist” supporters.

“And the last of them is that Obama,” Mr. Morsi said. He called the American president a liar who promised the Arab world “empty meaningless words.”

The other video clip was a television interview from the same period unearthed last week by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based in Washington, which tracks anti-Semitic statements in the Arab world.

“These bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs,” Mr. Morsi declared, using a slur for Jews that is familiar across the Muslim world. Although he referred repeatedly to “Zionists” and never explicitly to Jews, Mr. Morsi echoed historic anti-Semitic themes: “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout their history. They are hostile by nature.” ....

Elder of Ziyon wrote about this yesterday: MSM gives Morsi a free pass for calling Jews "apes and pigs." He was quoting an article by Richard Behar, who writes for Forbes, on January 11: News Flash: Jews Are 'Apes And Pigs.' So Why Is Egypt's Morsi The Elephant In America's Newsrooms?

Last Friday, the sitting president of Egypt – the world’s 15th most populous nation — was exposed for calling Jews “apes and pigs.” And he did it in a TV interview (in Arabic) in 2010, less than two years before he took office.

Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn’t. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report. Not the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today. Etcetera. And therein lies a story, which this column can only begin to skin open here.

Mohamed Morsi’s bizarre Apes-and-Pigs rant hit the Jerusalem Post’s homepage that same day (again, last Friday), as its lead story. Specifically, a prestigious U.S. organization named the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) — chaired by Oliver “Buck” Revell, a former deputy head of the FBI in charge of counter-terrorism – released it widely to the global media and posted it on YouTube.

Undoubtedly, the Cairo and Jerusalem bureaus of the big U.S. media outlets saw the story. But the news only found its way to certain American readers and viewers by getting picked up in Jewish and/or conservative forums over the following days.

Commentary magazine, American Thinker and Breitbart thoughtfully weighed in on the subject. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Jewish Talk Radio, and the Christian Broadcasting Network also saw value in covering it. So did – of all things — a prominent national stock-picking and finance newspaper, Investor’s Business Daily. Fox News entertainer Sean Hannity has been pouncing on it — no surprise there. (Do I really have to tune in to that unpleasant loudmouth if I want to be sure not to miss such newsworthy information?) UPI gave it some pickup, but that news service is only a shadow of its former great self. Once nearly equaling the size and reach of AP in the 1960s, it shrunk to a virtual carcass by 2000 — when it was sold to a company founded by Reverend Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah.

The Times of Israel ran a story about it, and added the fact that Morsi was captured three months ago by MEMRI on a different video. In that tape, he can be seen in fervent prayer at a mosque in western Egypt in October, mouthing the word “Amen” after the preacher urged Allah to “destroy the Jews and their supporters.” (Virtually every big media outlet in America ignored that, too.)

I studied the Pigs-and-Apes story’s journey and trajectory through America over the past week with Sue Radlauer, the Director of Research Services here at Forbes. We gave it seven days to see if any of the so-called “mainstream media” — a pejorative phrase that too-often obscures more than it reveals — bestowed the hate speech even a few sentences of back-page ink. Nothing.

Of course, the demonization of Jews is commonplace and de rigueur in the Arab media (although most Americans wouldn’t know that because they are not being made aware of it). But what makes this omission in Big Media especially egregious is that Morsi–sometimes spelled Morsy or Mursi– went even further than genetically pairing Jews with lower beasts. As you can see and hear for yourself in the Morsi Tapes, he called for an end to any and all negotiations for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians – droning on that all the land belongs to the latter. He called for a boycott of American goods because of its support for Israel. (Of course, he didn’t bother mentioning that American taxpayers have provided nearly $70 billion of aid to Egypt, since it made peace with Israel in 1979, and the spigot continues for now.) He even went so far as to label the Palestinian Authority an entity “created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests.”

Apes and pigs aside, Morsi also warned his TV listeners that Jews have never been nice people. “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout history,” he oozed. “They are hostile by nature.” (One can almost see comedian Jon Stewart’s frozen eyes right about now, before he says something like, “A holiday in Luxor, anyone?”)

If that’s not enough to make the Morsi Tapes even a little newsworthy, consider that Egypt’s economy is on the brink of collapse, with its government desperate for a $4.8 billion IMF loan. Meanwhile, plans have long been underway for the first official visit by the Egyptian president to Washington this March, where he’ll dine with President Obama. So far, the U.S. State Department hasn’t issued a peep of dismay about the tapes. And yet this is arguably the time to do so — before (not after) the huge checks are cut.

So what’s going on here? On Monday, I raised the topic of Morsi’s 2010 language with Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. “Well, they [Muslim Brotherhood] certainly don’t have a monopoly over anti-Semitic comments in the Middle East,” said Oren, who was born and raised in America, and who has written best-selling books on Middle Eastern history. “These comments were alarming, intolerant, and cause for serious concern. Still, we want to distinguish between what they say and what they do. We expect people to act in a responsible and accountable way. That Morsi and his government today played a constructive role in reaching a ceasefire [with Hamas in November], that’s more important – because it actually saved lives.”

Fair enough. But major, seasoned reporters still need to hold Morsi’s feet to fire over such comments – if not by asking him directly about them, then at least by reporting that he uttered them. Surely, if the president of virtually any other country in the world had defamed an entire people in such a way — only a couple years before they got the top job, to boot — it would have at least gotten a few column-inches. Yet Morsi gets a free pass.

“In my view, it’s important to know just how extreme this important man really is, especially because [Leon] Panetta and [Hillary] Clinton after visits there made statements suggesting otherwise,” says MEMRI board director Elliott Abrams, who served in top policy positions under Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush. “You’re right that if such a tape by Putin or [Turkey's] Erdogan or [Argentina's] Kirchner, etc., etc., was discovered, it would be big news. If it isn’t, is the MSM saying, ‘Well, hell, we know all Muslims have a fanatical hatred of Jews, so no big deal?’”

On Sunday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer spent an hour with Morsi in Cairo in what the network billed as an exclusive interview. It was a fine conversation, and he’s doing an hour-long special this weekend about his hour-long interview and visit to Egypt. Blitzer is one of my favorite TV anchors today. (He plays it straight, if sometimes dull, and doesn’t condescend to viewers. I never feel like he’s trying to drag me with a rope through my television set.)

But Wolf could have tossed a few Ape-and-Pig hardballs in Morsi’s direction — given that his reporting staff surely must have been aware of the tapes from the Jerusalem Post piece, if from nowhere else. Why not ask the anthropologist-in-chief: “Do you still believe that Jews are pigs? Invoking Koranic scripture, you claimed that Zionists descend from pigs, but since Zionists weren’t around at the time of your prophet, does this mean all Jews come from pigs, or just certain ones? Do you still believe that America should be boycotted? And does that include American cash? Or should your whole diatribe be disregarded as merely the kooky, carefree views from one’s youth – uhhh…TWO YEARS AGO?”

For several days, I attempted to speak with Blitzer about the good, the bad and the ugly of media coverage of the Middle East. But his publicist says he’s too busy – even to consider responding to a single email question prior to my publishing.

The New York Times rarely touches this stuff. In fact, a harshly critical mega-report about the newspaper’s Middle East coverage was recently released by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). The Times can’t be too happy about it. “The failure of the New York Times to cover the hate indoctrination leads the pack, in a way,” CAMERA’s head Andrea Levin told me yesterday. “The fact that they deem it to be so unimportant helps to lay down that news decision for others as well. And, to us, it’s one of the greatest derelictions in current news coverage of the conflict.”......

One wonders if this Forbes article provoked the Times into publishing their article tonight about Morsi's comments. The Forbes article is much better than the Times article - more in depth, interviews Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren, better analysis - and especially because it's not hobbled by the attitude that there must always be balance in an article.

Should Chuck Hagel be our next defense secretary?

I haven't felt that I knew enough one way or the other to have an opinion on whether Chuck Hagel should be the next US defense secretary. These are my thoughts on two issues with his nomination - his views on Israel and gay and lesbian rights.

Israel

I am disturbed by some of the statements that the Fact Checker blog of the Washington Post has gathered from Hagel. The blog puts them in the context of the entire speech where they can be found.

Hagel says his positions on Israel has been “completely distorted,” though he acknowledges that “I have also questioned some very cavalier attitudes taken about very complicated issues in the Middle East.” Certainly, Hagel has expressed sentiments that many U.S. politicians tend to avoid, including a consistent concern for the plight of Palestinians.

I agree with his concern for the Palestinians, but I don't like the way in which he has blamed Israel for problems in the Middle East that Israel is not responsible for. In a discussion with then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1998, about getting Arab states' support for US policy vis-a-vis Iraq, he asked her, "Do you believe part of this problem is the perception in the Arab world that we’ve tilted way too far toward Israel in the Middle East peace process?" She says no. After Albright's response, he asks again, "But surely you believe that they're linked? You don't believe that there's any linkage between the Middle East peace process and what's happening in Iraq?"

I think Albright was right - what did sanctions against Iraq have to do with whether negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians were going well or badly? Does everything that happens in the Middle East, even when it does not involve Israel, actually involve Israel? Remember, Israel did not participate in the Gulf War, even though it was attacked by Iraq.

I also find it offensive what he said, in an interview with Aaron David Miller, talking about about someone asking him a question during a meeting in New York, "I said, ‘I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator.’ I support Israel, but my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States — not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I’ll do that. Now I know most Senators don’t talk like I do.”

This is offensive to me because it comes across as if Hagel is questioning the patriotism of the questioner. If he's not an Israeli senator, then what does that make the questioner? Someone who is more loyal to Israel than the US? The quote doesn't tell us the speech or meeting where he made this statement, so we don't know if he's speaking to someone Jewish or not. In the US there is a classic trope that accuses American Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to the US, and whether or not Hagel intended to do that, it feels to me that he's evoking that accusation.

Do any of these statements mean he shouldn't be the next US defense secretary? Probably not. He doesn't make US foreign policy - President Obama does. But I don't feel particularly happy that Obama nominated him rather than Susan Rice. Why did Obama fold on Rice? Senate Republicans opposed her (at least some of them), and probably the same Senate Republicans will oppose Hagel. Why wasn't it worth supporting Rice in the face of the same opponents?

Gay and lesbian equality

In addition to his statements about Israel, Hagel has also said and done other things that I don't agree with - for example, his offensive remarks about the gay man that Clinton nominated to be ambassador to Luxembourg, whom he accused of being an "aggressively gay" and his consistent anti-gay voting record in the Senate. The New Yorker reports:

But the Hagel nomination also presents challenges for Americans who care about civil rights. When Hagel served in the United States Senate, as a Republican from Nebraska, he consistently voted against gay rights—his record earned him a zero-per-cent rating (three times) from the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay-rights lobby. Among other things, Hagel voted against extending basic employment nondiscrimination protections and the federal hate-crimes law to cover gay Americans. 

In 1998, after President Bill Clinton nominated a prominent gay-rights advocate from San Francisco, James Hormel, to be the ambassador to Luxembourg, Hagel, then a Senator, seemed to go out of his way to malign not only Hormel—“openly, aggressively gay”—but gay Americans generally, with comments that were blatantly offensive even then; they suggested that the very fact of being gay should disqualify one from representing America abroad.

Hagel was also opposed to gays and lesbians openly serving in the US military (ironically enough, Israel accepted openly gay and lesbian soldiers in 1993 - at just the time that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was passed in the US). This raises another question - while the defense secretary doesn't make foreign policy, he does direct the US military. Now that DADT has been repealed, will Hagel aggressively support the equality of gay and lesbian soldiers?

The New Yorker article continues:

Hagel should—and, presumably, will—be pressed to do substantially more than give his assurance that he will carry out the President’s policies on gay rights. If he has truly changed his views, he needs to explain the context of that conversion and lay out a plan for making the Pentagon and the military more welcoming for gay and lesbian Americans. (“I want to hear how he’s evolved on this issue,” Tammy Baldwin, the newly elected openly gay Senator from Wisconsin told MSNBC.) He will also need to speak to the issue of gay-marriage equality and how it impacts gay military families who are among those most affected by the Defense of Marriage Act, under review this term by the Supreme Court.

I hope that this issue is one that Obama will press Hagel on. I also wish that Obama had considered  more carefully whether it was a good idea to put a man in control of the Defense Department who had voted consistently against gay rights and made offensive anti-gay remarks about a gay man nominated to be an ambassador.

Joe Weissman - his family's fate at Buchenwald and Sobibor

Joe Weissman, who blogs at Harry's Place, has written a very moving post about the fate of his family during the Shoah: My Weissmann family at Buchenwald and Sobibor.

His grandmother Lili, from Austria, was saved by the Kindertransport to London, but her father, Heinrich Weissmann, was murdered at Buchenwald, and her mother Anna and brother Heinz were murdered at Sobibor. They are pictured below (L-R: Anna, Lili, Heinz, Heinrich).