Anti-semitic editorial from the Duke University student newspaper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1008MIDEASTmap

1008MIDEASTmap
Originally uploaded by reb-lesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTC

WTC
Originally uploaded by reb-lesses.

In commemoration.

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

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

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

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

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