I just received an e-mail from the American Jewish World Service about the U.S. House of Representatives eliminating $150 million of humanitarian aid for Darfur. Ruth Messinger, the head of AJWS, wrote: "Last Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives eliminated $150 million in emergency humanitarian aid to Darfur. Send your elected representatives an email demanding the aid be restored, by using our simple take action system." If you are outraged by this example of legislative indifference to human suffering, go to the AJWS web site to send a letter to your representative. The sample letter reads as follows:

I am horrified that, even as violence continues daily in Darfur, the House of Representatives is preparing to eliminate $150 million in emergency food assistance for Darfur from the emergency supplemental. Two million people in Darfur need food. Currently, only one million are receiving any food assistance, and nearly one quarter of children under the age of five living in refugee camps are malnourished.

As a supporter of American Jewish World Service, I call on Congress not to stand idly by as those in Darfur suffer. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. will offer an amendment in the House Appropriations Committee to restore the funding for food aid. While it will not end the violence, $150 million for food assistance will save the lives of tens of thousands. The amendment also provides $100 million in funding for disaster and refugee assistance in Darfur, and other emergencies in the region. I ask that you vote in favor of the Jackson Amendment.

I added the following paragraph:

I write as a Jew who is aware of how the world "stood idly by" when Jews were being massacred by the Nazis. Can we, the United States, "stand idly by" when innocent people in Sudan, men, women, and children, are being murdered? The least we can do is offer humanitarian aid to the survivors. Please vote for the Jackson Amendment.

I urge all of my readers to send a letter to your congressman or woman expressing your support for the Jackson Amendment.

Why Jewish Students are really silent

I meant to blog about this earlier. Guy Spigelman at Ha'aretz wrote on Why Jewish students are really silent. He was writing about the lack of activism on university campuses about Israel. He says,

At universities across the world from Europe to Australia to the U.S., Jewish students - inclined, as are all students, to lean towards the left during this period of life - are in a bind. They are torn between the communal message of unquestioning support for the state of Israel and their real concerns about the corrosive effects of occupying another people. There has been no room for a middle ground, one that says: "I love and support Israel, our fundamental rights to settle in the land of our forefathers, to live securely, etc. And at the same time I do not and cannot support Israel's continued status as an occupier."

So these Jews remain silent. With no place to feel "at home" ideologically they feel there is no point in confronting their anti-Israel professors nor debating the leaders of official Jewish organizations, most of whom defend Israel's every action.

Isn't it amazing that pro-Israel advocates repeatedly shout from all possible podiums that we are the only democracy in the Middle East (even though this claim may be a little out of date), yet as soon as we go out into the world we are only allowed to express one point of view?

I feel this is true not just on the level of college students, but also of adults teaching on campuses or part of local Jewish communities.

His point is made even more strongly by a visit he paid to Australia, where he visited Australian trade unions and put forward a leftwing Zionist pro-Israel stance - which they had not heard before.

Recently I visited Australia and took the time to visit some powerful and militant unions. When I walked in the door at one union, the first thing I saw was a large poster that shows a boy about to be trampled by a tank and has "Free Palestine" plastered on the bottom. The general secretary of the union explained that they have had two presentations to their executive about the Middle East, one from the PLO and the other from the Palestinian Labor Federation. Needless to say their public statements about Israel aren't exactly filled with praise for us.

Not feeling bound by the policies of Ariel Sharon's government (it was before Labor joined the coalition) I told him that Israel would be a lot better off if we left Gaza and the West Bank and I pointed to the polls that said that a majority of Israelis would agree if they could be guaranteed peace and security. He was shocked....

By relentlessly attacking Israeli policies and our right to defend ourselves, unions, academics and politicians around the world are doing a disservice to the cause of peace, as it weakens the left camp in Israel. "Where is the solidarity for our suffering?" I challenged the union's secretary general. He hadn't heard this perspective. At the end of the meeting he invited me to address his executive: a first, the Australian Jewish community told me. This is not rocket science, it simply shows that presenting a plurality of views can convince opinion leaders, especially those on the left, that Israel has a complex story and outright rejection of everything Israel does is unjust and unhelpful.

I think that he is absolutely correct.

Further from Mahmood's Den on hopes for democracy in the Arab world. Mahmood writes about three Bahraini bloggers who have been imprisoned for their criticisms of the Bahraini royal family on their blog, (in Arabic) BahrainOnline.org. A web site has been put up to protest the detention and to call for their release - Free Ali.

David Adesnik at Oxblog, on liberals and Lebanon - what he said.

I find the political position that I'm in very strange. I did not vote for George W. Bush and did not want him to be re-elected. When I'm asked what my political beliefs are, they tend to fit into the "liberal" or "progressive" box. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I fit pretty securely into the "left-wing Zionist" box. But when it comes to a lot of current American foreign policy, I find myself agreeing with Bush and Condoleeza Rice!

I'm thrilled about what's happening in Lebanon, especially if it leads to a Syrian withdrawal and a genuine democratic government there. I was pleased at how well both the Palestinian and Iraqi elections went. I'm glad that the U.S. government appears to be withdrawing its support for horrible Arab dictatorships. I found the events in Ukraine positively inspiring. Why aren't my fellow liberals as excited as I am? Just because George Bush might have had something to do with some of these moves towards democracy and political freedom? (Differing amounts in different places, of course - the death of Yasser Arafat was the major factor in Palestine, for example).

I do genuinely wonder what John Kerry would have done in foreign policy if he had been elected. I pretty sure I would have preferred his domestic policy (since he wouldn't be in thrall to the Christian Right, wouldn't have proposed an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Constitution, and probably wouldn't be trying to gut Social Security in the name of saving it), but would he have done what I wanted in foreign policy?

Another fascinating blog that I've just learned about, on the practice of taharat ha-mishpacha, or "family purity" - Mayim Rabim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Link courtesy of Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A peaceful guy!

Churchill has also responded to his critics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more on Churchill, see here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancer is the top killer for those under 85

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

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