According to Foreign Media Reports

If the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was done by the Mossad, they have done an unbelievably bad job at covering their tracks: using fake passports of seven Israeli citizens for some of the hit squad members and dressing in "false beards, wigs and glasses, in almost comical attempts at disguise." (See Israelis Share Suspicions in Hamas Leader’s Killing).

Amir Oren in today's Haaretz writes:

If the perpetrators were from the Mossad (AFMR, of course), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be walking around with an acute sense of deja vu. Once again, an assassination of a senior Hamas leader in a friendly Arab country; once again, an operation designed to kill someone quietly and inconspicuously; once again, a diplomatic mess; and once again, it is all happening on Netanyahu's watch. In 1997, it was Khaled Meshal in Jordan. This time, it's Mabhouh in Dubai.

I had forgotten that the attempted assassination of Meshal occurred during Netanyahu's previous prime ministership - it was only one of the many things that he botched then.

The United Kingdom and Ireland were used once again, and this time, a French connection topped it off. It is as if Israeli governments had never apologized to London for using British documentation; as if they had not promised solemnly, when passports of Her Majesty's subjects were found in a certain phone booth, that this would never happen again....

Using the identities of real, living, innocent Israelis for operational documentation is against the law. This kind of abuse also causes innocent civilians to suffer the evil that already plagues ministers and officers: being prevented from traveling abroad for fear of being arrested by Interpol on suspicion of being the Dubai assassins.

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy pushed for a Mossad Law to be legislated that would enshrine the state's obligation to defend its agents caught breaking laws abroad. The initiative never got off the ground: A state can't legitimize illegality. But neither can it allow one of its institutions to arbitrarily harm civilians not the police, not the tax authority, not the Shin Bet security service and not the Mossad.

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein was asked yesterday whether an investigation will be opened following the public complaints of those whose identities were stolen from them, and whose lives and liberty are therefore now threatened. Weinstein has not yet had time to study the issue. He has some superficial knowledge of Dagan's character, but no prejudice.

Netanyahu played deaf to the warnings and extended Dagan's tenure for an eighth year, a decision as hasty as it was unnecessary. But the Mossad, like the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office, cannot hinge upon one man, without whom everything would collapse.

What is needed now is a swift decision to terminate Dagan's contract and to appoint a new Mossad chief - one of the current department heads, one of their predecessors, or a talented Israel Defense Forces general. There's no disease (AFMR) without a cure: An easel in Rosh Pina is yearning for pensioner Dagan to come home.

(AMFR means: According to Foreign Media Reports. This circumlocution is used by the Israeli press to write about topics that the military censor will not allow them to report directly, like Israeli nuclear weapons).

"May The Judgement Not Be Too Heavy Upon Us"

Despite my disagreements with Andrew Sullivan on whether the Israel lobby is as nefarious as he now thinks it is, he is often an eloquent and moving writer on moral issues whom I find deeply moving, especially in his writing about torture. His meditation today on Ash Wednesday and March Thiessen, the Catholic apologist for torture who seems to entirely ignore his own church's stance against torture, is particularly impressive: "May The Judgement Not Be Too Heavy Upon Us."

The notion of the integrity of the human person, of human dignity, is integral to the Catholic faith. We are all made in the image of God, imago Dei. The central and divine figure in our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was brutally tortured. He was also robbed of dignity, forced to wear a mocking crown of thorns, sent to carry a crippling cross through the streets of Jerusalem, mocked while in agony, his body exposed naked and twisted in the stress position known as crucifixion - which was often done without nails by Romans so that the death was slow and agonizing in the way stress positions are designed to be. Ask John McCain. That the Catholic church in the Inquisition deployed these techniques reveals the madness and evil that can infect even those institutions purportedly created to oppose all such things.

Read the whole essay.

Wieseltier vs. Sullivan: A Question on the Trinity

I haven't gotten into the whole contretemps between Andrew Sullivan and Leon Wieseltier because I haven't had time to read all of Wieseltier's opus and consider what I think of his criticisms of Sullivan. I have been disturbed at what seems to me Sullivan's gradual turning against Israel over the last year or so. But part of my thinking about him comes from how it is that he turned against the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq - not all of a sudden or reflexively, but after a lot of consideration. His long discussions about Abu Ghraib and torture had a big impact on my thinking about the Bush Administration, and contributed to my turning against them. I think he is coming from a deep concern with the morality/ethics of government action in democratic societies.

I do wish that he was a bit more careful in his language about Israel, and I'm starting to think that he would benefit from actually going to Israel/Palestine and talking to people on the ground. He needs a deeper basis for his judgments than he has now.

But one of the things that he objected to in Wieseltier's essay were the remarks that Wieseltier made about the Christian belief in the Trinity. Wieseltier's essay isn't particularly easy to get into - he starts off from what seems to be left-field, discussing a quote from W.H. Auden on the difficulty of explaining the Trinity to the readers of TNR (in 1944!). He then goes into a discussion of how difficult many Christian writers found it to give a rational explanation of the Trinity. He quotes Aquinas as saying, “It is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason.” He refers then to the Church Fathers on the Trinity, and his own conclusion:

"For this reason, he [Aquinas] asserted, “we must not attempt to prove what is of faith, except by authority alone, to those who receive the authority; while as regards others, it suffices to prove that what faith teaches is not impossible.” Indeed, the despair of explanation goes all the way back to the Fathers of the Church, who afflicted themselves with the most extraordinary mental contortions–hypostasis, ousia, and the rest–to make the idea of the Trinity seem plausible. They were right, finally, to call it a mystery.

Wieseltier's judgment is that: "To regard a concept as a mystery may be a spiritual triumph, but it is an intellectual defeat." But is the debate about the Trinity really an intellectual one? I think that Aquinas' assertion that natural reason will not lead one to an understanding of the Trinity makes sense - it is a foundation of Christian faith, not a philosophical proposition.

And then Wieseltier writes about the Trinity, and this is what Sullivan most objected to:

The idea of plurality in the deity, like the idea of corporeality in the deity (Auden would not have had an easier time with the Incarnation!), represents nothing less than a retraction of the monotheistic revolution in thinking about God, a reversal of God’s sublimity, a regress to polytheistic crudity. It is completely inconsistent with everything that my mind instructs me to believe about God’s essence. (I leave aside what my mind instructs me to believe about God’s existence. We are in the realm of theology here, not the realm of philosophy.)

Of course, my stiff-necked opinion about this central tenet of the Christian faith is not only rational, it is also Jewish. The electrifying history of Jewish-Christian disputations in the Middle Ages amply documents the scrupulously argued Jewish refusal to entertain anything but a perfect unity in the conception of God. In the words of an early modern Jewish writer, whose polemical work survives in an unattributed Hebrew manuscript at the Jewish Theological Seminary, “I do not understand this and you will not be able to explain it to me.” That is not a report of a prejudice. It is a report of a view with rationally defensible grounds. The respect one must have for believers one need not have for beliefs.

Wieseltier's argument here boils down to saying that Jews do not agree with the Christian belief in the Trinity because it is not rationally defensible. Again, are Christians required to make a rational explanation for the Trinity that would satisfy nonbelievers? I don't think so - all religions have beliefs and practices that really cannot stand up to rational scrutiny (Dawkins and Hitchens have exploited the irrational in religion quite to their benefit in their books). Jews have beliefs that cannot stand up to rational scrutiny, for example the belief that the universal God who created the entire universe decided to make a covenant with one particular group of people on Earth, the Jews.

I also think there are other problems with Wieseltier's argument. Is he saying that all polytheism is "crude"? Would Hinduism then be a "crude" religion? If he's going to make this assertion, I think he needs to learn more about what polytheistic religions really are about. He doesn't have to agree with them to come to a better understanding of them. His remarks seem to be very close to the "satire of idols" as found in many of the prophets of the Bible - who were in fact mocking the polytheistic beliefs of their neighbors, without seeming to understand them very well.

And finally, on this point, I think that certain types of Judaism are open to exactly the same criticism. Kabbalah teaches that the unknowable Godhead (Ein Sof) revealed Itself through the emanation of ten Sefirot (divine potencies), which are co-existent with Ein Sof (in other words, they are not the instruments of Ein Sof, but partake in its essence). When I first studied early Christianity and tried to understand the Trinity, I had a great deal of trouble getting my mind around it - I remember telling the teaching fellow for the course that I just couldn't understand it because I was Jewish. When I began to study Kabbalah and read the Zohar (the key text of medieval Kabbalah), somehow the Christian idea of the Trinity began to make more sense to me. I wonder what Wieseltier would say about Kabbalah.

To turn to Sullivan's reply to Wieseltier's comments on the Trinity:

Leon is describing the central tenets of the Christian faith - the divinity of Jesus and the Triune God - as a step backward for religious thinking. He is dismissing as stupid and backward the Incarnation. He goes so far as to insult it by decrying it as a regress to polytheism. And not just polytheism but crude polytheism.

I am not one to take offense at such things. My own faith can withstand the cheap pot-shots of others. But can you imagine if Wieseltier came across a Muslim or a Christian making similar derogatory and condescending and cheap remarks about Judaism? As crude? A form of religious regression?

I acknowledge that the belief in the Trinity is a central tenet of Christianity - but for that reason are non-Christians supposed to respect it? From the Jewish point of view the Christian beliefs in the divinity of Jesus, the incarnation, and the Trinity are wrong. I don't believe in them, although I try to understand what Christians believe about them. (And I don't feel any impulse to call them a step backwards in religious thinking - although I think that many Jews would agree with Wieseltier on this point).

I wonder if Sullivan here is suffering somewhat from the assumption that of course everyone should respect what Christians believe because we live in a Christian culture. I don't think he would say this consciously, given all of his attacks upon what he calls "Christianism." But he does seem to give Christianity a privileged status as a religion that he doesn't give to other religions. (Again, not consciously).

In this realm, as David Schraub writes, Sullivan is writing "from an (along this axis) empowered class." In other words, Sullivan is demanding respect for Christianity as a religion from Jews who have been oppressed by Christians for about nineteen hundred years on religious grounds. Historically speaking, Vatican II and other Christian attempts to reconcile with Jews are very recent.

Wieseltier then writes in reply to Sullivan's reply:

Sullivan concludes with a ringing question: “Can you imagine if Wieseltier came across a Muslim or a Christian making similar remarks about Judaism? As crude? A form of religious regression?” He thinks he knows the answer to this question. So I want to be clear. There is no need to imagine me coming across people who think that some of the most foundational convictions of Judaism--God, creation, the splitting of the Red Sea and all the other miracles, the cosmos of reward and punishment--the whole supernatural apparatus of my religion--is nonsense. I have met such people and some of them are my friends. If their objections are thoughtful, then there is nothing “derogatory and condescending and cheap” about them.

I would have to agree with Wieseltier here. Members of my own family don't understand my religious beliefs - I don't have to go very far to meet with amazement that I could believe in such silly things.

Sullivan's latest post on this argument, The Trinity, is mostly a quote from a reader, whom he seems to agree with.

The reader writes:

It's downright evil to excuse saying terrible things about other people's faiths, especially when the things you are saying misconstrue what those people themselves believe about their own religion. It would be one thing if Leon Wieseltier laid out the doctrine of the Trinity fairly and charitably and then argued against it. But that is simply something he has not done....

And it's okay to derogate this as crude because his objections are somehow "thoughtful," and acting as if he would respect similar ridicule from another provided that ridicule was "thoughtful?" Would he acknowledge any such assault on Judaism as "thoughtful?" If he says yes, here's a hint: even he knows he's lying.

It's evil for Wieseltier to argue that the Christian belief in the Trinity is polytheistic? Is Wieseltier really under any obligation to lay out the doctrine of the Trinity fairly? It would certainly make the argument more civil, but I don't see that he's required to be polite (nor is Sullivan, for that matter).

The writer here is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and a Christian, and says that,

I've spent my entire life as a Christian trying to find and quarantine aspects of the Christian tradition that have held up Christianity as a progressive religion that renders "backward" peoples only to have Leon Wieseltier come along and decide it's high time Judaism's conception of monotheism started taking up the slack

I'm not sure what I think about this argument. On the one hand, I am happy that he is trying to disown this part of the Christian tradition, which was certainly part of the project of colonialism of many European countries from the 15th century onwards. On the other hand, Judaism, unlike Christianity, has not been a proselytizing religion since the first couple of centuries CE, due to Jewish powerlessness in the face of Christianity and Islam, so Jews were not part of the European colonial project in this sense. I think that all of us should cultivate a humble attitude towards making assertions that our particular religion is true above all others.

I thought that I was going to write a short post on whether we are required to show respect for other people's religious beliefs - I find that I have written a long post. I don't think I've answered my question, but I hope I've given my readers some food for thought.

Ethan Bronner and the Public Editor of the New York Times

The Public Editor of the New York Times is calling for Ethan Bronner, the New York Times chief correspondent in Israel, to be reassigned for the period when his son is serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Fortunately, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, disagrees.

The concern of Hoyt (the Public Editor) seems to be not that Bronner would actually be biased in his research and writing, but that some readers would perceive him as being prejudiced. As Keller makes clear in his reply to Hoyt, the New York Times is endlessly scrutinized for its Israel/Palestine coverage, and people on both (or many) sides of the issue are quick to criticize them for it. I've had Jewish friends accuse the Times of being anti-Israel, and I've had other friends claim that the Times is reflexively pro-Israel (one such conversation included the awkward claim that the Times was pro-Israel because the owners of the newspaper are Jewish - my interlocutor, whom I had thought was a friend, was unaware of the newspaper's shameful role during WWII in downplaying the gravity of the Holocaust). For an example of the claim that the Times' reporting is reflexively pro-Israel, see the first comment to Keller's response, which comes from Alison Weir, who is convinced that Israel can never do anything right.

Keller asks very cogent questions about who it is that should be trusted to report the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Readers, like reporters, bring their own lives to the newspaper. Sometimes, when these readers are unshakeably convinced of something, they bring blinding prejudice and a tendency to see what they want to see. As you well know, nowhere is that so true as in Israel and the neighboring Palestinian lands. If we send a Jewish correspondent to Jerusalem, the zealots on one side will accuse him of being a Zionist and on the other side of being a self-loathing Jew, and then they will parse every word he writes to find the phrase that confirms what they already believe while overlooking all evidence to the contrary. So to prevent any appearance of bias, would you say we should not send Jewish reporters to Israel? If so, what about assigning Jewish reporters to countries hostile to Israel? What about reporters married to Jews? Married to Israelis? Married to Arabs? Married to evangelical Christians? (They also have some strong views on the Holy Land.) What about reporters who have close friends in Israel? Ethical judgments that start from prejudice lead pretty quickly to absurdity, and pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.

He also gives examples of other Times reporters who have a personal involvement of some kind in the area they are reporting about - for example, he brings up the case of Nazila Fathi, the Times correspondent in Tehran. Should she not be permitted to report on Iran because the Iranian regime hounded her out of the country?

Nazila Fathi, our brave Tehran correspondent, was hounded out of her native country and into exile by the current regime. Does that “conflict of interest” disqualify her from writing about Iran? Or does that, on the contrary, make her more qualified, knowing as she does how that regime operates? Would you prefer to have a correspondent in Tehran who had NOT been persecuted by the Iranian government?

It seems to me that Hoyt is calling for an impossible standard which would lead to an absurdity - reporters who do not care at all about the place or topic they are reporting on. One of the things I had noticed over the years about the Times' reporting on Israel is that every few years they would send a new person to be the chief correspondent. They did not have as their chief correspondent someone who actually lived in the country for a long time - nor did it seem they even had Israeli or Palestinian correspondents (perhaps some stringers). I think it is a good thing that the Times is now employing reporters who know Israel thoroughly because they are Israelis or have lived in the country long term. (For example, Isabel Kershner, whom I first read in the Jerusalem Post probably about twenty years ago, is now reporting for the Times pretty regularly). Perhaps if they are worried about the appearance of bias, they should be careful to employ a Palestinian reporter to write regularly for the Times on an ongoing basis (the reporter they used in Gaza last year during the Gaza War seemed excellent to me).

Tablet Magazine has just weighed in on this issue, on the side of Hoyt - "Hoyt and I agree that Bronner has been fair-minded. But Hoyt and I also agree with Alex Jones, a Pulitzer-winning Harvard press expert. He told Hoyt: 'The appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest. I would reassign him.' Such a move, frankly, is unfair to Bronner, 'but the newspaper has to come first,' he added."

I repeat that this is an impossible standard for the newspaper. Does this mean now that the excellent Gaza reporter the Times had last year for the Gaza War shouldn't work for them because of her inevitable personal stake in the course of the war? In Iraq the Times also employs many Iraqi staffers, some of whose names actually even show up as bylines. Should they be fired because they also have a stake in the ongoing fighting there? I imagine that some are Shi'ites, some are Sunnis, some are Kurds, some are Christians - all groups that are struggling over what is going to happen in Iraq. I think it is actually a plus for the Times to have reporters who are from a particular place - as long as they can adhere to journalistic standards. I have not seen any reporting from the local reporters in Iraq or Gaza or Israel that has led me to believe that they are violating journalistic standards.

And why is Tablet Magazine piling on in this argument? It's a Jewish publication - do they believe that an Israeli Jewish reporter would be incapable of reporting on Israel/Palestine fairly? What about Isabel Kershner, who is an Israeli and who writes for the Times? She immigrated to Israel from Britain and is an Israeli citizen. She used to report for the Jerusalem Report (and I think also for the Jerusalem Post). NPR employee Linda Gradstein, who is an American Jewish immigrant to Israel, has reported for them for at least 15 years. I don't think she's served in the IDF, but her husband may have. Does that mean she's incapable of reporting fairly on Israel/Palestine?\

Jeffrey Goldberg has written two good posts on this issue - Pandering to Zealots, in which he says:

.....reporters are capable of actually separating out their personal interests from their coverage. I've worked with Palestinian reporters in Gaza and the West Bank, many of whom have had family ties to Fatah and, in one case, even to Hamas, but without fail they've functioned as professional news-gatherers interested only in getting the story before the competition. I don't think the Times should stop using Palestinian reporters in the West Bank and Gaza, because if it did so, its coverage would suffer. And its coverage of Israel would suffer immeasurably if the Times bent to the pressure of anti-Israel propagandists and removed Ethan Bronner from his post. I'm just glad Bill Keller is the editor of the Times, and not Clark Hoyt. 

Amen to that point. His second posting is in response to a reader's inquiry about "Why not have Jewish reporters cover Gaza? Why not have Palestinians cover Israel?" He answers:

A good question. Two answers: First, Jewish reporters do cover Gaza. And Palestinians do, in fact, cover Israel. Anyone who has been in the Knesset press room knows that Palestinians, working for Arab outlets, as well as European and American publications, are busy covering the main issues of the day. Answer number two: There could always be more of this cross-cultural coverage. I, for one, would love to read a Taghreed al-Khodary [who has reported for the New York Times] profile of Bibi, or Gabi Ashkenazi, or whomever, not only because she's a great reporter, but because she would draw out different responses from these men, based on her background and knowledge, than I could. I trust her to be fair and accurate, so why not?

Indeed.

Why not to support Amnesty International

Why stop supporting Amnesty? (according to Flesh is Grass)

They have suspended the head of their international secretariat’s gender union Gita Sahgal, ostensibly because of this interview with The Times [of London]. Sahgal objects to Amnesty’s involvement with the apologist for terror, Moazzam Begg, in the charity’s Counter Terror With Justice campaign [in Britain].

For the full posting at Flesh is Grass:  Defend Gita Sahgal from her employers - Amnesty International.

See the excellent comments by Terry Glavin: No Support For Amnesty International Until It Reinstates Gita Sahgal, Cuts Jihadist Ties.

There's also a Facebook group calling for Sahgal's reinstatement.

Harry's Place has a longer article by Lucy Lips - Amnesty in Cageprisoners Row: Dynamite! about the Times article on Sahgal.

They have also published Sahgal's letter of today, responding to Amnesty's suspension of her. It is worth repeating here:

Statement by Gita Sahgal
7 February 2010

This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.

Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.

The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimization of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right.

I have always opposed the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror. I have been horrified and appalled by the treatment of people like Moazzam Begg and I have personally told him so. I have vocally opposed attempts by governments to justify ‘torture lite’.

The issue is not about Moazzam Begg’s freedom of opinion, nor about his right to propound his views: he already exercises these rights fully as he should. The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights. I have raised this issue because of my firm belief in human rights for all.

I sent two memos to my management asking a series of questions about what considerations were given to the nature of the relationship with Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cageprisoners. I have received no answer to my questions. There has been a history of warnings within Amnesty that it is inadvisable to partner with Begg. Amnesty has created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights. Many of my highly respected colleagues, each well-regarded in their area of expertise has said so. Each has been set aside.

As a result of my speaking to the Sunday Times, Amnesty International has announced that it has launched an internal inquiry. This is the moment to press for public answers, and to demonstrate that there is already a public demand including from Amnesty International members, to restore the integrity of the organisation and remind it of its fundamental principles.

I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg’s consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty’s mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

And more on the recent history of Amnesty which seems to have led to their willingness to work with Islamists who support the Taliban, an article by Nick Cohen on Standpoint.

Hate Crimes - FBI report for 2008

The annual FBI report on hate crimes for 2008 has been posted to the FBI website, and once again it is interesting to see what the most common hate crimes were (among those reported to law enforcement agencies, which certainly doesn't include all hate crimes committed in the U.S. in 2008).

The FBI reports:

Of the 7,780 single-bias incidents reported in 2008:

• 51.3 percent were racially motivated.
• 19.5 percent were motivated by religious bias.
• 16.7 percent stemmed from sexual-orientation bias.
• 11.5 percent resulted from ethnicity/national origin bias.
• 1.0 percent were motivated by disability bias.

Of hate crimes motivated by race (total 4,704), 3,413 were motivated by anti-Black prejudice (72.5% of the total). This means that 37% of all hate crimes reported were motivated by anti-Black prejudice. The percentage of the American population which is African-American is about 12%.

Hate crimes motivated by bias against people of a particular religious group break down as follows:
There were 1,606 hate crime offenses motivated by religious bias in 2008. A breakdown of these offenses shows:

• 65.7 percent were anti-Jewish.
• 13.2 percent were anti-other religion.
• 7.7 percent were anti-Islamic.
• 4.7 percent were anti-Catholic.
• 4.2 percent were anti-multiple religions, group.
• 3.7 percent were anti-Protestant.
• 0.9 percent were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.

Therefore, 12.8% of all hate crimes were motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice and 1.5% of all hate crimes were motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice. I wonder what the "other religion" category includes. Jews are about 2% of the American population, while Muslims are less than that (when I looked this up a couple of years ago, the best figure I could come up with was about 2 million Muslims in the U.S. - claims that there are up to 6 million Muslims in the U.S. do not seem supportable by the evidence).

If we break down the statistics by type of crime, it's also interesting. Fortunately, in 2008, there were no reported murders on the basis of religion, and one rape.

For the remaining crimes against persons, these are the statistics:

Aggravated assault - total crimes 47
• anti-Jewish: 25 (53%)
• anti-Catholic: 1 (2.1%)
• anti-Protestant: 3 (6.3%)
• anti-Islamic: 5 (10.6%)
• anti-atheist or agnostic: 1 (2.1%)
(the rest were against either "other religion" or "multiple religions")

Simple assault - total crimes 114
• anti-Jewish:58 (50.8%)
• anti-Catholic: 3 (2.6%)
• anti-Protestant: 3 (2.6%)
• anti-Islamic: 30 (26%)
• anti-atheist or agnostic: 1
(the rest were against either "other religion" or "multiple religions")

Intimidation - total crimes 311
• anti-Jewish: 201 (64.6%)
• anti-Catholic: 3
• anti-Protestant: 1
• anti-Islamic: 46 (14.7%)
• anti-atheist or agnostic: 0
(the rest were against either "other religion" or "multiple religions")

Statistics for crimes against property:

Lumping together robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft - total crimes 83
• anti-Jewish: 23 (27%)
• anti-Catholic: 12 (14%)
• anti-Protestant: 8 (9.6%)
• anti-Islamic: 5 (6%)
• anti-atheist or agnostic: 5 (6%)
(the rest were against either "other religion" or "multiple religions")

Arson - total crimes 13
• anti-Jewish: 4 (30.7%)
• anti-Catholic: 0
• anti-Protestant: 2 (15%)
• anti-Islamic: 5 (38%)
• anti-atheist or agnostic: 0
(the rest were against either "other religion" or "multiple religions")

Destruction/damage/vandalism - total crimes 1029
• anti-Jewish: 742 (72%)
• anti-Catholic: 0
• anti-Protestant: 2 (15%)
• anti-Islamic: 5 (38%)
• anti-atheist or agnostic: 0
(the rest were against either "other religion" or "multiple religions")

Even though, according to polls, there is more prejudice against Muslims in American society (for example, the percentage of Americans who would not vote for a Muslim for President is far higher than the percentage who would not vote for a Jew), there are more actual crimes committed against Jews based on anti-Jewish prejudice.

The total number of victims of hate crimes in 2008 were reported as 9,683 (single-bias incidents). They included (among others):
3,596 Blacks (37%)
1,145 Jews (11.8%)
1,672 gay men, lesbians, or bisexuals (17.2%)
792 Hispanics (8%)

This means, just as I said in 2007, "From these statistics, we can see that the hatreds rampant in the United States are really the old tried and true ones - anti-black racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments."

Weirdest political campaign ad ever

I had thought you couldn't get any stranger than the political advertisements in the last Israeli elections for the combined Holocaust Survivor/Marijuana Legalization Party list. But that was until I watched Carly Fiorina's Demon Sheep ad against Tom Campbell. I particularly like the way that the demonic sheep appears at the end, knowable only through its red demon eyes, and then scuttles off, revealed to be a man covered in a sheep costume pretending to be a wolf. I though that Carly Fiorina was rich - couldn't she afford an ad with slightly higher production values (although this would have led to the ad unfortunately being less weird).

CAMERA on Stephen Sizer and Joseph Weissman

CAMERA, an organization that I often do not agree with, has published a good report about Seismic Shock (Joseph Weissman) and Stephen Sizer: Stephen Sizer Complains to Police About Blogger. One correction I would make to this report is that Weissman's first blog was not hosted by his university's computer system - it was hosted on Blogspot, which is owned by Google. (To access at least the first page, go to the Google cache of the blog). (This is the blog that he deleted at the request of the police).

Some links: History, Jacobo Timerman, and Messianic Jews

Defending History by The Plump. A sample:

I am always concerned by historical attempts to make qualitative judgements between unambiguous evils - was Stalin worse than Hitler (thereby implying one was actually better), was Fascism the same as Communism etc. – as they are either a form of sloppy shorthand or an attempt to dissemble. Nor is it enough to quantitatively evaluate regimes by counting the corpses (there are always corpses; many, many corpses).

Jacobo Timerman smeared, at Z-Blog.  A sample:

Many readers will be familiar with the name of the Argentine journalist and publisher Jacobo Timerman. Kidnapped and tortured by agents of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, he was eventually allowed to leave for Israel where he wrote a book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number that was to become a classic account of the horrors of military rule in Argentina.

I remember reading Timerman's book when it was first published - it was profoundly disturbing, a witness to the hellish tortures and murders committed by the Argentinean dictatorship.

Messianic Jewish Musings, by Derek Leman. Before the whole kerfuffle with Seismic Shock (Joseph Weissman) and the Reverend Sizer, I hadn't been very aware of Messianic Jewish groups (Jews who now believe that Jesus is the Messiah yet also hold onto their Jewish identity in various ways). Through my reading about his case, I came across this blog by the leader of a Messianic group in Roswell, Georgia. The blog tackles some weighty theological issues, such as supercessionism in Christianity, which Lerman (and Weissman) are particularly offended by, since it negates the value of any continued connection to Judaism on the part of Messianic Jews. (I personally object to Christian supercessionism, since it negates the continuing value of Judaism after the advent of Jesus as the Messiah).

Calvin L. Smith has also written in an interesting way about Stephen Sizer and Seismic Shock at his blog. He teaches at King's Evangelical Divinity School in England.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today, January 27, is the day that people in European countries usually commemorate the Holocaust. (In the U.S., as far as I have noticed, the Holocaust is commemorated on the day chosen by the Israeli Knesset and followed by Jewish communities - the 27 of Nisan, which this year falls on April 11). The date was chosen because on January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. Outside the Italian consulate in New York City today the names of the 8,600 Italian Jews rounded up and killed from 1938 to 1945 were read aloud by a variety of figures. The readers included the Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and some prominent rabbis.

But this year’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day carried an added weight of silence, coming soon after the outbreak of an international, interfaith controversy over the proposed canonization of Pope Pius XII, who presided in Rome during World War II.

None of the readers, including Cardinal Edward M. Egan and several prominent rabbis, made mention of the dispute while standing at microphones planted along Park Avenue, reciting names that included about 1,000 Roman Jews rounded up by German and Italian authorities in a single day, Oct. 16, 1943....

Many historians contend that Pius XII did not do enough to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Vatican has long said that Pius, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, helped save many Jews who were hidden in Roman Catholic churches, monasteries and convents.

Natalia Indrimi, one of the organizers of Wednesday’s event and director of the New York office of Centro Primo Levi, a group dedicated to the history of Italian Jews, said the question of Pius’s role during the Holocaust would be settled only when all papal records of the wartime period were unsealed by the Vatican, which so far has released only some.

“It is up to the church to make its own decisions about canonization,” she said. “But any claim that Pius did something or didn’t do something is only a claim until all the records can be studied by the historians.”

German court summons bishop over Holocaust denial

Following up on a story from last year, Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying pseudo-bishop whose excommunication was revoked last year by Pope Benedict, has been summoned by a German court to answer charges that he denied the Holocaust in comments on Swedish television last year. While the remarks were broadcast on Swedish television, they were made in Germany, which outlaws denial of the Holocaust.

The district court in the southern city of Regensburg has set a hearing for April 16, because Williamson had appealed against a 12,000 euro fine for incitement that was summarily handed down last year for his remarks.

The court has now summoned Williamson, 69, to face questioning in person, court spokesman Thomas Frick said.

Authorities cannot force him to attend, but if Williamson is not represented at the hearing, then the appeal against the fine will be thrown out, Frick added.

"Then the fine becomes legally binding," he said.

Williamson's remarks broadcast on the television station were made near to Regensburg, within the court's jurisdiction.

Comment moderation now on

I've switched my blog settings so that comments now will have to be approved before appearing on the blog. In general, I welcome comments from any perspective, including those I strongly disagree with, but I do not want this blog to turn into a forum for antisemitic, racist, anti-Islamic, or homophobic remarks. I will not approve comments that egregiously violate this policy. If a comment is made that seems to skate on the edge, I will write a reply to it, and if it is then followed up by another comment of the same or worse degree, it will not be approved.

This policy is not aimed at anti-Zionist or anti-Israel comments, but only at remarks that blame Jews for all the world's problems, argue that there is a Jewish conspiracy to do something evil, hold that Jews inherently possess some negative characteristic, or otherwise engage in wholesale scapegoating of Jews. Similar comments made on racial grounds, or which smear all Muslims as inherently violent or single out Islam as a uniquely evil religion will also not be approved.

Is this censorship? In one sense, yes, since I'm refusing to publish certain comments. I view this, however, as akin to the censorship that newspaper publishers exercise when refusing to publish all letters sent to the newspaper. (And I wish that the online version of newspapers would much more heavily edit readers' comments by deleting hateful racist, antisemitic, homophobic, or anti-Islamic remarks). This blog is mine, and I get to decide who posts on it. If you really feel that strongly, create your own blog and start propagating your opinions that way.

Was Israel a Mistake? - Review of Sizer's first book

I just found a review of one of Sizer's other books, in Christianity Today, by Paul Merkley: Was Israel a Mistake? It's also a doozie.

In Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon?, Stephen Sizer advances the fantasy, previously elaborated by a host of anti-Zionist polemicists, that the long and honorable history of defense by Christians of Israel's right to be Israel is merely an epiphenomenon of the history of a singular, off-center school of theology called premillennial dispensationalism. According to this thesis, all Christian Zionists are mindless acolytes of a Sanhedrin of pamphleteers which carries on the teachings of John Nelson Darby.

By my casual reckoning, about 80 percent of the book is devoted to a sedulous taxonomy of End Times speculation. The project began as a doctoral thesis for which Sizer bravely sifted through the mountain of English-language prophetic theology from the 17th to the end of the 20th century and disposed its components into categories: amillennialist, postmillennialist, and premillennialist—the latter further divided into covenantal and dispensationalist, and, in the latter section of the book, apocalyptic-dispensationalist and political dispensationalist. Do not despair: there are charts.

Early in the book, Sizer outlines a sequence of political figures who carried the message of premillennial dispensationalism forward into a plan of action for establishing a Jewish state. The list breaks off with Balfour, and thus Sizer spares himself having to explain the connection between dispensationalism and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and their successors in the front ranks of political actors after 1918.

Among major misrepresentations of historical fact too numerous to list, let alone to deconstruct, I take the case of Arthur James Balfour, he of the Balfour Declaration, who stands in this book for the entire class of Christian Zionists. We learn that he was a man who was "brought up in an evangelical home and was sympathetic to Zionism because of the influence of dispensational teaching," hence naïve, uncultivated, weak-minded, his thinking processes dulled, like those of the rest of us Christian friends of Israel today, by low-brow pamphleteering and thus easily led by the Zionists. Balfour, dim bulb that he was, "regarded history as an instrument for carrying out a Divine Purpose." (Since when did this become a heresy?)

In truth, Lord Arthur James Balfour was a member of the most prominent political family of his day, noted for its achievements in science and the arts; he had a place at the very heart of British intellectual and artistic circles, was educated up to his ears, and was a widely published critical-academic philosopher, which earns him a long entry today in the Encylopedia of Philosophy. The quotient of dispensationalism in Balfour's intellectual makeup was zero.

In fact, of all the major Christian Zionists whom Sizer describes as standing at the end of the line whose head and fount is the dispensationalist Prophet, John Darby, only one, William Blackstone, was in fact a dispensationalist, or, for that matter, speculated at all about covenants and dispensations. (And how on earth did the notoriously agnostic Lord Palmerston get into this sequence of the mindless dupes of premillennial dispensationalism?)

Sizer's cartoon-Balfour stands for all the Christian Zionists jerked around by scheming Jews. Think of contemporary Christian Zionists, puppets of the Likud, cheering from the sidelines, never questioning, never doubting, as bulldozers destroy the vineyards and homes of Palestinians (as illustrated on the cover of the book), as illegal settlements are expanded towards the never-admitted but palpable goal of extending Israel's boundaries to include Damascus, Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad—perhaps, who knows, to China. Like the cartoon-Balfour, Christian visitors to Israel are swiftly taken captive by State-appointed tour-guides who drag everybody off to Yad Vashem (which exists "to represent Israel as a victim") and then to the Wailing Wall and Masada in order "to perpetuate a favorable image of Israel, stifle criticism and reinforce their claim to the land." Related to this red herring is the one about being in love with cosmic-death scenarios inspired by provocative passages in Daniel and Revelation. The debt which Sizer owes to the Chomsky-Finkelstein-Ateek school of the History of Israel is readily apparent.

Some of my best friends are premillennial dispensationalists, but we get along anyway. For a Christian Zionist of my ilk, a full and sufficient biblical mandate is in Genesis 12, with special reference to verse 3: "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the nations of the world shall be blessed"—a text which Sizer turns inside out on page 147.

It does not seem of any interest to Sizer to note that we stand today on historical ground very different from that of the age of the dispensationalist prophetic conferences. What we have to speculate about today is whether the being of Israel should be undone by human force. Christian Zionists are realists. They no longer attend conferences in which anyone proposes a theory about Israel's coming into existence. Their speculations about what is right and wrong, what should be done and not done, start from the premise that Israel is. Anti-Zionists, meanwhile, live in the same counterfactual world as do the Muslims who speculate about the legitimacy of Zion.

It is a common feature of anti-Christian Zionist literature that little interest is shown in the actual historical circumstances that brought the modern State of Israel into existence. In Sizer's book there is absolutely none, unless we count this oddity on page 148: "in 1948 the U.S. government was just as opposed to the founding of the State of Israel [as was] Britain." Is this revisionism, or what? It is Franklin Roosevelt attacking the Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor. Did none of that long list of people who are thanked on the Acknowledgements page twig to this incriminating bit of confusion? Does InterVarsityPress not have fact-checkers? This is embarrassing. It is, however, all we have to indicate that Sizer knows that once there was no State of Israel but now there is—somehow.

With this book, says Colin Chapman in his back-cover appreciation, "Sizer has thrown down the gauntlet in a way that demands a response from those who support the state of Israel for theological reasons." Well, anytime, anywhere.

Seismic Shock: When blogging meets policing

The BBC has an article about Seismic Shock's encounter with the police, in which he comes out as Joseph Wiseman, a student at Leeds University (see also his article at Harry's Place, Introducing Myself. It turns out that he has also been posting at Harry's Place as Yeze, identifying himself as a Messianic Jew. He writes:

I am a Christian strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, and I also support the continued existence of Israel. I attend an Anglican evangelical church occasionally, and also a neo-charismatic church more regularly. I hope for a just and peaceful solution to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict that provides security for Israelis and Palestinians alike, as well as justice for both Jewish and Arab refugees from 1948.

Jewishness is also a big part of my life, as I was born Jewish, I attend a Messianic fellowship, and will always identify as a Messianic Jew. I should stress that I am the third generation of my family to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. This is not some new-found faith for me, but a belief with deep roots. I have never been anything other than a believer in Christ.

I don't know much about Messianic Judaism - before reading Yeze's blog posts at Harry's Place, I had basically thought of it as a type of evangelical Christianity with a few Jewish trappings (like wearing a tallit or blowing the shofar), and had not thought of it as a form of Judaism. Now I'm more curious to know if I was correct. I have met some Christians in Ithaca who have gone to some kind of Messianic Jewish service, and I know that there are people who call themselves Messianic rabbis. I'll have to look into this further and see what they mean.

Reverend Stephen Sizer, Anti-Zionism, and Free Speech

Happily, in the United States, we have the First Amendment to prevent the police from showing up on the doorsteps of bloggers and telling us to take down our blogs on a dubious charge of harassment.

Unfortunately, this is not true in Britain, where the blogger Seismic Shock has been visited by the police on the complaint of a Reverend Stephen Sizer, a campaigner for the Palestinians and against Christian Zionism, who seems to be of the opinion that criticizing other people's actions and opinions on one's blog is a "campaign of harassement and intimidation."

Seismic reports on his visit from the police at Harry's Place. Go to his blog for further updates.

I've tried to read Sizer's blog and his other online writings, but since everything he pens is smothered in a thick flannel of ostentatious piety, it's rather hard to get through.

In this posting on Harry's Place, Seismic discusses Sizer's 2007 visit to Iran:

In October 2007, Stephen Sizer was invited to Iran by Zahra Mostafavi and Jawad Sharbaf of the Iranian institute NEDA, notorious for its links with Holocaust deniers. Not one to insult his hosts, Sizer’s main concern in Iran was to preach about the evils of Christian Zionism.

Faydra L. Shapiro of Wilfred Laurier University in Canada has written a slashing review of his latest book, Zion's Christian Soldiers. It appeared in the Review of Biblical Literature in November 2009 (published by the Society of Biblical Literature). I reprint it here for those interested in a scholarly approach to Sizer's anti-Zionist and anti-Judaic theology. I have emphasized the points I think most important.

In 2004 Stephen Sizer wrote Christian Zionism: Roadmap to Armageddon. Zion’s Christian Soldiers is Sizer’s attempt to reach a wider audience, by simplifying and shortening his previous work, taking out much of the detailed historical and political material to be found there. Zion’s Christian Soldiers is left with some scarce resources to make its point and is primarily a politically motivated theological critique of Christian Zionism.

In the introduction to Zion’s Christian Soldiers, the author sets out the basic terminology for his later discussion, most importantly contrasting covenantalism and dispensationalism. Sizer also takes the time to debunk what he refers to as the “three red herrings”: that dispensationalism is the only biblical literalism; the assertion that anti-Zionism is anti- Semitism; and the “straw man” of supersessionism. Sizer is careful in chapter 1 to emphasize that in his eyes the issue is not solely political; rather, “It is not an understatement to say that what is at stake is our understanding of the gospel, the centrality of the cross, the role of the church and the nature of our missionary mandate, not least, to the beloved Jewish people.” (19) In chapter 2 the author takes pains to distinguish what he deems a kind of acceptable biblical literalism from that of what he calls the “ultra-literalists.” The section on “five common mistakes made by ultraliteralists” is a brief but trenchant look at some of the creative reading techniques used to interpret biblical prophecies in light of current events.

Chapter 3 engages Sizer’s central question of the identity of God’s chosen people. For Sizer, the answer is unambiguously that believers of all nations are the real children of God and that it is thus “inappropriate to … claim the Jewish people have a separate relationship with God based on their ancestry or Mosaic Law” (71). Chapter 4 takes up the issue of “the Promised Land.” It is here that Sizer paints a utopic picture of the nature of the state following the return from exile in Babylonia, asserting that “The Promised Land under the old covenant was to be shared and inclusive. This is a biblical model many Christian Palestinians, who favor a one-state solution, long to see accepted within the modern State of Israel” (89)

Chapter 5 challenges Christian Zionist support for Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel, arguing that Christians ought not to focus on an exclusivist, physical city of Jerusalem; rather, their vision should be trained on the inclusive and eternal heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation. From here Sizer moves smoothly into a chapter sharply criticizing Christian Zionists who support rebuilding the temple. Chapter 8 examines the doctrine of the “rapture” and premillenialism generally as creating a “destructive culture of pessimism and fatalism in Western Christianity” (150). The book ends with a chapter of conclusion, followed by a reprint of a sermon by John Stott (Rector Emeritus of All Souls Church, London) entitled “The Place of Israel.”

Zion’s Christian Soldiers suffers from some significant weaknesses. Sizer not only overestimates the influence of Christian Zionism among American evangelicals and significantly overrates the importance of dispensationalism to their Zionism, but he utterly exaggerates the role of Christian Zionism in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and global politics more generally. Sizer’s suggestion in the introduction that Christian Zionism explains everything from the West’s concern about Iran’s development of nuclear capability to Arab terrorism in Britain and America (“despite our commitment to the rule of international law, democracy and human rights” [10]) is simply hyberbolic. On page 19 Sizer likewise asserts that “the movement [Christian Zionism] as a whole is nevertheless leading the West, and the church with it, into a confrontation with Islam,” as if were it not for evangelical support for Israel, the West and Islam would have nothing to disagree about. Statements like these reduce the author’s credibility to such a degree that any valuable parts to his argument are lost along the way.

Sizer clearly does not quite “get” Judaism as an entity that is neither “religion” nor “race.” This is clearly illustrated in his assertion that “The myth of racial purity is nothing new, nor is the desire to limit or exclude those deemed inferior. This is particularly so today when defining Israel, since national identity tends to be restricted to those who are Jewish by race” (46). Beyond the simplistic understandings of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism here, Sizer’s echo of Nazi terminology here is a cheap shot and utterly irresponsible. To paraphrase, Sizer is trying to argue here that, unlike contemporary Israel/Zionism, Israel of the Old Testament was not based in “racial exclusivity.” Yet such allegations of a program of “racial purity” in contemporary Israel are difficult to reconcile with the fact of a state with non-Jewish Arabs comprising some 20 percent of its population, together with the racially heterogeneous mix of Jews in Israel that includes Yemenite Jews, Russian Jews, Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and Chinese Jews.

Zion’s Christian Soldiers never pretends to be the work of objective scholarship and should not be thought of as such. The author has a very strong opinion that is anti-Israel and highly critical of Christians (or presumably anyone) who support Zionism. Sizer’s passionate anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism give this work a great deal of energy, yet they harm any scholarly aspirations this book might have. Sizer writes in the preface that the “fear of being labeled an anti-Semite is a powerful disincentive” (8) to challenging Christian support for Israel. Rather than simple anti-Semitism, his work expresses something more complex, deeper, and ultimately more terrifying—a sincere, theological, Christian anti-Judaism. In several instances the reader hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. Bizarre assertions such as “If we have come to know Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior, we will read the Hebrew Scriptures with Christian eyes—the way Jesus and his apostles did” (27) or “The challenge the apostles faced was proclaiming this good news among the very people [Jews?] who had crucified Christ” (110) speak for themselves and make it difficult to take the work seriously as a contribution to scholarship.

What does it mean to be pro-Palestinian?

Harry's Place has two excellent articles just posted on the recent Gaza Freedom March. The first article covers the Viva Palestina delegation, led by George Galloway, which was finally allowed into Gaza by the Egyptian authorities. They were greeted by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Amira Hass also has an interesting article on the reception that the Gaza Freedom March gained in Gaza - it's apparent from her report that Hamas' grip is tightening in Gaza. The protesters who had contacts with non-Hamas Gazan groups were hindered in their attempts to make contact and stay with members of those group (like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). She writes:

The international organizers of the march coordinated it with civil society, various non-governmental organizations, which were also supposed to involve the Popular Committee to Break the Siege, a semi-official organization affiliated with Hamas. Many European activists have long-standing connections with left-wing organizations in the Gaza Strip. Those organizations, especially the relatively large Popular Front, had organized lodging for several hundred guests in private homes. When the Hamas government heard this, it prohibited the move. "For security reasons." What else?

Also "for security reasons," apparently, on Thursday morning, the activists discovered a cordon of stern-faced, tough Hamas security men blocking them from leaving the hotel (which is owned by Hamas). The security officials accompanied the activists as they visited homes and organizations.

During the march itself, when Gazans watching from the sidelines tried to speak with the visitors, the stern-faced security men blocked them. "They didn't want us to speak to ordinary people," one woman concluded...

In meetings without the security men, several activists got the impression that non-Hamas residents live in fear, and are afraid to speak or identify themselves by name. "Now I understand that the call for 'Freedom for Gaza' has another meaning," one young man told me.

Perhaps the foreign activists will also gain some understanding of why the Israelis don't trust Hamas and why they have blockaded Gaza to try to bring down the Hamas regime.

The second Harry's Place article is about Hedy Epstein, an 85 year old German Jewish refugee who left Germany in 1939 with the Kindertransport for Britain. Her parents were murdered in Auschwitz. She has now become involved with the Free Gaza Movement and as the article says, has become an "icon" of that movement. She went on a hunger strike in Cairo. She is also apparently on the advisory board for Deir Yassin Remembered, which is led by Daniel McGowan and Paul Eisen. McGowan claims to be an advocate of the Palestinian cause, but his primary focus now seems to be on denying that the Holocaust occurred. It seems very odd to me that Hedy Epstein would be willing to work with a man who denies the truth of how her parents were murdered.

Perusing the DYR website, I discover a vile article, just posted by Henry Herskovitz (another DYR advisory board member). He finds Code Pink insufficiently radical because they won't go along with his assertion that it's necessary to "focus their attentions on the underlying cancer (Zionism, if you prefer)." Does Hedy Epstein really go along with the hideous anti-semitic stance of this organization that she has lent her name to?

6 killed at Coptic church in Nag Hammadi, Egypt

This is a shocking attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt: Gunmen kill 6 at Egypt church after Coptic Christmas Mass.

Gunmen killed at least six people in a drive-by shooting outside a church in southern Egypt as worshippers left a midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas, Egyptian security and hospital officials said overnight Wednesday.

The attack took place in the town of Nag Hamadi in Qena province, about 64 kilometers from the famous ancient ruins of Luxor.

A local security official said two gunmen drove by a group as they were walking out of the Virgin Mary church and sprayed gunfire randomly into the crowd. The official said at least six people had died and an administrator at the hospital where the casualties were taken said seven were dead.

This attack apparently was not unexpected. Al-Jazeera reports:

The interior ministry said the attack in the town of Nag Hammadi in southern Qena province, located about 65km from the famous ancient ruins of Luxor, was suspected to be in retaliation for the November rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man in the same town.

The ministry said witnesses had identified the lead attacker.

Bishop Kirollos of the Nag Hammadi Diocese told The Associated Press that six male churchgoers and one security guard were killed.

He said he was concerned about violence on the eve of Coptic Christmas, which falls on Thursday, because of previous threats following the rape of the 12-year-old girl in November.

'Your turn'

He got a message on his mobile phone saying: "It is your turn."

"I did nothing with it. My faithful were also receiving threats in the streets, some shouting at them: 'We will not let you have festivities'," he said.

Kirollos said he ended his Christmas Mass one hour earlier than normal because of the threats.

He said Muslim residents of Nag Hammadi and neighbouring villages had rioted for five days in November and torched and damaged Christian properties in the area after the rape.

"For days, I had expected something to happen on Christmas day," said the bishop, adding that police had told him to stay home for fear of further violence.

The bishop said he had an idea of who the attackers were, calling them "Muslim radicals".

"It is all religious now. This is a religious war about how they can finish off the Christians in Egypt," he said.

Christians, mostly Coptic, account for about 10 per cent of Egypt's 83-million predominantly Muslim population.

Update - today Coptic Christians rioted in Nag Hammadi during the funeral procession.

Thousands clashed with police during a funeral procession Thursday for six of seven people killed in an attack on churchgoers leaving a midnight Mass for Coptic Christians, security officials said.

Throughout the day, protesters in the southern town of Nag Hamadi pelted police with rocks and damaged cars and stores.

Early in the day, they smashed ambulances outside a hospital in frustration over delays in turning over the bodies for burial. A security official said police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.

The riots resumed after the burial services, with angry Copts smashing shop windows, chasing Muslims off the streets and bringing down street light poles. The riots continued into the late afternoon.

An important fact mentioned in the above article about the relations between Muslims and Copts in Egypt:

As Islamic conservatism gains ground, Egypt's Christians have increasingly complained about discrimination by the Muslim majority. Coptic Christians are limited in where they can build churches and must obtain government approval before expanding existing facilities. The government insists Christians enjoy the same rights as Muslims.

The requirement that Coptic Christians must seek government approval for expanding churches seems to be a milder version of the old rules of the dhimma, which forbade Christians or Jews from building new houses or worship or repairing existing ones.

As Jim Davila commented yesterday in Paleojudaica, Nag Hammadi is where the ancient Coptic Gnostic library was discovered in the 1940s.

President Obama at work

I just discovered that the White House has a Flickr page (through reading some really unhinged right wing blogs about photos of the president posted on Flickr). I like this one, which shows him on the phone talking about the December 25 attempted bombing of the plane to Detroit.

Why not a secular binational state in Israel/Palestine?

Norm has just expressed in an exemplary and lucid fashion the two possibilities when considering whether there should be a "one-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: normblog: The one-state dissolution.

The one state solution can occur in two ways: 1) with the consent of the majority of Israelis and a majority of Palestinians. If this consent has been reached, how can anyone else object to it? It would be the same as if any two nations decided to become one (for example, if the majority of Canadians and the majority of U.S. citizens decided to become the United States of Canada - not that this is going to happen!).

It can also occur 2) without the consent of either or both populations - in other words, forced upon Palestinians and Israelis. As Norm says, if this is done without the consent of either party, it would deny that party the right of national self-determination. He asks, "are the democratic one-state solution converts merely sponsoring in a more hand-wringing way what others put less tactfully in their rhetoric - namely, the forcible destruction of Israel?"

To be fair to the advocates of the one-state solution, it seems to me that they are actually pointing to a real problem that needs to be solved. Under the current state of affairs, Israel is in control of pre-1967 Israel, the West Bank, and the Golan. (I'm not including Gaza because there are neither Israeli soldiers nor settlers within the Gaza Strip anymore, and Israel evinces no desire to reoccupy the Strip, although I think it is fair to say that in a larger sense Israel still controls Gaza because of its ability to stop people or goods from moving from Israel to Gaza and because of its military power over Gaza; one could say the same thing of Egypt, although opponents of the "siege of Gaza" rarely do, because they prefer to blame Israel for everything).

Palestinians living in the West Bank are living under a military occupation which limits their movements and imposes many hardships on them (for example, Israel has confiscated Palestinian land for various purposes, including building settlements). Israeli settlers in the West Bank have a privileged position over Palestinians (for example, when they are permitted to drive on roads forbidden to Palestinians, although the Israel Supreme Court has just ruled that Route 443, one of the two main roads leading out of Jerusalem, which in part goes through the West Bank, must be open to Palestinian as well as Israeli drivers). Settlers are governed by Israeli law, Palestinians in the West Bank by military occupation rules. Legally, they have a different, unequal status.

How to equalize the status of Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli settlers in the West Bank? How to make sure that Palestinians are getting their civil and human rights? One way is a two-state solution - a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that gives Palestinians the ability to govern themselves and make decisions about their own lives, unhindered by the Israeli military. There are a number of proposals of how to do this which would result in uprooting some, but not all, of the settlements from the West Bank, and in return giving the Palestinians land that is in Israeli proper to compensate them for the loss of land. This is the solution that I support.

Another way to ensure that Palestinians are given equal rights with Israelis is for Israel to annex the West Bank. This would mean that no settlements would have to be uprooted. It would also mean that West Bank Palestinians would now live under Israel civil, not military law. (This is what Israel did in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights - in both places Israel offered Israeli citizenship to the residents; very few Jerusalem Palestinians accepted citizenship, and I am not sure about the Druse on the Golan Heights). It would seem reasonable to me that if Israel did this, West Bank Palestinians should become Israeli citizens, with all the rights of Israeli citizens, including the right to organize political parties and run for Knesset (if Israel didn't do this, then it would also seem reasonable to accuse it of apartheid policies). If Israel did this, the Israeli Arab population would increase greatly and they would become a much more powerful political force within Israel. According to a Palestinian census of 2007, there are about 2,345,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank (this includes East Jerusalem).

According to Wikipedia (Demographics of Israel):

The State of Israel had population of approximately 7,465,500 inhabitants as of September 2009.^[1] 75.5% of them were Jewish (about 5,634,300 individuals), 20.3% were Arabs (About 1,513,200 inhabitants), while the remaining 4.2% (about 318,000 individuals) were defined as "others" (family members of Jewish immigrants whom were not registered at the Interior Ministry as Jews, non-Arab Christians, non-Arab Muslims and residents whom do not have a religious classification).

The total figures thus break down to:

3,858,200 Arabs (39.3%)
5,634,300 Jews (57.4%
318,000 Others (3.2%)

9,810,500 Total

If we add the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip into the mix, this adds about 1.4 million Palestinians. The resulting figures are:

5,258,200 Arabs (46.9%)
5,634,300 Jews (50.2%)
318,000 Others (2.8%)

11,210,500 Total

If Israel annexed all of Palestine west of the Jordan River, the Arab and Jewish populations of the state of Israel would be almost evenly split, with a slight advantage to the Jewish population. Given the higher Palestinian birthrate, this would quickly be reversed (unless it has already, since the Palestinian figures are a couple of years old). If Israel gave all of the new Palestinian citizens equal rights to vote and run parties for the Knesset, this would quickly mean that if the Palestinian parties were able to organize themselves in a united fashion, they could have a majority in the Knesset, and make decisions to change the fundamental nature of the state of Israel. For example, they could decide to grant all Palestinians the "right of return" to Palestine. They could decide to annul the Jewish "right of return" to Israel.

Advocates of the one-state solution like Alice Walker would not have a problem with this solution. Probably many Palestinians would not have a problem with this solution. But how would Israeli Jews think?

From my knowledge of Israeli Jews, almost none of them would back this solution, for a variety of reasons. One big one, of course, is the principle of self-determination which is an essential part of Zionist ideology. Israeli Jews want to live in a democratic, Jewish majority state that respects Jewish traditions (while at the same time being a secular state) and gives democratic rights to the Arab minority. Another reason is fear of what would happen to Jews in such a binational state. Would Jews be treated fairly if there were an Arab majority? What if an important faction in the new Arab-majority Knesset coalition were Hamas, which advocates an Islamic state in Palestine and espouses openly anti-semitic beliefs and policies in its charter?

It is hard to imagine how such a transition to a binational state in all of Palestine could be managed peacefully with the end result that the rights of both Jews and Arabs would be respected in the new state. I doubt that Israeli Jews would just stand by and let the new state do things like abrogate the law of return for Jews and promulgate it for Palestinians. I doubt that Hamas would wait to gain political rights through the ballot box, given their actions in Gaza after they won the Palestinian elections.

The establishment of a binational state in all of Palestine would be a recipe for immediate civil war between Jews and Palestinians. It would not lead to the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs in one state. What Alice Walker and the good ladies of Code Pink advocate is a utopian pipe dream. For all of their proclamations that they love peace, this would lead to a savage war in which many thousands of people would be killed.

However difficult it will be to arrive at two states living side-by-side in peace, one Palestinian, one Israeli, it is far more difficult at this time in history to arrive at one peaceful binational state.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all my friends and readers!

I went to a very pleasant little New Year's party and at precisely midnight watched the year change on the Ithaca College towers. Two of the Ithaca College dormitories are 14 storey towers. They can be seen clearly from much of Ithaca and the surrounding area because IC is nearly at the top of South Hill (Cornell is on East Hill; there's also a West Hill; there's no North Hill because Lake Cayuga is to the north). In the days before New Year's, volunteers from the college turn on lights in the appropriate rooms of the last two digits of the year that is ending. Exactly at the stroke of midnight on December 31, they change over from the old year to the new year. This year was pretty challenging, since the 0 had to change to a 1 instantaneously, and the 9 to a 0 - they must have needed quite a few volunteers to flip the switches all in unison.

My friends live in Belle Sherman (a neighborhood of Ithaca close to the Cornell campus) and have a clear view of the IC towers, especially in the winter when the trees have lost their leaves. We went out at about two minutes to midnight, watched as the date was changed, listened to the happy new year cries and firecrackers in the neighborhood, and then went inside.

Mike King in Ithaca took a photo of the towers a couple of days ago and put it on his Flickr account - this gives you some idea of what 09 looked like. He writes: "Ithaca College has a cool tradition where they light up these two towers with the year... and then after New Year's they switch to the new year. From our house on South Hill we have a great view of it!"

According to Frankie14850, who posted a similar photo on Flickr in January of 2009 (when the date had just changed), this is the history of the use of the towers for this purpose:

Every New Year's Eve Ithaca College performs a ceremonial changing of the calendar year's numerals using 300-watt lights in designated rooms inside the two 14-story residential towers. The towers on the South Hill campus have a commanding view of the city -- this is shot from about a mile or more away from Sunset Park on Ithaca's northeast side. According to IC media, the light show tradition was started in 1965, a concept that owes its creation to the late Petrus Van de Velde, a custodial supervisor at the college. The 100-foot-high numerals are illumined several days before the New York and changed at the stroke of midnight by volunteer staffers.

One of the things we talked about at the party was the attention being paid to the fact that 2009 was the "last year of the decade" (something that frankly had not occurred to most of us until the press started reminiscing about the last ten years). I think one reason that I hadn't realized we were about to enter a new decade was because of all the confusion about whether 2000 was the first year of the new millennium, or 2001. And if 2001 was the first year, wouldn't that make 2009 simply the ninth year, so that a decade of the first millennium won't have passed until the end of 2010? (Whatever, I really don't care).

(photo from the New York Times - It's Always the End of the World as We Know it - article on Y2K hysteria).

So that reminded us about the infamous Y2K hubbub in 1999 that scared everyone. We all told our stories of Near Year's 1999/2000, how in nothing happened in any of the places where we spent that supposedly dramatic transition. I was in Jerusalem then for a visit over the winter break between semesters. My friend A. and I stayed up together. She had prepared for the possible Y2K disaster by buying lots of big water bottles. We waited to see if the electricity would go off, the phones would stop working, etc. at 12:00:01 on January 1, but nothing happened except for a lot of fireworks going off in the Arab part of Jerusalem. (There were no official fireworks in the Jewish part of the city since January 1 is not the Jewish New Year). We drank some of the water and went to sleep.