Unplugged Mike

New Letter in The Jewish Star

2011-03-03T16:20:00.000-05:00

David Nesenoff is the new publisher of The Jewish Star, and like most people associated with the Star, he appears to be somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. A couple of weeks ago, he wrote a piece about being a former liberal that can be found here. It was called Liberals Anonymous, like Alcoholics Anonymous.

So I responded with the following:

To the editor:

"Hi, my name is Heshy. I'm a Republiholic. For years now, I've thought being Republican is synonomous with being Orthodox. For years, I thought supporting Republicans who outdid each other to make the most right-wing political statements on Israel was the only thing that mattered for Orthodox Jews in American politics, whether their rhetoric provided any real benefit for Israelis or not. While doing so, I helped turn Israel into a partisan issue in America by claiming, falsely, that the Democratic Party was not pro-Israel.

I spouted mantra about fiscal responsibility while supporting tax cuts for the wealthy most economists opposed as irresponsible. I voted for people who opposed luxuries like clean water. And when it came to social justice, an American value that has parallels in my own tradition, I stood up with Glenn Beck and called it communism. I called lots of things communism - any attempt to provide a health care option to those who couldn't afford it, any legislation with the word "environmental" in it, and of course, any attempt by government to increase taxes. And when non-partisan bodies like the Congressional Budget Office said that the health care reform would save the country money, I simply told bald-faced lies about death panels, confusing the public and creating unnecessary panic. My party lied so often that by the time the bill came up for a vote, the American people could not tell the lies from the truth. Some celebrate the disputatious nature of Judaism and call themselves free-thinkers; I celebrated the bombast of Rush Limbaugh and called myself "dittohead."

When it came to military issues, I defamed my fellow Americans who disagreed with me on controversial policies like the war in Iraq by accusing them of being insufficiently patriotic.

When it came to abortion issues, I became an honorary Southern Baptist by adopting their stance on abortion, even though the legislation they favor conflicts with my own tradition that favors the life of the mother over the life of the unborn child should the mother's life be in danger.

When it came to the right of Americans to worship freely, I favored it, unless, of course, they were Muslims in New York.

In the American Orthodox world, being politically right-wing is often confused with being Jewish. And support for Israel is often confused with validating each and every stupid thing Israel does, from celebrating whackjobs in Hebron who have a habit of throwing rocks at Arab kids on their way to school to promoting the philosophy of Avigdor Lieberman, a crude boor of a man whom most of the Israeli government tries hard to ignore. Being pro-Israel is not enough; we have to be substantially to the right of Israel, because right is right and anything else requires brainpower.

Someone, please, help me."

This is what they published:

"To the editor:
[RE Liberals anonymous, Feb. 18] “Hi, my name is Heshy. I’m a Republiholic. For years now, I’ve thought being Republican is synonomous with being Orthodox. I thought supporting Republicans, who outdid each other to make the most right-wing political statements on Israel, was the only thing that mattered for Orthodox Jews, whether their rhetoric provided any real benefit for Israelis or not. While doing so, I helped turn Israel into a partisan issue in America by claiming, falsely, that the Democratic Party was not pro-Israel.
In the American Orthodox world, being politically right-wing is often confused with being Jewish. Being pro-Israel is not enough; we have to be substantially to the right of Israel, because right is right and anything else requires brainpower.
Someone, please, help me.”

Gotta say, I'm not thrilled with the cuts. I think the original is way better.

For those with a poor sense of history

2010-07-06T22:53:00.001-04:00

Thaddeus Russell's piece on Daily Beast has, predictably, generated considerable comment, particularly in the anti-Zionist community. Russell makes a simple, unoriginal argument: The US is less safe because of Israel existence because there were no Arab terror attacks against America before 1968. Israel makes Jews less safe for the same reason. Perhaps the only unusual part is the silly argument that Bobby Kennedy's assassination was Israel's fault because Sirhan Sirhan was Palestinian.

In a predictable overstatement, Mondoweiss has dubbed this a landmark piece.

It's difficult to read arguments that claim that Jews are worse off for Israel's existence, especially when that argument is dated to 1948. It is the ultimate in historical myopia. In fact, there is no question at all that Jews are infinitely safer since Israel came into existence. Before 1948, Jewish history was a series of pogroms periodically carried out by Europeans and Russians culminating in the Holocaust. Since 1948, save for societal discrimination behind the Iron Curtain, Jews have enjoyed success and prosperity in the United States and Europe, widespread physical attacks have greatly diminished, and Jews have the security of knowing that should this change, there is a place in the world where Jews do not live as a subjected minority, but as a majority, a majority that exercises power over its own destiny. Since 1968, antisemitic attitudes in America have dropped precipitously according to virtually every poll.

It is also historically fanciful to argue that Arab terrorism directed against Americans has much to do with Israel. Yes, Sirhan Sirhan was a mentally unstable Palestinian who shot Bobby Kennedy. But all of the attacks against Americans since then have been the work of Al-Qaeda, and the presence of American troops in the Saudi Peninsula is thought to far outweigh any policy of Israel's.

Moreover, to accept such an analysis is to deflect blame from the parties responsible - Middle Eastern Arabs who have not suffered in any way because of Israel's policy - and blame another victim of those same people. It is to buy into a self-serving myth in the Arab world, namely that Israel is responsible for the many ills that plague the Arab world. It ignores the widespread use of terrorism by Muslims against other Muslims in places like Egypt and Pakistan and the overall decrepit state of human rights in the Islamic world.

New letter in the Jewish Press on gay marriage

2009-06-06T16:14:00.003-04:00

A new letter in the Jewish Press. This one is on gay marriage and a response to an article by Rabbi Yair Hoffman. You can find a link to Hoffman's original article below. I am also including Rabbi Hoffman's response to me, which appears directly after my letter.

My letter may also be found here:

Rabbi Hoffman's original article may be found here:

Discredited Arguments

Rabbi Hoffman offers several tired and discredited arguments against the legalization of same-sex marriage.

In his overheated language, "undermining an institution that has been designed by history and Natural Law to vouchsafe the future of mankind can be compared to unleashing chemical and nuclear hazards with the potential to undermine mankind's future."

He gives no facts to support this claim. There is no evidence that allowing gay couples to marry keeps straight couples from doing so. There is no evidence that children of gay couples are worse off than children of straight couples. Little if any evidence exists that children raised by gay parents are more or less likely to be gay. There is no evidence that people are having fewer children because of gay people.

There is, however, evidence that many children who today have no home might have one if gay couples could adopt them and evidence that gay couples who want children use the avenues of adoption, in-vitro fertilization, and surrogacy to have them.

Hoffman argues that legalization of gay marriage will lead to legalization of incest and bestiality. Suffice to say, Hoffman presents no evidence of a constituency advocating for either one.

It is true that having a mother and father is optimal. But using this argument against gay marriage is itself dangerous. In the first place, little evidence exists to show that children raised by gay couples do not develop normally. In the second place, prejudging the suitable environment for a child based on "normal psychosocial development" suggests that the government should be quick to interfere in all circumstances that are less than optimal.

Why shouldn't the government remove children from a home where the parents are unemployed or poor, since studies show that rich children do better in school than poor children? Why should single parenthood or divorce be legal? Should one's personal beliefs be examined before one is permitted to reproduce?

Yes, as Hoffman points out, we certainly give homeowners a tax break based on the belief that home ownership brings more social stability than a "transient lifestyle." We also have a tax credit for those who have children. But we have not outlawed the renting of apartments, and we have not forced childless parents to divorce.

Finally, Hoffman reveals his true purpose: "[R]edefining the parameters of marriage amounts to a subtle and insidious attempt to undermine the beliefs and principles of those who uphold the sanctity of Natural Law. It is an insult to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and practitioners of other religions in this country."

Legalizing gay marriage places no restriction on my ability to be a heterosexual or my ability to reproduce. Neither does it prejudice anyone's ability to argue that heterosexual marriage is superior. If anything, it strengthens the institution of marriage, which has been eroded by high divorce rates, the frenetic, self-destructive pace of modern life, and the narcissism that pervades our society these days.

As a member of a religious minority, I believe legislating personal religious viewpoints can only hurt us and our open society. Our fight against Islamic extremism is in part a fight against that kind of thinking, where so-called religious insult serves as justification for curtailing civil liberties and in extreme cases, organized violence.

Rabbi Hoffman should relax. Legalization of gay marriage is not going change things, and humankind will be just fine.

Michael Brenner

Woodmere, NY

Rabbi Hoffman Responds: I would like to thank Rabbi Shapiro and Mr. Brenner for reading and responding. This is an issue that must be taken seriously.

Mr. Brenner describes the arguments offered against redefining marriage as "tired and discredited."

To reiterate the first argument: There is such a thing as Natural Law, which is why the founding fathers established this country as one nation under God. This is neither tired nor discredited. It is not overheated to say that redefining marriage undermines this institution - the fact that the nuclear family has all but disappeared in entire neighborhoods has contributed to a deterioration of society in terms of education and crime. This too is neither tired nor discredited.

As for my second argument - "the slippery slope" where other marriages will become legalized - is Mr. Brenner really saying there is no constituency for multiple wives? There are tens of thousands of people in this country who have multiple wives and they do want to legalize it. From schismatic Mormons to certain Islamic groups, there are strong voices that wish to legalize second and third wives.

On the third argument - that having a mother and father is optimal for psychosocial reasons and that it is in the state's interest to preserve the traditional definition - it would seem the statistics comparing children from no-fault divorce states to states with no such laws prove the point. No amount of dressing up and role-playing will replace the essential fact that a child needs a mommy and a daddy.

It's interesting that Mr. Brenner claims my true purpose is revealed in argument number four. My main point actually lies in the first argument. The Midrash tells us that no society ever went so far as to redefine marriage. My op-ed merely pointed out that the motivation behind the movement to redefine marriage is, quite likely, to "stick it" to those religions that consider the practice of homosexuality an abomination.

Further, no one is advocating a justification for "curtailing civil liberties." Let us not fool ourselves. There are no civil liberties being argued for in this legislation. What is being argued for is the right to hijack terms and institutions.

Like Mr. Brenner, I believe legislating personal religious viewpoints can only hurt us and our open society. But Natural Law has historically been and still is at the very heart of our society. And there is a higher moral power that has defined the institution of marriage. We live in a free country, and we all value those freedoms. But let us not make the mistake of confusing freedom with the wanton hijacking of terminologies.

Barack Obama and the Distortive Polemicist, Daniel Pipes

2008-06-29T13:19:00.008-04:00

In my research on Barack Obama, I came across an article written in late April by Daniel Pipes, a "scholar of Islam" who has been embraced by all too many people in the Jewish community who cannot tell the difference between a reliable source and a deceitful polemicist who engages in fearmongering. The article appears in on the Jewish World Review website. Perhaps my deconstruction of this article will prove once and for all that Pipes is not a man any of us should take seriously or use as a source and that Barack Obama is not a Muslim. Pipes' screed is a breathtakingly transparent and brazen example of his fundamental dishonesty, because all one need do is click on the links he himself includes to see just how misleading he is.

The article is entitled "Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood", though nowhere in the article, which is one-hundred percent innuendo, does Mr. Pipes ever actually prove or even bring evidence that Obama had a "Muslim childhood." I start with the second paragraph, first sentence. Pipes is in red. The extended quotes I have included from his sources are in blue.

Obama asserted in December, "I've always been a Christian," and he has adamantly denied ever having been a Muslim. "The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country [Kenya]. But I've never practiced Islam."

The source for this sentence is an MSNBC web article covering a campaign-stop conversation Obama had with a group of women over pumpkin pie. His basis for claiming that he had always been a Christian was sound; his mother is Christian, he was raised by his mother, and the only religion he has ever practiced was Christianity. His "adamant denial" (Pipes' words) consists of an assertion that he had never practiced Islam. He supports this assertion first by telling the women that his father, who was not involved in his upbringing, was not actually a practicing Muslim, and that during the time he lived in Indonesia, a Muslim country, he himself did not actually practice Islam.

In February, he claimed: "I have never been a Muslim. … other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child [Indonesia, 1967-71] I have very little connection to the Islamic religion.

Pipes' source for this quote is the rough transcript of a closed-door meeting Obama held with Jewish leaders in Cleveland. Of course, no self-respecting writer or journalist would quote from a source like this, but the quote as excerpted by Pipes omits that which Obama said which is hurtful to Pipes' case. Here's Obama's entire quote (which is broken up and contains misspelling because it's a rough transcript from a blog):

If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim. We had to send CNN to look at the school that I attended in Indonesia where kids were wearing short pants and listening to ipods to indicate that this was not a madrassa but was a secular school in Indonesia. Where I attended for two year prior to coming back to Hawaii. If you look at Nicholas Kristof’s article today it gives you an indication of where I got my name. My grandfather who was Kenyan converted to Christianity then converted to Islam, my father never practiced he was basically agnostic and so other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child I have very little connection to the Islamic religion.

Seems a little more than a simple assertion when Obama mentions that CNN (as have many others) investigated the so-called Islamic school in Indonesia Obama attended as a young child and found that it was in fact a secular school for wealthy middle and upper-class students of several faiths. It's easy to make an argument when you ignore the facts presented by your opponent.

In the next paragraph, Pipes states his thesis:

"Always" and "never" leave little room for equivocation. But many biographical facts, culled mainly from the American press, suggest that, when growing up, the Democratic candidate for president both saw himself and was seen as a Muslim.

As we'll find out, none of the article Pipes culls support this view.

Pipes begins his list:

Obama's Kenyan birth father: In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936-1982) was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named "Hussein".

The first sentence is, of course, a true statement. It would also be true to say that Barack Obama was Jewish if his mother had been Jewish, because in Judaism, religion passes from the mother to the child. But if Barack's Jewish mother had abandoned the family when Barack was a year old, and he was raised by his Christian father, and attended Church every Sunday, would it be fair to say that Barack was Jewish in the context of proving the he was distorting his background by claiming that he was not, and never was, a practicing Jew? It would, of course, be a complete distortion.

The second sentence is indefensible, because Pipes cannot prove that no non-Muslim child is named Hussein. Pipes is simply suggesting here that the fact Obama has the middle name Hussein is proof of his Muslim identity. But let's give Pipes the benefit of the doubt and assume that what he really meant to say is that Hussein is a Muslim name and that it is uncommon for non-Muslims to have it. I think Barack "Barry" Obama agrees. That's why Obama, a Christian, doesn't (and never did) use his given middle name. Those who do insist on using it have only one reason for doing so: Playing on the public's post-9/11 fear of Muslims by suggesting that Obama is a Muslim, because as Pipes says, only Muslims are called Hussein.

Next assertion:

Obama's Indonesian family: His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: "My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim."

The quotes are, once again, highly selective and highly misleading. Here is the entire paragraph in which Ms. Soetoro-Ng's quote appears, along with the sentence that precedes it:

His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.

“My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where the religious education was cursory. When he was 10, he returned to his birthplace of Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attended a preparatory school with a Christian affiliation but little religious instruction.

So, in fact, we learn that Lolo Soetoro was a "nominal Muslim" who was peckish for pig, and that Obama actually attended first a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where religious education was cursory. That's the elite secular one we learned about above. And as far as the "whole family being Muslim", it's certainly a fair description of Mr. Soetoro's family because Mr. Soetoro was a Muslim, albeit a nominal one who ate haram.

Pipes offers a second assertion to support his point about Obama's Indonesian family:

An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that "All the relatives of Barry's father were very devout Muslims."

Three questions should be asked by any inquiring mind who wishes to hold this assertion up to scrutiny: What does it mean? Who is Rony Amir? Are there others who knew Obama in Indonesia who say the same? And what is the Banjarmasin Post?

Let's take the last part first. The Banjarmasin Post is an Indonesian daily newspaper in Banjarmasin. It's in Indonesian. So anyone who wants to read the article must run it through a translator. If you do that, you'll find that the article basically says this: I played with Barry when he was little kid in Indonesia. (Nowhere does Rony Amir refer to the middle name "Hussein", by the way.) His family was Muslim. He was a lot of fun as a kid, he's a great guy now, and we're all proud of him.

Is Rony Amir considered an authority on Barack Obama? Apparently not, because a Google search of his name shows that Mr. Pipes is the only one to have quoted him, and all other cites on the internet are derivative quotes of Pipes' article.

Most importantly: Do others who knew Barack Obama during his time in Indonesia support Amir's view? As we'll see in the sources for Mr. Pipes' next bullet point, the answer is no.

Mr. Pipes next suggests that Mr. Obama's Catholic school attendance is not dispositive of his non-Muslimness:

The Catholic school: Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that "documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim" while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was "listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school." A blogger who goes by "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" found that "Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name 'Barry Soetoro' serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. … Barry's religion was listed as Islam."

Documents listed Obama as a Muslim when he attended Catholic school. He must have been a Muslim, then, right? Apparently not, accord to that very same Chicago Tribune article quoted by Pipes, which is actually entitled, "History of Schooling Distorted." As the very same Kim Barker reports, during the three years Obama attended Catholic School in Indonesia, "he prayed as a Catholic." So then why is he listed as a Muslim on the school's registration forms?

At the time, the school most likely registered children based on the religion of their fathers, said Darmawan, Obama's former teacher. Because Soetoro was a Muslim, Obama was listed as a Muslim, she said.

The enrollment form from the Catholic school, which has been cited as evidence that Obama was a Muslim in Indonesia, also was rife with errors. It listed Obama as an Indonesian, listed his previous school incorrectly and failed to list his mother, Ann, at all.

So Daniel Pipes' Catholic school proof that Obama was a Muslim while in Indonesia consists of an enrollment form that also lists Obama as Indonesian, lists his previous school incorrectly, and omits the name of his mother entirely. Obama former teacher, a reliable source on matter of enrollment, offer a perfectly plausible explanation: Since the school registered children according to the religion of the father, Obama's religion was listed as Muslim.

And what of the claim that Obama was a Muslim according to Rony Amir? Is it shared by others who knew Obama at that time? Barker informs us of her journalistic work:

Interviews with dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia, despite being listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school, Strada Asisia, where he attended 1st through 3rd grades.

Hmm, interviews with dozens of classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends versus some guy name Rony Amir. I'll take the dozens of classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends as my source.

Next:

The public school: Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Indonesians familiar with Obama when he lived in Jakarta that he "was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended." Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star visited the Jakarta public school Obama attended and found that "Three of his teachers have said he was enrolled as a Muslim." Although Siddiqui cautions that "With the school records missing, eaten by bugs, one has to rely on people's shifting memories," he cites only one retired teacher, Tine Hahiyari, retracting her earlier certainty about Obama's being registered as a Muslim.

Still with the registration. Pipes is so hung up on the registration that he actually misses evidence that helps his case in the LA Times article, which quotes Obama's first grade teacher as claiming that Obama prayed in the Catholic way but was also a Muslim, whatever that meant for a first-grader, and however someone can p.

Next up:

Koran class: In his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, Obama relates how he got into trouble for making faces during Koranic studies, thereby revealing he was a Muslim, for Indonesian students in his day attended religious classes according to their faith. Indeed, Obama still retains knowledge from that class: Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, reports that Obama "recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them [to Kristof] with a first-rate accent."

So everyone who studies the Koran is a Muslim, right? I assume Daniel Pipes and others who have quoted the Koran in their articles have studied it to some extent. That must make them Muslims too. Except that it turns out that Obama was placed in Koran class because of his faith, which, you guessed it, came from his registration card. And apparently, he actually learned the Adhan while in Indonesia and can still recite it today. The Adhan is something he would have heard over a loudspeaker five times a day living in a Muslim neighborhood.

He'd have to have a pretty bad memory not to remember something he heard five times a day for four years.

Pipes draws on some of his past sources to make his next bullet point:

Mosque attendance: Obama's half-sister recalled that the family attended the mosque "for big communal events." Watson learned from childhood friends that "Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque." Barker found that "Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers." One Indonesia friend, Zulfin Adi, states that Obama "was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong" (a garment associated with Muslims).

It's back to the selective quoting again. It is hardly a surprise that the Soetoro family would attend the local mosque in a Muslim country for communal events. But did they attend regularly for prayer?

Here's what the LA Times article actually said:

Obama's younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only "for big communal events," not every Friday. (emphasis mine)

Sound like another distortion. Indeed, the article quotes Maya Soetoro-Ng more pointedly later on:

In her statement, Obama's sister, who was born after the family moved to Indonesia, said: "My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community. He never went to prayer services except for big communal events. I am absolutely certain that my father did not go to services every Friday. He was not religious."

Pipes only bothers to quote the part about the communal events and of course, makes it seem as though he has proved that Obama attended the mosque when no one had denied that kind ofattendance in the first place. In fact, Obama said that he sometimes attended the local mosque for community events. This decontextualization serves to obfuscate the truth. Pipes claims that Obama occasionally went with his father to the mosque. That would be pretty typical for a young child whose father went to the mosque for the occasional big communal event.

What about that friend, Zulfin Adi? Well, it turns out that he's quoted in both the LA Times article and the Chicago Tribune article. Pipes cites from the LA Times article, which appeared on March 16, 2007. Barker's appeared a few days later, on March 25, 2007, and by then Adi was already a suspect source. From the Chicago Tribune article:

Zulfan Adi, a former neighborhood playmate of Obama's who has been cited in news reports as saying Obama regularly attended Friday prayers with Soetoro, told the Tribune he was not certain about that when pressed about his recollections. He only knew Obama for a few months, during 1970, when his family moved to the neighborhood.

Hmm, Barack Obama's sister, who was part of the family versus Zulfan Adi, a guy who is not certain what he remembers and only knew Obama for a few months. I'll take the sister. Pipes distorts what the sister says, quotes Adi, and neglects to tell us that Adi is not a reliable source.

Finally, having failed to prove anything, Pipes sinks even lower:

Piety: Obama himself says that while living in Indonesia, a Muslim country, he "didn't practice [Islam]," implicitly acknowledging a Muslim identity. Indonesians differ in their memories of him. One, Rony Amir, describes Obama as "previously quite religious in Islam."

Once again, Pipes is fundamentally and willfully dishonest. Having failed to prove that Obama was ever a Muslim or a practicing one, he suggests that Obama acknowledges that he had a "Muslim identity" by - get this - using Obama's denial that he ever practiced. Then he claims that Indonesians differ in their memories of Obama's religiosity by citing Rony Amir, that old friend who wrote for the Banjarmasin Post. I guess if one considers Amir's opinion against the "dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends" who say that "Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia," one could consider it a difference of opinion.

Pipes concludes with no apparent sense of irony:

Obama's having been born and raised a Muslim and having left the faith to become a Christian make him neither more nor less qualified to become president of the United States. But if he was born and raised a Muslim and is now hiding that fact, this points to a major deceit, a fundamental misrepresentation about himself that has profound implications about his character and his suitability as president.

Indeed, let us trumpet the first sentence of this concluding paragraph from the hilltops. Let us also remember the (completely unsuccessful) lengths Daniel Pipes has gone through to suggest that from the ages of 6 to 10, Barack Obama was a Muslim. And let us do exactly what Pipes suggests we do to Obama to Pipes himself - hold him accountable for his major deceits and fundamental misrepresentations and make the appropriate conclusions about his character and his suitability to be any kind of source of information for our community or for anyone else's.

Obama for President

2008-06-09T13:16:00.003-04:00

My cousin Ryan becomes a superdelegate for Obama.

Initial Impressions of the Old City

2007-08-17T10:29:00.000-04:00

I'm in Israel right now, and I feel both like it's the first time I've been here and also that I've been here many times before. Neither is exactly accurate. I've been in Israel once before in 2004, on a Birthright trip. This trip is the first I've taken on my own, though I'm travelling with a friend. I think this feeling is a personal version of what the tour guide at the Tower of David calls the difference between the historical record of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem of the Heart that Jews, Muslims, and Christians possess on a religious and personal level.

Right now I'm sitting in Ali Baba's Internet Cafe on the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City; since it's close to the Sabbath, the Jewish Quarter is mostly shut down. I just took a walk through part of the Shuk here; I get the feeling the shopkeepers are insulted by people who browse without entering their shops. But they seem to all sell the same stuff.

I arrived here yesterday, early in the morning, and so far, I've davened at the Kotel (Western Wall), bummed around Ben Yehuda Street and its environs (yesterday), toured the Burnt House and Wohl Archaeological Museum and the Tower of David, taken a Camel Ride outside of the Jaffa Gate, and walked through the Shul.

Yesterday, after checking in the hotel around 7 AM, we walked over to the Kotel to daven Shacharit. It was not the greatest time to go. Thursday morning is Bar Mitzvah day at the Kotel. I am always touched when a Bar Mitzvah boy chooses to have his Bar Mitzvah at the Kotel instead of a lavish celebration. I have always thought it was choosing substance over style. I'm somewhat less impressed by the fact that such an occasion requires the Bar Mitzvah to share his celebration with a dozen or more similar celebrations taking place in the same place at the same time. It's complete chaos there. It's ironically hard to find a minion in this atmosphere because everything is in progress. You kind of have to be in the right place in the right time. Nothing is posted.

From the Kotel, we walked to Ben Yehuda Street. While my friend decided to return to the hotel to rest, I stuck it out for a few hours to walk around, eat a falafel, and look in the various Judaica shops. The streets in and around Ben Yehuda are an object lesson in how Jerusalem is not New York. No grid of straight lines exists here. Everything seems to run together. You walk on Ben Yehuda and you hit King George. You walk on King George and you hit Jaffa. You walk on Jaffa and you hit Mordechai Ben Hillel. And back to Ben Yehuda again. After a few hours of this, I found my way back to King George Street, and walked the mile or so back to the King Solomon Hotel. By then, I was pretty much ready to crash, and slept for a couple of hours.

We ate dinner nearby the hotel at Rosemary, a dairy restaurant. The food was pretty good; I haven't had french onion soup in a while. We ate outside and enjoyed the remarkably good nighttime weather here, at about 65 or 70 degrees. After that, to walk off the meal, we took a quick tour of Liberty Bell Park, so named for the replica of the Liberty Bell in the center of the park. Most interesting to me, besides the alligator sculpture, was the Roman theater, where there are concerts from time to time. My friend went back to the hotel, and I decided to go across the street for a cup of tea at the Cup O' Joe cafe, a nice coffee house that is like Starbucks, only much more classy. The tea was served loose in an infuser, and was very good.

Today, we had planned to start with the Kotel tunnels, but found that we needed a reservation, so we put that off for next week. So we went to the Burnt House Museum, which is basically the ruins of a house believed to have belonged to the Katrios family of Kohanim. Their house was destroyed, along with many others, at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. The museum is really the showing of a film that dramatizes the both the destruction of Jerusalem and the internal conflict between the Zealots and the Moderates by presenting the wealthy Katrios family as being divided, the father favoring moderation, the son fighting with the underground. The presentation was quite good and effective.

After that, we went to see more ruins in the Wohl Archaeological Museum, which is across the street from the Burnt House in the Jewish Quarter. The centerpiece of the museum is the several ruined homes upon which the museum is built, including several mosaics built in the homes of the rich Jews who inhabited these houses. But the most interesting part for me was the museum's recounting of how the Old City, the Jewish Quarter in particular, was rebuilt after the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967. This rebuilding continues today. The latest project is the restoration of the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed by the Jordanians during the 1948 War of Independence. For those of you who have been here before, the arch is gone. In its place stands the structure of the Hurva Synagogue.

After this, we went to the Tower of David Museum located in the David Citadel, and took a very good tour that highlights the museum's focus on the history of Jerusalem and the Old City, from Roman times to the present day. We also went down to the gardens, which was really just an excuse for me to sit down and rest for a couple of minutes. Lo and behold, one of the many members of Jerusalem's feral cat population, often friendly to tourists because they grow up around them, jumped in my lap and started to take a nap. He didn't want to leave when I got up, either, and I had to literally lift him off of me.

After that, we walked out of the Jaffa Gate. There, I encountered a camel. I was offered a camel ride. Without thinking, I took the camel ride, and the proprietor of the camel took pictures of me with my camera on the camel with the Jaffa Gate in the background. (The picture are good pictures.) Then he took me for a ride and told me the price. I bargained him down a little, but the cautionary tale is always agree on the price before you take a ride on anything in Israel, animal or vehicle. I'm not going to say what it cost me, but let's say the camel herder could probably buy a second camel for what he charged me.

After a rest at a hotel, I ventured back out, and now I'm here in the cafe typing this post. One thing I notice: The Muslim Quarter smell of mint from all of the shops in the Shuk. It's nice. The Jewish Quarter smells like sewage. Uri Lupolianski (mayor of Jerusalem) needs to pick up the garbage. Shabbat is close, so I've got to get going. There will be more to come.

Anderson Cooper 180

2006-11-02T08:15:00.000-05:00

I normally enjoy watching Anderson Cooper on CNN, but this week he, and just about everyone else in the media did something that was typical of a media that doesn't understand the difference between reporting news and reporting non-news. I'm referring the whole non-story with John Kerry.
Don't you hate when the media reports about a non-story, tells you it's a non-story, and then analyzes the impact of their own reporting of this non-story? This is what heppened on AC 360 on Tuesday. John Kerry makes a gaffe about education and the soldiers in Iraq. Cooper reports the story, tells us the President is making hay of it and how this could hurt the Democratic Party. Then he has David Gergen on to tell us how John Kerry just needs to get off TV and let the whole thing pass with the newscycle.

Pass with the newscycle? How about ignoring the story in the first place? This is how the media becomes a massive tool of the political parties, usually favoring the incumbent. If they didn't report the story, the President likely wouldn't make a big deal out of it and we wouldn't be focusing on nonsense instead real political issues.

A New Letter in the Jewish Week

2006-09-24T22:35:00.000-04:00

I've got a new letter in the Jewish Week in reaction to the ads the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) has been putting out lately.

The Jewish Week has been printing these ads lately and I thought someone should say something about them. There were two ads in the newspaper the week I responded. One appears on the RJC website and is an ad that includes two quotes from former President Jimmy Carter. The two quotes are: "I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.” and "I represent the vast majority of Democrats." The clear intention of the ad is to suggest that Jimmy Carter is stating that it is the view of the vast majority of Democrats that Israel had no legal or moral justification for their recent bombing of Lebanon in response to the unprovoked kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. The quotes are from an interview Carter gave to Der Spiegel, a widely-read German magazine. In fact, as you probably can guess, they're highly misleading and were given in answer to two separate questions. In short, the first quote is Carter's own view. The second is given in answer to a more general question. In short, it is not clear at all that the vast majority of Democrats agree with Carter's views on Israel.

This is accompanied by poll results suggesting that while 84 percent of rank-and-file Republicans sympathize more with Israel than the Arab states, only 43 percent of Democrats do. (It's a reasonable question to ask how they came up with this, since news reports of the poll did not include breakdowns by party.)

At any rate, one might think that the Democratic Party is abandoning Israel. Of course, it's not; the recent congressional resolution in support of Israel during the war in Lebanon was passed by an overwhelming majority of Democrats.

I wrote that the RJC ad is irresponsible. Here is why:

Israel is a bipartisan issue. It has been that way for at least a generation. It must, for the good of Israel, stay that way. Responsible Jewish party politicking has usually been based on those issues in party platforms which actually distinguish the parties. Taxes, social programs, domestic legislation - these are the types of things we're talking about. But not Israel. The parties agree on Israel, and there is all the evidence in the world if one looks at Congressional votes, the only ones that matter.

The danger in politicizing Israel in the way the RJC has done it is twofold. In the first place, it is plainly offensive to suggest, as the RJC does, that Jews should vote for political candidates on Israel alone. Our community does not need this image, and we don't deserve it. If, as the RJC claims, the radical left is becoming a force in the Democratic Party, the Party, including those opposed to the Iraq War, isn't listening to it, at least where Israel is concerned. Ned Lamont is a good example. Despite the fact that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stood behind him after his defeat of Joe Lieberman, Lamont says "It is not for the United States to dictate to Israel how it defends itself . . .We should not seek to impose a resolution on Israel." It is true that Lamont believes that the US should work to achieve a peace settlement, but this hardly defines him as anti-Israel.

It is furthermore irresponsible, and frankly reprehensible, to use Israel to divide the Jewish community in order to get votes.

The second is that in our polarized political atmosphere, there is the danger of polarizing political pronouncements becoming self-fulfilling prophesies. If a party tries to define itself as holier-than-thou on a political issue, there may be a temptation for the other party to define itself in opposition. Parties have little use for positions which get them nowhere with voters. The Democratic Party is not anti-Israel. But like any other issue, if the Democratic Party sees an opportunity to define themselves as anti-Israel as a way to get votes, the opposing party defining itself as the "pro-Israel" party will only encourage them. Being pro-Israel is, thank G-d, a bipartisan position. Partisan political ads can only affect this state of affairs negatively because frankly, there is nothing to be gained in this atmosphere.

There should be a moratorium on partisan use of Israel by Republican and Jewish political party organizations. The New York board members of the National Jewish Democratic Council who also wrote to the Jewish Week had it right, it seems to me: "For the U.S.-Israel relationship to remain strong, support for Israel must come from across all political lines. Jewish Democrats invite Jewish Republicans to join us in educating and working to strengthen the strategic bi-partisan support for Israel. "

Anyway, my letter (and theirs) will be available for this week here.

2006-08-14T19:43:00.000-04:00

Liszt Trascendental Etude F minor

Cziffra plays Lizst - Lizst's way.

Recent Letter

2006-08-01T22:09:00.000-04:00

A new letter in the Guardian, responding to the common anti-Zionist argument that at one time in the 20th century, communist and Bundist Jews outnumbered Zionists:

It is true that during the first half of the 20th century, anti-Zionist Bundists and communists represented a larger proportion of Europe's Jewish population than the Zionists. Their ideas on Jewish nationalism, however, were thoroughly discredited by the Holocaust, which proved beyond all doubt that Jews could not rely on the good grace of their Christian brethren for survival.
Michael Brenner
Woodmere, New York, USA

The letter I was responding to can be found here. Tony Greenstein is an anti-Zionist activist in the UK. His letter contains some of the more rancid anti-Zionist arguments I've seen; in addition to totally misstating the history of the Dreyfus trial, he actually argues that French opinions were responsible for saving a few French Jews during World War II and compares these to the 3000 Argentinian Jews who disappeared during the Argentian junta.

Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, falsehood, or stupidity?

The Return of Sovereignity

2006-07-14T23:28:00.000-04:00

Here is the problem with Lebanon (and Iraq and the Palestinian Authority):

It has been said before, but it needs to be said again: Part of being a sovereign state means having a monopoly on the use of force. This is the lesson that represents the chastisement of the democracy hawks. It is the lesson of power and stability that outsider democrats like to ignore and dictators love to apply. States which cannot establish a monopoly on the use of force cannot bring real stability to their polities. If they bring stability to themselves, they will bring instability to others.

This prerequisite of state sovereignty makes the decision of the coalition of the willing to dismantle the Iraqi army all the more baffling. Stabilizing Iraq was going to difficult enough. Without the army, it became impossible. All the elections and constitutions in the world cannot bring stability to a divided country where every mullah has a militia and/or a private army and the government has neither the power nor the will to put these opponents of state power down.

This is why, though I strongly support Israel's right to take action in Lebanon, I question the tactics. What is the end game? Destroying Hezbollah's military capability is a band-aid solution. Doing it while causing mass civilian casualties, though I don't doubt that Israel is taking every precaution to avoid these casualties, risks sending the rest of Lebanon in Hezbollah's arms. We are not out for territory here. We will not make it much easier for the Lebanese government to do the job we're doing now. It seems to me that sooner or later, we will have to go after Syria and Iran in some fashion. They are the real culprits here. We have to have an idea of what Lebanon is going to look like when we finish with it.

On a troubling note, the New York Times has featured some poor reportage lately that betrays something of an editorial bias. I am usually not a proponent of the bash-the-Times crowd, but after seeing Steven Erlanger mention in an article that some people accuse Ariel Sharon of war crimes when it clearly wasn't necessary, reading Patrick Healy's article on a pro-Israel rally in New York at which Senator Clinton spoke and writing that she failed to "mention of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza who have been injured in the fighting" accompanied by a Clyde Haberman column in the same section decrying the fact that no one is talking about peace, it's hard not to conclude that some journalists are letting their personal opinions get in the way of their reportage. Healy shows contempt for the intelligence of his readers when he mentions something like this in an article that is about a pro-Israel rally. Erlanger is giving voice to unwarranted speculation by mentioning that some accuse Ariel Sharon of war crimes.

Another New Letter in the Jewish Press

2006-06-06T21:15:00.000-04:00

OK, it's a couple of weeks new.

This letter was written in response to a letter written by a Kahanist about how Meir Kahane proved that a Torah-true Israel cannot be a democracy. I wrote that I did not remember the Torah advocating any particular political system, and that even if it had, a hothead demagogue like Meir Kahane would not be the best guy to run it. Among the arguments (or lack thereof) in the letter were that the anti-kosher slaughter laws passed by Sweden and Norway proved that democracy could result in anti-Jewish legislation (as if a dictatorship could be relied on for being in perfect harmony with Jewish law).

Torah And Democracy

It was amusing to see reader David Ferster (Letters, May 5) use Meir Kahane as a source for his disagreement with Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. (I’ll take Rabbi Riskin.)

I am not clear on where the Torah "opposes" Western-style democracy. I don’t believe the Torah weighed in on the issue. The idea of a king comes from Nevi’im. (The idea of monarchy, lest we forget, was not especially well regarded by Shmuel, who resented having to set the whole thing up.)

The question is, Which system of government will best leave us in a position to uphold the Torah’s values? It is not a question of whether the two are compatible, though those who argue that democracy is a derivative of Judaism are probably engaging in some wishful thinking. No system of government is "compatible" with the Torah; it would devalue the Torah to make such a pronouncement.

In a democracy we are free to practice the Torah and to try to persuade those who disagree with us. The way of the Torah is not closed to us in a democracy. There is no such assurance in a dictatorship, and certainly not one run by someone like Meir Kahane.

The policies of Sweden and Norway are red herrings in this discussion. (For the record, the anti-shechita laws in these countries are very old, and though the laws are unfortunate, they do not prevent one from being a Torah-observant Jew in those countries.) They certainly do not prove that dictatorship is preferable to democracy.

Michael Brenner
Woodmere, NY

Music Review: Rushing though the Ballades

2006-05-07T18:46:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Gilad is a five-tool concert pianist. He has technique, tone, musicality, the willingness to take risks, and the stage presence to make himself interesting. The first half of Mr. Gilad's program at Washington Irving High School, consisting of Beethoven's energetic and difficult C major Sonata, Opus 2, number 3 and Prokofiev's equally energetic and difficult 2nd Sonata, established, made his pianistic skills clear. Mr. Gilad is willing to push tempos as far as they can be pushed, and this made for a particularly exciting opening to the Beethoven and conclusion to the Prokofiev. He showed off his musical qualities in the Andante of the Prokofiev.

Knowing that this young pianist possessed these hallmarks of pianism made the second half of the program, the four ballades of Chopin, all the more frustrating. Each tool present in the first half deserted Mr. Gilad in second, a mess of reckless, rushed banging that served neither Chopin nor Mr. Gilad well.

The Ballades are the crowns of Chopin's oeuvre. They are works of great contrast and feeling. Mr. Gilad's rushed, monochromatic performances, sans rubato, seemingly failed to grasp any of the emotion and drama that runs through these works. That he was rewarded with hearty applause seems, unfortunately, to prove only that very fast playing will win over an audience.

This critic admires reckless abandon when it heightens the drama of the piece of music, even if the pianist in question drops a few notes along the way. (The best example, to my mind, is the coda of Beethoven's Appasionata Sonata as played by Arthur Rubinstein). Reckless abandon that is merely reckless is unmusical. And though Mr. Gilad has a good technique, he does not have the super-duper technique necessary to play so fast without mistakes, nor the sophistication to do so with musical ideas intact.

Mr. Gilad has the tools for a good career. But if he rushes like he did Saturday night, he will not have the chance to make his case.

Dropping the Ball on Reality

2006-03-26T15:38:00.000-05:00

John J. Mearsheimer's (don't forget the middle initial) foreign policy outlook, at least at first glance, is hardcore realist. Where some talk about Democratic Peace Theory and international alliances based on something other than power politics, Mr. Mearsheimer stands by with the bucket of cold water. Here is what this (certain to be) champion of the pro-Palestinian movement has said:

"Countries must singlemindedly pursue their interests, Mr. Mearsheimer said, no matter what anybody else thinks . . . Power is the currency of the international system, Mr. Mearsheimer argues, and the United States should use it when it sees fit." Stille, Alexander. "What Is America's Place In the World Now?" New York Times, New York, N.Y.: January 12, 2002. pg. B7.

It is through this lens that his recent diatribe against Israel and the "Israel lobby" must be viewed.

What makes Mearsheimer's critique interesting is that just a few short years ago, in 2001, he published an op-ed in the New York Times on the Clinton plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the President whose Administration Mearsheimer now characterizes as having worked for Israel against the Palestinians) in which he commented:

"Because of security needs, Israel cannot grant the Palestinians a truly independent state of their own. . .

"One might argue that the Palestinians would have no beef with Israel if they had a legitimate state of their own. This is possible, but Israel can never be certain about future Palestinian intentions. Indeed, given the bitter conflicts of the past century and the fact that Palestinians widely believe that Israel was built on stolen Palestinian land, the Israelis have good reason to fear continued Palestinian revanchism against Israel. Therefore, common sense says that Israel should not let the Palestinians acquire the capability to settle old scores.

"In sum, it is hard to see how the Palestinians could get a viable state that would not threaten Israel. Independence for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis are fundamentally incompatible. . ."

He concluded:

"Israel cannot be secure alongside a securely independent Palestinian state."

Mearsheimer, John J. "The Impossible Partition", New York Times, New York, N.Y.: Jan 11, 2001. pg. A31.

The article was not a pro-Israel piece. But it acknowledged one essential truth about Mearsheimer's thinking, which was that making peace was not in Israel's interest. Therefore, one should make no mistake about the conclusions Mearsheimer reaches in his new study, where he claims that the relatively pro-Israel position of the United States has, in reality, hurt the Israelis, and that Israeli withdrawals would have saved both Israeli and Palestinian lives. He's not arguing for a policy of, as he puts it, "even-handedness". He's arguing for a US foreign policy of selling Israel down the river, and with it, the concept of a Jewish state, in favor of a policy favoring the Arabs. Mearsheimer's critique does not argue for a middle road. It argues for a switching of sides and for promoting a policy that he himself believes is diametrically opposed to Israel's self-interest, a self-interest which he ignores, by the way, in his Israel-lobby tantrum.

I will leave it to others (for now) to expose the many simple errors and mistruths Walt and Mearsheimer's piece contains. Here is a list of what sticks in my mind:

1. Out-of-context quotes on the origins of the conflict from David Ben-Gurion. Here is M + W's quote, along with the context they placed it in: "The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel’s leaders. As Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, 'If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?'"

Here is the rest of the quote, which goes on for a few more sentences: "They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance [for peace]. So it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out."

Looks much less like an acknowledgement of a moral failure on Ben-Gurion's part and a lot more like an acknowledgement of Ben-Gurion's pessimism. That's Goldmann's characterization. And it looks like Mearsheimer and Walt might be guilty of plagiarism since their selective quoting looks suspiciously like the kind found on pro-Palestinian websites.

2. A fatuous claim that most major American Jewish organizations will support whatever Israel does. M + W: "Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps."

This is misleading nonsense. It is first of all false - AIPAC and particularly CPMJO have long been run by people who hew close to whatever policy is favored by the Israeli government precisely because they believe it is in America's best interest to support that policy. When the Labor government was in power, they had AIPAC and CPMJO support. And more importantly, there are many, many mainstream Jewish organizations who support the moderates and the doves without being anti-Zionist, as a Jewish Voice for Peace is. They include Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Anti-Defamation League, the United Jewish Appeal (long opposed to funding settlements), and many, many others.

Norman Finkelstein at Columbia

2006-03-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

What stinks about Norman Finkelstein is not his scholarship. Plenty of academics holds views similar to his on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People can disagree. It's his rhetoric, his demogoguery, his intellectual dishonesty, his hypocrisy, and his bad faith toward those who disagree with him that has gotten him into trouble.

Finkelstein was at his demagogic best on Wednesday night at Columbia University, where he gave a speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that focused on two main themes. The first was that the conflict was uncontroversial because everyone agreed that Israel was violation of international law and was the conflict's aggressor. The second was that reports of increased antisemitism around the world were a hoax and were driven by the goal of stifling criticism of Israel.

The coalition of student organizations responsible for bringing Finkelstein to the campus consisted of the school's major Muslim and Arab groups.

Real intellectuals acknowledge differences of opinion. Finkelstein, who has always chosen the path of mocking polemicism to civil intellectualism in his public addresses, chose to argue that the other side didn't really exist. He used a mix of half-truth and demagoguery to do it. Finkelstein quoted at length from the International Court of Justice's opinion to back his assertion that there was nothing controversial about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because of the agreement of all 15 judges that Israel was in contravention of international law. The World Court, he claimed, was the world most important legal body, and thus, the verdict being in, there was simply nothing to argue about.

He then went on to say that a similar consensus exists among human rights organizations on the issue of Israel's culpability and that this was further proof that there was little to argue about.

But like most weak arguments, this one rested on the faulty assumption that there was nothing whatsoever controversial about international law, human rights law, or the international arbiters who create and apply these laws, and that a World Court opinion was the final say on whatever issues of international law there were as applied to the conflict.

Of course, neither one of these assumptions is accurate. International law, particularly as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, continues to be a highly controversial discipline, an unregulated, unbalanced, unacountable concept. General Assembly resolutions, so often cited by pro-Palestinian propagandists for their lopsided support of anti-Israel resolutions, prove only that the Arabs wield the powerful weapon of oil effectively and that third-world states continue to hold a misguided view of Israel as a colonial power and hold its association with the United States against it. It proves nothing about the feeling of these states for the values of human rights, both because many of these states are human rights violators themselves, and because they are unwilling to spend any comparable amount of ink condemning much worse situations, from the Sudan to Libya to Congo to China to Saudi Arabia. Israel is thus a political issue, not a human rights issue, and a controversial political issue at that. It is true that the UN Human Rights Commission has condemned Israel early and often. It is not true that these condemnations are not controversial, because many of the countries that run the UNHRC are among the world's worst violators of human rights laws.

International law, because of these political imbalances, does not yet contain a definition of terrorism. This is solely because most of the Arab and Islamic states are unwilling to accede to any definition that would define the killing of Israeli civilians as terrorism. This adds to the controversy of international law, at least as promulgated by the General Assembly and the World Court, as a reliable medium for assessing the conflict.

And though Mr. Finkelstein would like us to believe that the World Court is, in essence, a Supreme Court of the world on issue of international law, the system simply doesn't work that way. Like the resolutions of the General Assembly, the opinions of the World Court are non-binding. They are advisory. They are not the final say. They are only binding if the parties before the Court agree to be bound by its decisions. That is why, outside of an occasional advisory opinion on something like the legality of the use of nuclear weapons, the World Court mostly settles highly technical border disputes and things like water rights.

As any honest scholar of the conflict knows, only certain resolutions of the United Nations Security Council are binding, and that is why, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most major human rights organizations, as well as most governments, affirm that UN Security Council resolution 242 is the operative resolution. 242 calls for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, and does not, as Mr. Finkelstein claimed, call for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. It is not the case that there is a consensus that such a withdrawal is the solution to the conflict; even many Palestinian negotiators are willing to accept the assumption that there will be adjustments made so that Israel can keep large settlement blocks and sovereignty over the Western Wall. To the extent that 242 contradicts views expressed by the World Court, it is 242 that controls in international law, not the World Court.

Finkelstein went on to discuss what is now the tired topic of how Zionists stifle debate by accusing critics of Israel of antisemitism. Finkelstein's most outrageous rhetoric came in this section of the program, where he made the totally unsupported and false accusation that it was now common for critics of Israel to be referred to as Holocaust deniers, and that he thought that soon, Holocaust epithets would enter the slang lexicon, such as "mother-Holocauster" and the like. A joke to be sure, but a joke in very bad taste, based on a total lie. Finkelstein also cited last year's controversy over anti-Israel bias in the classroom at Columbia as another example of a false controversy.

As a questioner who had appeared in last year's documentary on anti-Israel bias in the classroom at Columbia reminded Finkelstein, no person who appeared in Columbia Unbecoming accused anyone of antisemitism, proving what many of us already know, which is that rather than critics of Israel being accused of antisemitism, it is far more common for critics of Israel to pronounce any criticism of themselves personally or the pro-Palestinian movement in general as an accusation of antisemitism. This is a valuable lie, because it justifies outrageous rhetoric of the type Mr. Finkelstein and others are known for. If one creates the impression that accusations of antisemitism are de facto without basis, one can immunize oneself from that charge. And indeed, the tactic appears to have been successful, because the reality is that there has been no stifling of debate. Mr. Finkelstein came to Columbia and gave his speech. If the Middle Eastern Studies Association is any measure, academe is dominated by people who share many of Finkelstein's political opinions. They haven't been silenced. There is not one case that I know of where a pro-Palestinian academic was fired for his viewpoint.

Mr. Finkelstein was no more honest in his surprisingly thin argument that there was no spike in European antisemitism. Mr. Finkelstein's sole support for this part of his thesis was a Pew survey finding a lessening in antisemitic attitudes among Europeans. No mention was made of the rise in actual antisemitic incidents. The logic of his argument was that Jews should take comfort if antisemitic viewpoints drop 20 or 30 percent, even if attacks rise 40 or 50 percent. In other words, it isn't a big problem if the fascists killed 100 more people than last year, so long as they dropped a couple of seats in the Parliament.

Mr. Finkelstein concluded his speech by attacking Alan Dershowitz's book, The Case for Israel, claiming that it was a hoax and a fraud, exemplified by Mr. Dershowitz's claim that Israel's human rights record was generally superb. Like so much else, this was a half-truth because Mr. Finkelstein did not tell the audience that Dershowitz's argument was not based on the assessments of human rights organizations based on the controversial discipline of international law, but was a relativistic argument based on the reality of conflict and the comparison of the conflict to other situations both past and present. Thus, Dershowitz could argue that whether a policy of targetted killing was considered legal by this or that human rights organization, when compared to, for instance, US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel's record was indeed superb. When compared to the responses of other states faced with terrorist insurgencies, such as Syria in 1982, Jordan in 1970, the US today, and so on, Israel's response had resulted in far fewer casualties, evinced a much greater respect for the principles of proportionality that are at the heart of international norms of armed conflict, and on this relative basis, could be reasonably characterized as generally superb.

Finkelstein also mischaracterized, as many have, the position of Benny Morris on the expulsion of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Morris has said that Israel's mistake was not expelling all of the Palestinians in 1948. He was almost certainly saying this tongue in cheek to illuminate the irony that states who perpetrated a complete ethnic cleansing, a "successful" ethnic cleansing as it were, came in for far less criticism than those that hadn't. The proof is that Morris also made the point that had the Arabs fulfilled their aims in 1948 and expelled the Jews, the world would not now be clamoring for repatriation of Jews to the region. They don't clamor for repatriation or restitution for Jews expelled from Arab countries, largely because these ethnic cleansings were by and large successful.

Finkelstein's mocking bad faith and nastiness were on display during the question and answer period. To a student who asked how Finkelstein could argue that antisemitism in Europe was on the wane when his own synagogue in Istanbul had recently been bombed, Mr. Finkelstein's response was that technically, Turkey was not part of Europe. To another question (mine) challenging Mr. Finkelstein's citation of casualty statistics as support for his thesis that Israel was a worse aggressor than Hamas by asking what Mr. Finkelstein would say if one of Hamas's many attempts to perpetrate a mega-terror attack were successful and resulted in thousands of casualties, Mr. Finkelstein compared it to asking if Grandma grew wheels, would she be a baby carriage.

I responded, by now fed up with Finkelstein's lack of good faith, by reminding Mr. Finkelstein that whereas Grandma was not trying to grow wheels, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had tried many times in the past to perpetrate a mega-terror attack. (I was shouted down by members of the crowd.)

Like so many other times that night, Finkelstein was responding to an argument by claiming that it didn't exist. That's intellectual dishonesty.

The promotion of your viewpoint as the only legitimate one of right-thinking people and the belittling and mocking of all others is demagoguery.

Accusing others of debasing the Holocaust when you are given to comparing Israelis to Nazis early and often is hypocrisy.

Claiming that the term "Holocaust denier" is used with any regularity as an epithet is a simple fib.

Claiming that the term "antisemite" is used with any regularity as an epithet began as an invidious exaggeration, and now has turned into a full-blown fabrication to legitimize hate speech.

Mr. Finkelstein is thus an intellectually dishonest, demagogic, lying hypocrite, and he did the groups that brought him to Columbia no good.

Radical Left Antisemitism

2006-01-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I am to participate in a discussion on why the Left hates Israel.

Here is my analysis:

Of course, it is not the whole Left that hates Israel. The left-wing of this country can not be said to hate Israel. People who support Israel's right to exist but believe Israel was correct to withdraw from Gaza and should withdraw from the West Bank can not be said to hate Israel. In the minds of many on the hard right who have adopted Israel as a pet cause, and are always looking to demonize someone, those who fail to silence any criticism tend to labelled negatively as either anti-Israel, and by some whackjobs, as antisemitic. I have been clear in the past on what I consider antisemitism and have been vocal in this space on the many instances of it around the world, particularly in Europe.

I have also written on the radical left (and it is really the radical left, not the "Left" that we are talking about) tendency to guiltily accuse supporters of Israel of accusing them of antisemitism when no such accusations have been levelled.

It is a major myth that antisemitism on the radical left in the West, the brand found on college campuses and amongst pinkish activists, is anything new. Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Forster, two ADL leaders of the last generation, wrote about it in the early 1970s in their book, "The New Anti-Semitism", which made Phyllis Chesler's recent book of the same title somewhat passe. Epstein and Arnold's book included chapters that could have been written yesterday: "The Radical Left", "The Media and the Arts", "Arabs and pro-Arabs", and only one chapter given over to "The Radical Right".

I agree somewhat with those who see the new antisemitism partly as a post-Communist search for meaning; though I would say that the leaders of those on the radical left responsible do not see themselves as "post-Communist". These are the International Action Center types who pine for the USSR. They are the unreconstructed radical left. They have long seen Zionism in its early 20th century form as a competitor to Communism and like good Stalinists, have treated it with the appropriate venom. A typical text is the volume of Marxist essays, "Antizionism and Antisemitism", published not long before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1987. In its introduction, Daniel Rubin, the editor of the volume refers to Soviet persecution of Jews as a "lie". In includes such comical sentences as this: "[Jewish-Americans] are unaware that socialism long ago eliminated all governmental and organized expression of anti-Semitism and all other forms of national oppression and that anti-Semitism is a crime in the Soviet Union." If antisemitism is the socialism of fools, sentences like these would certainly inspire the sentiments of those zealots on the hard-right, who promote the unfair converse of that statement: socialism is the antisemitism of fools.

And yet, one thing about Rubin is notable: his firm support for the two-state solution. He calls for a Palestinian homeland alongside Israel, not in place of it, even as he and his co-authors criticize Zionism as a form of chauvinistic nationalism that exists because of imperialism and pulls the wool over the eyes of the Jewish masses.

Today's radical left is not so accommodating. They by and large appear to prefer one state and a full right of return for Palestinian refugees, long Arab code for a reversal of 1948, ie, a reversal of Israel's founding. People seem to have little capacity for critical thought. They adopt the ideologies of others nowadays. It is not enough to want a Palestinian homeland, no, they must out-Palestinian the Palestinians and call for the right of return, demonize the Jews, and make utterly unfortunate comments about how it is not their place to criticize tactics like suicide bombings.

The other major difference is the proliferation of deceptive language. The radical left, always tending toward the self-delusional as we see from Rubin's fanciful account of Soviet treatment of Jews, have convinced themselves that as long as they call it anti-Zionism, it can't possibly antisemitic. This allows them to say the most outrageous things about Israel, its history, its people, and the 90 percent or so of the world's Jews who support its existence. The internet has allowed them to become more organized and to read more about some of bad things Israeli soldiers have done in the territories, with little context. They have less shame, less of a impetus to educate themselves about the entire picture, and in the post-Communist world of US superpower, an impetus to see Israel, a close US ally with too many people with white faces (forget Israel's nearly unparalleled racial and religious diversity), as an evil.

My response to all of this is the following:

1. The age of the problem suggests that it is not anything to be very worried about. These are not, by and large, grassroots movements. The people running them have always been more interested in running their mouths than in getting anything done. That's why they have accomplished nothing in more than three decades of the same thing.

2. We have to do a better job in the Jewish community of reaching left-leaning college students to keep them out of radical left clutches. Expanding Birthright Israel is a good idea. Disseminating literature is a good idea. Sending speakers from the Israeli mainstream is a good idea.

3. We have to do a better job of getting the same mainstream Israelis in the rooms of the progressive churches, and other large organizations who have the ability to move anti-Zionism from the fringe to left-wing mainstream.

Munich

2006-01-02T21:12:00.000-05:00

Steven Spielberg's "Munich" has been called his "by far the toughest film of the director's career and the most anguished". A lot of people probably believe this. I don't know. I think Schindler's List was probably much tougher and much more anguished. It is a sad sign of the times that a movie about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be considered more anguishing to make than a movie about the Holocaust.

I am not surprised Manohla Dargis, who is not a big Spielberg fan, wrote this. Those who find Spielberg a virtuoso filmmaker but purveyor of cheap, crowd-pleasing emotional thrills (not my assessment) doubtless find Tony Kushner, Munich's screenwriter and a reliable radical, a welcome influence. Kushner, the author of the great Angels in America, is no slouch.

Neither are on the top of their game here. Spielberg's great energy comes through unevenly here; his movie is an overlong graphic collection of assassinations. It is a mystery as to why Mr. Spielberg has not been criticized for cheap emotional thrills in a bizarre closing sequence where a sex scene is mixed with the murder of Israeli athletes or gratuitousness for the manner in which he depicts the killing of a female rogue Dutch assassin. Sex serves as both a foil and a corollary for the killing in this movie, an idea that is rather banal by now but oddly offensive here.

Kushner's script is transparently calibrated to promote his own personal political viewpoint. Anyone familiar with Mr. Kushner's stance on the conflict will recognize this. Mr. Kushner's theme, so simple and unoriginal but so well-regarded in Hollywood, is that violence begets violence, and that terrorists (Mr. Kushner would doubtless prefer "alleged guerrillas" or some other derivative that removes the linguistic violence of the word "terrorist") should be brought to trial rather than targetted for death.

It's a cinematic op-ed piece, not especially well-argued, ignorant of the complexity of the issues, and perhaps worst of all, ignorant of the facts, based as it is on a book with a discredited source. That makes it an arrogant op-ed piece, with Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Kushner (and I believe Mr. Kushner is more responsible than Mr. Spielberg) ignoring the actual parties and forcing their interpretation on the conflict.

Every director and writer who chooses to make a movie about a subject like this ought to watch Gillo Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" and learn its lessons. They are:

1. Keep your own political views at bay and stick to the facts. If you really believe in them, they should stand on their own. And if you're wrong, you're wrong. Pontecorvo's political outlook was, if anything, to the left of Kushner.

2. No big ideological speeches. Munich's script doesn't trust its audience to draw its own conclusions, so it has its characters tell them to the audience. Avner, the lead character, asks Ephraim, the Mossad head who recruits Avner to lead a team who will assassinate Palestinians implicated by the Mossad as terrorists, why the terrorists could not be brought to justice rather than killed. (The question is a serious one in this context, though not serious in today's West bank context.) But in a story where the accepted truth is that the Israelis who participated in the revenge killings showed little ambiguity about what they did, it is all the more unfortunate that Mr. Kushner chose to have them wear their emotions on their sleeves. Pontecorvo's French general was in a similar position to Avner. He was a hero of the French resistance from the World War II. He was honest about what was necessary to get the job done and said so. And by his saying so, Pontecorvo presented his argument without skirting the facts. He didn't have to invent lines about civilizations compromising with their own values, as Kushner has Golda Meir tell her security cabinet.

It's not surprising that Kushner doesn't trust his audience to understand him without these literary indulgences of his.

Kushner and Spielberg fail to heed these lessons, and as a result, Munich is a failure.

A couple of notes:

Many Arabs are unhappy with Spielberg for presenting the Israelis as conflicted men while presenting the Palestinians as fairly irredentist, most distinctly in a scene where a PLO member speaks to Avner about not resting until Israel is once again in Arab hands. In other words, one side is humanized and the other isn't. This is a strange criticism, given the movie's clear effort to present the targets as fathers with young charming daughters, intellectuals, poets, friendly guys who will offer you a cigarette, and so on. Taken with Kushner's effort to remind the audience that the evidence on these men was limited and certainly not public, it seems as though the criticism is hardly justified.

Irina has a different take. She argues that the lesson is that a guy doesn't have to wear a military uniform in order to kill people; he can be a poet who kills, an intellectual who kills. Scholarship and artistry is no barrier against evil. I doubt this was Kushner's intent given his politics, much as he would not hesitate to deliver such a lesson about American and Israeli civilian politicians. It is, nonetheless, a useful lesson to draw from this movie, particularly for those who think of Sheikh Yassin as a harmless paraplegic clergyman.

Meme from Ignoble Experiment

2005-12-21T16:58:00.001-05:00

*TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF - The Survey*
Name:	Michael Leon Brenner
Birthday:	11/25/1979
Birthplace:	Brooklyn
Current Location:	Woodmere
Eye Color:	Hazel
Hair Color:	brown
Height:	5'7.5"
Right Handed or Left Handed:	Right-Handed
Your Heritage:	Jewish
The Shoes You Wore Today:	Allen Edmonds MacNeils
Your Weakness:	Dark Chocolate
Your Fears:	Nuclear Holocaust, messing up my children, and bumblebees
Your Perfect Pizza:	Plain
Goal You Would Like To Achieve This Year:	Be a better person
Your Most Overused Phrase On an instant messenger:	Don't use instant messenger much
Thoughts First Waking Up:	What time is it?
Your Best Physical Feature:	Fingers
Your Bedtime:	n/a
Your Most Missed Memory:	Life without the internet
Pepsi or Coke:	Coke
MacDonalds or Burger King:	Burger King
Single or Group Dates:	Single
Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea:	Lipton
Chocolate or Vanilla:	Chocolate
Cappuccino or Coffee:	Coffee
Do you Smoke:	no
Do you Swear:	yes, but I'm trying to cut down
Do you Sing:	Yes
Do you Shower Daily:	yes
Have you Been in Love:	Yes
Do you want to go to College:	I already have
Do you want to get Married:	Yes
Do you belive in yourself:	Sometimes
Do you get Motion Sickness:	No
Do you think you are Attractive:	To who?
Are you a Health Freak:	a little
Do you get along with your Parents:	a little
Do you like Thunderstorms:	not really
Do you play an Instrument:	yes
In the past month have you Drank Alcohol:	yes
In the past month have you Smoked:	no
In the past month have you been on Drugs:	no
In the past month have you gone on a Date:	yes
In the past month have you gone to a Mall:	no
In the past month have you eaten a box of Oreos:	no
In the past month have you eaten Sushi:	no
In the past month have you been on Stage:	no
In the past month have you been Dumped:	no
In the past month have you gone Skinny Dipping:	no
In the past month have you Stolen Anything:	no
Ever been Drunk:	yes
Ever been called a Tease:	no
Ever been Beaten up:	no
Ever Shoplifted:	no
How do you want to Die:	of natural causes if possible
What do you want to be when you Grow Up:	President
What country would you most like to Visit:	Israel
*In a Boy/Girl..*
Favourite Eye Color:	Don't care
Favourite Hair Color:	Red
Short or Long Hair:	Long
Height:	doesn't matter
Weight:	doesn't matter, unless morbidly obese
Best Clothing Style:	wouldn't know
Number of Drugs I have taken:	0
Number of CDs I own:	150
Number of Piercings:	0
Number of Tattoos:	0
Number of things in my Past I Regret:	who knows?
CREATE YOUR OWN! - or - GET PAID TO TAKE SURVEYS!

New Letter in the Jewish Press

2005-11-02T18:07:00.000-05:00

The Jewish Press has printed my letter on religious students and secular college. I wrote a very long letter, which they cut significantly, so I'm including both versions. I can't really object to a newspaper cutting a 1300+ word letter, but that's what blogs are for, I guess.

The article which I am responding to may be found here. The edited version of my letter may be found here, and is followed by the response of Dr Yitzchok Levine, the author of the original article.

My version:

To the editor:

Though I admired Dr. Yitzchok Levine's argument for secular studies in high school, I find his article on college education to be misinformed. To assert that a secular college education is inappropriate for yeshiva students because of "negative influences" insults the intelligence and commitment of those yeshiva graduates who do attend these schools and do perfectly well. Earlier this month, Dr. Yisrael Aumann, a religious Jew and graduate of City College and MIT who gave a lecture at the Technion last year entitled, "Risk Aversion in the Talmud", shared the Nobel Prize for economics. For these reasons and many others, Dr. Levine's argument against secular college falls on its face.

Every morning on the Long Island Railroad I pass religious commuters on their way to work as lawyers, accountants, financial analysts, doctors, teachers, and other professions, learning from a safer or davening Shacharis. This happens to be a golden age for the religious Jew who wants to work in the secular world.

There is a paranoid notion in conservative communities that secular colleges are bastions of immorality where religious students cannot survive. This is a dangerous half-truth, because the result is to needlessly insulate and isolate religious students from the secular world and to deny those who have the intellect the opportunity to attend institutions capable of foster that intellect. Online courses, at this point in time, are often no substitute for the kind of liberal arts and scientific educations most good secular colleges offer and the benefits that come from interacting with other students who share similar interests. And in an era where the colleges of the City University of New York are experiencing a renaissance, a good secular college education is quite affordable; scholarships and student loans are always available. Students who do well in high school and on the SAT stand a good chance of receiving scholarships for City University.

Antisemitism is not a problem in the form of physical attacks, and certainly not a reason to forgo college altogether. The San Francisco incident is the rare exception, not the rule. There are pro-Palestinian organizations of some form on many campuses. There are pro-Israel organizations, most of them stronger than the pro-Palestinian ones, on most major campuses. It is hysteria to suggest that Jewish students, particularly those in New York, face antisemitic mobs. It is also contradictory to refer to antisemitism on the one hand and claim that the college atmosphere in the 1940s and 1950s, when antisemitism was still institutionalized on many campuses, as preferable. It fits within the general tone of the case Dr. Levine makes, which relies more on fear than reality.

By the time most yeshiva students graduate from high school, they are more than equipped to handle the temptations of the average college environment and should be prepared to debate those who may hold views opposed to their own. Those who wish to attend secular schools without dorming, can always do so as many NYU students, Fordham students, and virtually all City University students do. Commuting eliminates many of the issues of modesty yeshiva students may struggle with on the college campus.

It is also important to note that the so-called atmosphere students confront in college is not the same as that confronted in graduate schools and professional schools. While the excesses of the college atmosphere come from its status as a place for 18 to 21 year olds to experiment and decide who they are, these are largely absent from graduate and particularly professional schools, where the student bodies are more career-oriented. Dr. Levine fails to make this distinction, and it is an important one because while one might plausibly argue that a student with a very strict background might feel uncomfortable in a secular undergraduate atmosphere, the same is not true for post-college higher education, though the lack of a secular college education makes gaining entry into these schools more difficult. Nevertheless, a significant number of my classmates at Fordham Law School were yeshivish in orientation and some came via rabbinical schools with no secular college experience. (Talmudic training, not surprisingly, is excellent preparation for the rigors of law school, though this should certainly not be taken as a suggestion that one should learn Talmud for the purpose of studying American law.) I'm not so sure about higher learning in math, science, and the humanities.

I remember Dr. Levine's defense for secular studies in high school. I felt sad reading it because I thought it was unfortunate that the case had to be made at all. It is unfortunate that secular knowledge has become so devalued in some parts of religious society that a serious attempt was recently made at Yeshiva University to remove the institution's "Torah U'Maddah" motto.

A nebulous idea has been allowed to take hold that secular studies are unimportant because some of today's Torah scholars were not consumers of such low knowledge as basic math, geography, history, and science. Perhaps this is why they often seem divorced from all reality, and why their devaluation of secular studies appears to be more about carrying on an old medieval tradition of keeping the flock ignorant and obedient than anything Judaic. This approach might have had merit in an era where learning was generally unavailable. It is no longer appropriate.

A part of Dr. Levine's argument for secular studies in high school deftly swept away any notion that such a view had anything approaching universal historical rabbinical support. In Pirkei Avot, Rabban Gamliel directly warns against Torah study without secular study: "Beautiful is the study of Torah with the way of the world, for the toil of them both causes sin to be forgotten. Ultimately, all Torah study that is not accompanied with work is destined to cease and to cause sin." (Pirkei Avot, 2:2, see http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=2011). Both, as the Maharal suggests, are essential to the development of the complete person. (An extensive analysis of the Maharal's position is available online at http://torah.org/learning/maharal/archives.html). The Rambam was well-read in the philosophy and science of his time, as were many of his disciples, and many rabbeim since then.

Secular knowledge is a misnomer. Perhaps if it was called "knowledge of Hashem's universe", which is what is really is, there would be less of a tendency to see secular knowledge as competing with or in direct conflict with Torah study and consequently more thought devoted to mixing the two as Dr. Levine suggested in his previous article. Just because the laws of physics, the intricacies of calculus, or the location and features of the physical world are not detailed in the Torah does not mean they are not Hashem's creations to be studied and enjoyed. Just because many problems and conflicts in the world involve people other than Jews does not mean that Hashem wishes us to ignore the study of politics, economics, and psychology. Indeed, how do we fulfill our mandate to be exemplify Hashem's principles without these tools? In that vein, I see little wrong with mixing religious values with secular study, as long as neither suffers.

I've run across too many intelligent, strong-minded religious people with yeshiva backgrounds to put any stock in the notion that allowing them to attend college would result in a diminution in their religious practice. Indeed, the permissive atmosphere on college campuses is a two-way street, and I think it far more likely that a strongly committed religious Jew will cause more people to become obversant Jews, not the other way around. This can only be a kiddush Hashem. Encouraging religious Jewish students to stay away from the college campus only reinforces stereotypes, particularly among secularized Jewish students, that being observant offers little but narrow, ignorant insularity. The prevalence of these stereotypes is inversely proportional to the presence of religious Jews on campus.

To encourage religious Jews to accept a second-rate college education on the basis of fear of the secular world is to commit the sin of wasting their talents and denying them to humanity. We hated the Romans not because they offered us secular knowledge, but because they tried to force us to believe that so-called secular learning required assimilation. That is why the lesson of Chanukah is to hold fast to Jewish ideals and practice, not to reject the notion of worldly knowledge altogether. To do so is to grant the Romans and their ideological ancestors the victory of proving that worldly knowledge is incompatible in Torah knowledge.

Michael Brenner, Woodmere

Delay Tactics

2005-10-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

Toothy Tom DeLay's laywer, Dick DeGuerin, has made a motion for the judge in DeLay's case to recuse himself because the judge is a Democrat who gave to Moveon.org during the 2004 election. The argument, I guess, is that in a case arising from the 2004 election, a judge who gave to DeLay's political opponents cannot ensure a fair trial for Delay, a Republican. Delay apparently believes that he will get a fairer trial from a Republican judge, a notion which should be insulting to both Democratic and Republican judges. Apparently, DeGuerin thinks that insulting the bench is a good public tactic, or perhaps Delay will claim that the Judge was biased if he's convicted. It sure as heck isn't a great legal tactic.

Our system of justice treats defendant as innocent until proven guilty, as it should. The public, however, has no obligation to do so. They don't vote, and thus they can draw any inferences they want. That's why OJ's acquittal was something of a pyhrric victory and why Martha Stewart's conviction and jail term amounted to the equivalent of a temporary hiatus from running her empire.

Texans will see through this multiple ethics offender's charade of standing in front of the Texas Capitol building and claiming that he is beating prosecuted for beating the Democrats. Texans are (or should be) too smart for this nonsense. Indeed, Dick DeGuerin, who teachs Advanced Criminal Defense at the University of Texas Law School, seems too smart for it too, as this excerpt from a profile done on DeGuerin by MSNBC.com suggests:

"[DeGuerin] has taught at the University of Texas Law School for 12 years. This semester, he is teaching Advanced Criminal Defense, walking students through his cases and how he beat prosecutors.

"Third-year student Polo Gonzalez said DeGuerin told the class that lawyers should keep their clients quiet, so classmates were puzzled after DeLay’s indictment to hear the lawmaker defend himself on talk radio, television and in the newspapers.

"According to Gonzalez, when students asked DeGuerin about it, the lawyer responded: 'I don’t have control of Tom DeLay. He’s his own man.'"

Who will hopefully receive his very own conviction.

We Jews who look at DeLay as one the House's major Israel supporters should see through Toothy Tommy too, and we should drop him like a stone, because there are plenty of House members who manage to support Israel without burning bridges and disgracing themselves.

Opendemocracy on Democracy

2005-10-21T10:02:00.000-04:00

Isabel Hilton and Anthony Barnett, two editors at the newsmagazine-like website Opendemocracy have published an article on Opendemocracy about the state of democracy and the role in fostering democracy Opendemocracy sees for itself.

Unfortunately, it reads very much like an endorsement of advocacy journalism as the way to go. I wrote a response which I published in Opendemocracy's forums after Opendemocracy chose other responses. Hilton and Barnett's article embodies the worst of what is often a very interesting website on world politics, globalization, and the internet: an article that mixes confuses the march of democracy with the left-wing politics of the website's editors. Thus, they hold, seemingly as an article of faith, that the anti-war protests against the Iraq War were great exercises in democracy.

Here is my response:
I have no doubt that OpenDemocracy fancies itself as a positive force for democratic change and evolution. The web offers the greatest chance for a truly open press, by which I mean an outlet for all possible views. Point, click, publish.

I offer a response to Hinton and Barnett on two grounds: First, particular political positions are not in and of themselves democratic, and second, that the concept of an independent media empowering the powerless is a concept that is based on a faulty premise and often results in the opposite of what is intended.

Democracy is first and foremost a system of government, and in all nation-state cases, a representative system of government. To the extent that it fosters values which permeate civil society, such as dialogue, openness for dissenting viewpoints, and so on, civil society might be termed democratic.

Unfortunately, what often happens is that the political partisans of civil society substitute ideas for institutions. The web, an institution, is a democratic place which offers a laissez-faire marketplace of ideas. But the ideas on my blog or someone else's are not themselves democracy.

Similarly, the idea that people may be allowed to march in the street for a cause is a democratic idea; in a democratic society, the marketplace of ideas should be open. But that does not make the anti-war movement in and of itself democratic, and it is out of place for Hinton and Barnett to argue that it is any less or more democratic than a protest in support of Iraqi freedom. Both are expressions of freedom in democratic society. Neither is intrinsically democratic. (As far as the promotion of democracy goes, one could argue, and argue easily, that the anti-war protests were fundamentally anti-democracy, because they opposed, and continue to oppose, the democracy in Iraq today.)

Neither are the positions taken by the mostly white anti-globalization movement, which often favors a brand of Eurocentric protectionism that will, if anything, hurt the developing world. The favoring of a policy of using international force in a legal and accountable framework, particularly when that framework is not the result of democratic processes and when such legality is highly politicized, is not a democratic position and does not in and of itself constitute the promotion of democracy.

Expressions of democratic freedom should not be conflated with democracy itself.

Hinton and Barnett loftily intone: "[W]ithin nations and globally, democracy calls for regular people having a say over how they are governed: which means empowering the powerless and checking the powerful. This is a great ambition. The calling of openDemocracy is to give it every support we can with our modest means – with truthful reporting, honest, lively argument and full use of the creativity of the web. For you can't have democracy without an independent media."

Democracy does call for people having a say; that is a truism. But it has nothing to do with empowering the powerless. There are no powerless people in a democracy, because the people have the vote. If the anti-war movement was supposed to check the powerful, it abjectly failed; Tony Blair is still the Prime Minister, George W. Bush is still the President of the United States. Majorities in both countries believe, in opposition to the anti-war movement, that pulling out of Iraq at this juncture would be a mistake and would ill-serve the nascent democracy that is the new Iraq.

The call to empower those that have little power is a lofty aim, but it does not congeal with truthful reporting. Neither does self-congratulatory terms like "independent media", which appears, like calls to empower the powerless, to be little more than a left-wing catchphrase. On the contrary, most of the time it leads to deeply biased political analyses which are short on the truth and long on demonization of whatever the en vogue target is. That's not to say that OpenDemocracy fails at telling the truth most of the time, but it has had its share of pieces which have nothing to do with truth and everything to do with partisan politics, suggesting that OpenDemocracy's "independence" bears a startling resemblence to political viewpoints of its editors. There is the token dissenting viewpoint from time to time, of course, but any good "corporate" media newspaper has that.

True independence involves the transcending of the personal political viewpoints of the editors. The independent media movement would do themselves a great service if they merely committed to doing the job of representing all relevant viewpoints better than their corporate counterparts instead of constantly proclaiming their independence. Perhaps it is time these forces sit down and ask themselves what they are independent from. If it is rancorous partisanship, they have failed. If it is a narrowness, they have failed. If it is "mendacity" (a major charge for anyone to level), they have not fared better than their corporate counterparts, and in their political zeal, may well be worse than they are.

The web offers that great opportunity for important voices with little power to get through. Opendemocracy's job is not necessarily to help them or promote them. It is to keep them to a high standard of truthfulness, accuracy, and relevancy, the values of any good publication.

Man with Shit-faced Grin

2005-10-20T21:27:00.000-04:00

Tom Delay, right-wing nut job, has turned himself in. Only nut jobs smile for mugshots. That and people who know no shame.

A War Against the War against Prejudice

2005-10-16T12:16:00.000-04:00

"The War Against Prejudice" is the title of a new radio documentary that played on BBC4 last week. It examines the Community Security Trust (CST), a British-Jewish defense organization which documents incidences of antisemitism and, through its volunteer services, provides security for Jewish events.

The premise of the program - and it clearly has an agenda - is that the CST is a controversial organization that is hyping the antisemitism problem in Britain. It's a typically annoying project - the documentarian's main sources for criticizing the CST are two Jews, one of whom has long been a critic of the Jewish establishment, another an orthodox rabbi who has a history of downplaying conflicts between Muslims and Jews because of his position as the head of a large interfaith group. The documentarian's investigative work is apparently limited to outing the vandalizing of a synagogue as possibly the work of hoodlums rather than an overt act of antisemitism. He sounds like a idiot bringing this example to the CST and trying to use it to prove a systematic attempt by the CST to inflate the statistics.

There's nothing wrong with opposing views, of course, but do they really establish the CST as a controversial organization, or do they establish that the documentarian has created a controversy where none existed before, and hyped that controversy into a radio documentary? The Observer certainly doesn't think so, and referred to the CST's compilation of antisemitic attacks as "one of the most exhaustive analyses of abuse of Jewish people."

There is one chilling moment during an interview of Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle, where Phillips, a demonstrated proponent of Jewish-Muslim interfaith relations, complains of being at a dinner and hearing a fellow diner say "I simply hate the Jews." To which Melanie replied, "What do mean you hate the Jews?" To which her fellow diner replied, "because of what they're doing to the Palestinians."

As Melanie told this to the interviewer, he says, "But she meant the Sharon government."

Did she? Is that for the interviewer to assume? And does this mean that we're simply supposed to let baldly antisemitic statements pass in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and assume they're aimed at the Sharon government. Melanie Phillips has written about the BBC documentary here.

Just imagine the equivalent scenarios:

"I hate the Christians."

"Why?"

"Because of what they're doing to the Iraqis."

"Because of what they're doing to the Kosovar Albanians."

"I hate the Muslims."

"Why?"

"Because of what they're doing to the Jews."

"Because of what they're doing to the Americans."

Would you consider these anti-Christian and anti-Muslim sentiments? I would. It's pretty certain that if someone expresses their hatred of Israel's government by saying they hate the Jews, there's something else there besides hatred of Israel's government, just as I'd say that anyone who presents their hate for the 9/11 terrorists as hate for Muslims should give others pause.

Remember when I wrote a few months ago that repeating the mantra that being anti-Israel was not antisemitic was fast becoming an excuse for people to utter antisemitic statements? I think it was when the Guardian published a letter by a prominent adherent of the theory that the Israelis were behind 9/11, claiming anti-imperialism and anti-racism as a defense that I realized the bounds of manipulating language were nearly limitless. And the other warning was when the anti-Israel-is-not-antisemitic mantra became the answer to a question no one was really asking. In situations where no one had made the claim that anti-Israel equalled antisemitic, someone would invariably invoke the mantra anyway.

Is it possible that the CST hypes the antisemitism problem slightly? Well, yeah. They fight antisemitism, and they fight a media and collection of prominent people who are underplaying the problem. Any defense organization worth its salt needs to remind people that a problem exists, and as any good lawyer knows, eyewitness accounts are not always going to be perfect. What is the CST supposed to do, underplay the problem and reassure people that nothing whatsoever is amiss? The Anti-Defamation League suffers from the same "problem". Does the ADL produce reports where the statistical methods are open to criticism? Sure. So does the RAND corporation. But no one calls them controversial.

BBC's Elusive Peace: Elusive Translation, Elusive BBC

2005-10-12T09:22:00.000-04:00

On Monday night, PBS broadcasted the BBC's three-part series on the last five years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs". I caught most of past 2 and all of part 3. Lots of interesting high level interviews, but unfortunately, lots of bad things.

This particular program reflected several BBC theories, none of them new. The first is the theory of Israel-Arab history which holds that Labor politicians are rational and Likud members are nuts. The BBC's history of the conflict, Israel and the Arabs: 50 years of War, also made by Norma Percy, tended to present that history as a series of attempts by Labor politicians to make nice with Labor always getting screwed by hardliners like Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and so on. Arabs moderates are usually favored, as they are here in a scene where the documentarian describes the Beirut Summit in which the Arab League offered recognition to Israel in return for withdrawal to the 1967 borders (and, the documentarian forgot to mention, recognizing the right of return).

The second is the theory of Yasir Arafat as pathetic know-nothing. The BBC claims that Arafat did not know about Hamas bombings, could not stop them, and wasn't given any help by Israel anyway. Arafat does not exactly come off well here.

Though my Hebrew is not by any means perfect, I noticed a lot of suspicious translations. The most glaring:

When Ariel Sharon talked of Eretz Yisrael in a clip of the famous Herzilya speech where the Disengagement plan was unveiled, it was translated as "Greater Israel".

When Israeli leaders talked about the targeted assassinations of various Hamasniks, the word "La'harog", which means "to kill", was translated as "to murder".

When Sharon referred to Yehudah v'Shomron, it was translated as the "West Bank".

There are doubtless others, and I believe that these are not honest mistakes. The account of Jenin was also troubling. The Israeli soldier viewpoint consisted of one guy who looked an awful lot like a dissident saying that they were told beforehand to go in and destroy everything, and then, saying that thought the scale may have been exaggerated, later reports found that over 50 Palestinians had been killed. Of course, there nothing wrong with his inclusion, but when he is the only soldier interviewed, it's a problem.

Here, the BBC played Labor off against Likud. Peres says that the problem with Jenin was that it looked worse than it actually was and for that reason, he thought Sharon should have let in the UN inquiry while Mofaz (who ultimately won over Sharon) says he thought allowing in the UN would have been betraying his soldiers.

(A matter the BBC did not bring up, it seems, is the UN's choice of Maarti Ahtisaari to lead the delegation. According to a new memoir by Pedro Sanjuan, a former UN undersecretary general, Ahtisaari was always antagonistic toward Israel and did not, at least in the 1980s, believe its existence was justified.)

At another point, the Fuad Ben Eliezer says that when the Cabinet debated whether to hit Raed Karmi, he told the Cabinet that the time to take him out had probably passed and that it might do more harm than good.

There was some remarkable footage of Mofaz and Mohammed Dahlan speaking at the Aqaba summit.

Yasir Arafat comes out mixed. The documentary claims he did not have control of Hamas. Colin Powell, who describes himself as, in the weeks before President Bush's speech in June 2002 calling on the Palestinians to elect new leadership, Yasir Arafat last friend, says he finally lost faith in Arafat. Yasir Abed Rabbo describes the last meeting betweeen Arafat and Powell as a fiasco and even admits that Arafat tried to convince Powell that some of the suicide bombings were the work of Israeli intelligence. Abed Rabbo's body language suggests that even he thought Arafat was losing it by then.

From a Hasbara standpoint, I believe the documentary illustrates a structural disadvantage we face because of the extreme openness of the Israeli government. Israeli leaders are willing to disagree on core issues in public. Cabinet meetings are open to the public. This allows the news media to choose to play off one side against the other and impedes the goal of core message.

A positive in all of this is that while certain decisions were contested at the time, there seems to have been no lingering resentment. Shimon Peres and Fuad Ben-Eliezer are not seen lamenting the invasion of the West Bank in 2002. There is no disagreement on the fundamental need to fight terror. This is a good sign, and it means that it should be possible to find enough commonalities to put out a clear coherent message that transcends the daily political disputes.

The Vatican and Israel

2005-07-31T09:06:00.000-04:00

Haven't blogged in a while (new job, not enough time), but I've just begun posting to the Zio-web list on Yahoogroups (see the new link), and a subject of interest has come up.

The question of hasbara, which may be loosely translated from Hebrew to English as public relations, has always been a controversial one in the Jewish community.

Right up front I'll say there is the problem of, well, the way we call hasbara hasbara. It's tawdry to say so publicly, as Zionists I know tend to do, "we've got to improve our hasbara". It's like saying, "we've got to improve our propaganda." In reality, everyone has a hasbara campaign, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Palestinians, Americans. Only we seem to talk about it as a hasbara campaign.

Anyway, every once in a while, the Israel government hits a hasbara low and does something completely stupid like it did last week by starting up with the Pope over his failure to mention the bombing in Netanya in his condemnation of recent terrorist acts . Israel charged it was intentional. This transparent attempt to twist the Pope's words naturally angered the Vatican, and now there is war of words going on, with escalating barbs on both sides. Israel criticizes the Pope. The Pope gets mad and protests that he's been a good friend. Israel summons the Vatican ambassador. The Vatican gets more mad and releases a memo giving reasons why it doesn't always condemn Palestinian terrorism, something they would not say otherwise, but now say because they have been backed into a corner. Now, undoubtedly, it will get still worse, and all because some idiot spokesman in the Foreign Ministry (there seem to be no shortage of them, which is a hint) decided to be petty with the Pope and the Vatican.

The end result is that any Catholic who cares what the Vatican says (which, admittedly, is probably a small minority) has just been told that Israel is a state that sometimes violates international law in a statement that has been widely described as extraordinarily blunt. We didn't win this one.

Hasbara in our community is sometimes a horse that is dead, entombed, that we continue to beat, but there are a couple of common sense things Israel ought to do more religiously. The first is to set the Foreign Ministry up like the US State Department. One spokesperson, not twelve. This, at least to me, is much more important than whether the spokesperson is a man or a woman. Everyone who cares knows that the State Department spokesperson is Richard Boucher. (M0st people don't care, but that is a different issue.) Having a single spokesperson with maybe a couple of deputies ensures a message that is above all consistent. You repeat the same thing day after day. You give the impression that you believe what you are saying. When you change your mind every day and say something different, people tend to take you less seriously.

Stay on message. This is very difficult because of the blunt nature of Israel society and the many opinions people hold even among high government officials. Ariel Sharon, as a minority in his own party, has no concept of "keeping discipline" like, say, President Bush has. The problem with Israel's political culture is that it's simply not disciplined. There are too many parties, too many special interests, and of late, too many disagreements on the fundamental assumptions about society that have come to the fore.

Pick your fights carefully. What is Israel gaining from this tiff with the Vatican? Is the Vatican going to change its ways or its policy? Will ratcheting up the right-wingers, who like nothing more than to be angry over something and use that anger to become irrational, help, especially at this time?

There are many other suggestions that I could make, but I'll stop here.

Le Monde and the Jews: The Folly of Forgoing Free Speech

2005-06-05T16:08:00.000-04:00

This from Paris: "A French appeal court has found the editor-in-chief of Le Monde and the authors of an opinion piece in the paper guilty of "racial defamation" against Israel and the Jewish people."

The offending passages?

""It is hard to imagine that a nation of fugitives born of a people who have been subjected to the longest persecution in the history of humanity, who have suffered the worst humiliation and the worst contempt, should be capable, in the space of two generations, of transforming themselves into a people sure of themselves and dominating (of others) and, with the exception of an admirable minority, a scornful people that takes satisfaction in humiliating others."

The second continued: "The Jews of Israel, descendants of an apartheid named the ghetto, ghettoise the Palestinians. The Jews who were humiliated, scorned and persecuted humiliate, scorn and persecute the Palestinians. The Jews who were the victims of a pitiless order impose their pitiless order on the Palestinians. The Jews, scapegoats for every wrong, make scapegoats of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority."

(Source: The Guardian: Le Monde editor 'defamed Jews')

As Tom Gross, a British correspondent who used to be stationed in Jerusalem, pointed out in the Jerusalem Post, this kind of writing, which appeared in an editorial, is not unusual in Europe. It is, unfortunately, an all-too-commonly expressed sentiment.

But it is the response to this ruling by one of the lawyers for the offenders that is most troubling:

"The court made plain that it found the text as a whole constituted a very potent critique, but a perfectly tolerable one given the complexity of the situation," he said. "It was just those two passages that were picked out. All it means is people are going to have to re-read their copy a bit more carefully; be very careful not to talk about 'the Jews', for example, but about 'some Israelis'."

We see here the folly of trying to change speech through legislation, the hate speech legislation that is a part of most European legal systems and a growing number of college campuses. Antisemitic? No problem. We'll put in politically correct language to cover up the problem. An author speaks his mind and says what we know many people in Europe really think.

Jews no good? We'll substitute Israelis. This way, we can claim that our critique could not possibly be antisemitic, because criticism of Israel cannot be antisemitic.

In the US, where we have, thank G-d, a First Amendment, there is no need to do any of this; people who hate Jews are relatively up front about it. That's how free speech works. People are more likely to say what they mean. People are more likely to say what their thoughts are, rather than tailoring their speech to fit what's acceptable. The framers understood the Darwinian quality of unfettered speech, that over time, good speech triumphs over bad in the marketplace of ideas.

Boycott Overturned: Justice Prevails

2005-05-27T14:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, following a four-hour debate, the Britain's Associations of University Teachers (AUT), overwhelmingly voted to overturn its recently enacted policy to boycott Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities in Israel.

Both sides have reacted in an interesting way. The boycott organizers, in classic Abdul Nasser-Saddam Hussein style, proclaimed victory, noting that the controversy put Israel's violations of international law on the map.

LOL! As if Israel wasn't already the most overcovered story in the world, with virtually every major British newspaper, save perhaps the Telegraph, carrying almost daily stories of Palestinian woe.

They have also claimed, predictably, that they are the victims of a vast Zionist conspiracy to silence them.

The boycott has also taught us, if we didn't already know, that political advocacy is often a profoundly anti-intellectual game. Sue Blackwell, Omar Barghouti and their ilk pulled the wool over the eyes of AUT delegates in much the same way the Presbyterian Church members who passed a resolution to divest from certain companies doing business with Israel. They paraded a few visitors to the territories before the body, cited the support of certain Palestinian organizations, used false evidence, and avoided debate on the issue. Blackwell and Barghouti possibly even held the vote on Passover eve to exclude Jewish delegates from voting. This was enough to trick a collection of intellectuals. I'm inclined to ask just how people who are paid to think dropped the ball on this one. I fear the answer.

The reason the AUT very quickly voted down the boycott yesterday, and in overwhelming numbers, is because a real debate was held on the issue, and the Israeli and Jewish narratives, as well as the narratives of those who were ideologically against cancelling academic freedom for British and Israeli professors, had their say. Debates are, at least hypothetically, intellectual events, and the end result, should a result be desired, is that the better ideas triumph.

There is a lesson here for Israel's supporters, and that lesson is that, even in Europe, where we are vastly outnumbered, the truth can prevail if we make an effort to promote it. Hasbara efforts to this point have been woefully inadequate in Europe. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Israel's government has all but written off Europe from the standpoint of winning the popular mind. The other, connected to the first, is that Israel's supporters see strong American support as vastly more important. The AUT case shows that this lack of focus has a price. It also shows, concurrently, that Europe's public is not hopelessly anti-Zionist, and that it is possible, by combating bad information, bad speech, with good information and good speech, the cause of Israel may be advanced.

Why Bill Frist Ought to Be Thrown in Jail and Skinned

2005-04-29T17:53:00.000-04:00

Democrats better take Bill Frist seriously. When he wants to accomplish something, he's not above doing something completely illegal and psychopathic. (Hat tip, Irina T.)

I'll adopt a special style for this post to explain what Frist (hereinafter "Defendant") did.

While a student at Harvard Medical School, Defendant, Bill Frist, did go to local animal shelters, and tell local shelter personnel that Defendant was interested in adopting a cat. Defendant would take said cats home, conduct surgery upon them, and kill them. Defendant has said that defendant conducted these "experiments" to better his surgery techniques.

If Defendant were a New York resident, Defendant would likely be charged with Aggravated Animal Cruelty, an E-class felony (up to 2 years in jail), both because of the unusual cruelty of defendant's actions and because of apparent volume of cats defendant killed.

Charges: Am 353-a(1)(ii) - A person is guilty of aggravated cruelty to animals when, with no justifiable purpose, he or she intentionally kills or intentionally causes serious physical injury to a companion animal with aggravated cruelty. For purposes of this section, "aggravated cruelty" shall mean conduct which: (ii) is done or carried out in an especially depraved or sadistic manner.

The number of counts Defendant is to be charged with will be equal to the number of animals he kills.

I would recommend that the sentences run consecutively.

Defendant is apparently a poor surgeon, since he no longer practices.

Defendant is our current Senate Majority Leader. G-d help Defendant if he runs for President in 2008.

Unfortunately, Defendant escapes felony charges on aggravating statute of limitations issues. New York's 353-a was passed in 1999. Defendant would probably fall under 353, the misdemeanor animal cruelty statute.

Massachusetts, the real site of the crime, passed their felony animal cruelty statute just last year, and it went into effect on November 17, 2004. It is Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 272, Section 77. It's also tougher than New York's law. Defendant could go to jail for up to 5 years if Defendant were to do what he did then today.

I'd still recommend that the sentences run consecutively.

I would also give Harvard University a call and have Defendant expelled, or at least, in the Thane Rosenbaum tradition of creative punishment, have the Defendant sent on naked jungle safari.

The AUT Boycott

2005-04-25T16:52:00.000-04:00

On Friday, the Association of University Teachers, which represents English university professors, voted to boycott Haifa and Bar Ilan Universities in Israel. For background on what led to the boycott, see Stephen Howe's article at Opendemocracy. I won't make all of the anti-boycott arguments here; they've been made in many other places.

The AUT made no statement about incidents of antisemitism Jewish students have faced on British college campuses. The leader of the boycott is one Sue Blackwell, a Christian fundamentalist turned socialist revolutionary. (To me, this suggests that she is at best unbalanced, but then again, one could say that she went from one kind of irrational hatred to another.) Few seem to have picked up that Ms. Blackwell has called Israel an "illegitimate state", which makes clear that her aim has nothing to do with the occupation, and everything to do with using the academy to further an political interest which favors the negation of Jewish self-determination.

It is bad news when any body votes for anything like this. The good news is that in reality, it will mean nothing because it is most likely against British law. The other good news is that most of the opinionmakers in Britain appear to oppose a boycott, including The Times and even The Guardian. There are also the beginnings of a huge backlash within the AUT itself; several lecturers have resigned in protest. The motion did not pass with an overwhelming majority; the vote was barely over half in favor, and the decision-making process, which allowed for no debate on the issue has been noted by many.

What should the strategy be from here on out?

1. This motion did not pass by much. It failed by almost two-to-one in 2003 when it last brought up. The reason given at that time by the Union's Assistant Secretary General was: “We do not support and will actively oppose any attempt to deny students the right [of equal access to higher education] purely on the basis of their opinions or beliefs.” Therefore, the first matter of business should be to explore reversing the motion. The AUT, resignations or no resignations, is not going to go away.

2. The Jewish defense organizations and any others opposed to the boycott should ensure that any academic who tries to implement this boycott faces academic sanctions, and if necessary, criminal and/or civil penalty. When Oxford professor Andrew Wilkie refused to work with an Israeli graduate student, the university suspended him for two months without pay. These punishments may very well be meted out to academics who do similar things; the organization representing British university administrators has come out against the AUT resolution and such boycotts are almost certainly against the rules of most British universities. It is likely for this reason that the AUT has instructed its members not to act on this resolution until given further instruction. Therefore, our defense organizations in Britain should write to the AUT and inform them of their intention to pursue whatever sanctions are available against any professor who refuses to work with an Israeli colleague on the basis of that colleague's nationality.

What other strategies should be explored?

New Popes, Old Ideas

2005-04-20T00:53:00.000-04:00

Three things are going on which I find interesting. The first is the election of a new pope, Benedict XVI. The second is the proposed boycott of Israeli universities by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) in Great Britain. The third is the nomination of John Bolton for US Ambassador to the UN.

The conclave of Cardinals chose Joseph Ratzinger, a German who has served for a quarter century as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In this position, Ratzinger served as an enforcer of theological Vatican decisions, essentially acting as John Paul II's right-hand man. The best way to understand what the job entails is to look at the office's old title, the Holy Inquisition. It is almost a necessity that whoever holds such a position hold the Catholic line, and thus, will be viewed as a conservative.

I was debriefed on Ratzinger by a former Catholic seminary student at the office and based on this debriefing, I have a somewhat more complete picture of how insiders may view the new Pope. Ratzinger is apparently the foremost Catholic philosopher of his time, the author of several books. This intellectual rigor is apparently attractive to many serious Catholics, and my source mentioned that if nothing else, Ratzinger was likely to be consistent.

Many people, particularly liberal laity Catholics, have criticized Ratzinger's election as a polarizing move by the Cardinals certain to further alienate the liberal elements of the Church's laity.

It strikes me, though, that the Cardinals understood what these liberals do not: the old-time religion of authority is growing. John Paul II's conservatism did not stop the Church from growing in leaps and bounds during his papacy.

Both Islam and Judaism are experiencing different phenomena, and both have much more at stake, in my view, than the Catholic Church does. Islam is also growing by leaps and bounds, and it is not the liberal wing of Islam that is accounting for this growth. It is the hardline fundamentalist element, those who favor imposition of Sharia law and get along poorly with people of other faiths. In Judaism, no sector is growing as quickly as the ultra-orthodox, and, particularly in Israel, this fact has major implications for the future of the state. Authority seems to rule the day here, and hardliners appear to be gaining ground.

The secular world is little different. The movement for boycotting the Jewish state, the latest manifestation of which is the effort by some in the AUT to boycott Haifa, Hebrew, and Bar Ilan Universities in Israel. This hardline position, discriminatory in nature, has solidified even as Israelis and Palestinians are moving back to the peace table. It is obvious to all those but the brainwashed that such an action would be counterproductive, because the universities are bastions of liberalism, because the Right in Israel will immediately use such a boycott to demonstrate how naive the left-wing university professors are, and because the move would vitiate every double standard argument ever made by the Zionists. Despite these obvious problems (not to mention the utter immorality of the bigotry such an action entails), the widespread condemnation by mainstreamers, and the moderation of both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, the movement to boycott the Israeli academics appears to be growing. If successful, the AUT would effectively be requiring Israeli professors to take an anti-Zionist loyalty oath.

The Bush administration's nomination of hardline blowhard John Bolton for US Ambassador to the United Nations at a time where many, left, right, and center, are counselling an improvement of the working relationship between the US and UN is yet another example of a hardliner reacting to calls for compromise by staking out an even harder line. Predictably, this Rovian move by the Bush administration, forever playing to the base rather than the country, has been welcomed and applauded by conservatives, who have poo-pooed all of Bolton's shortcomings, including (and particularly distressful) dressing down of intelligence analysts who tried to restrain Bolton from lying in speech about Cuba's weapons capabilities.

Is the art of compromise lost? Has it simply been abandoned for winners-take-all-losers-be-damned systems? Religious, secular, governmental - no one seems to be immune.

Death of a Cat

2005-04-12T00:37:00.000-04:00

After four death of people I knew in the last two weeks, it took the death of an animal for me to shed a tear. This is no small event for me. I haven't cried since I was nine years old. I think I've long substituted anger for tears.

My mother has been feeding a small black cat which at first she called Baby, and then Princess, since the cat was about a month old.

Around November 2003, a mother brought her three kittens to our backyard. My mother had been feeding a big black and white cat whom we named Oreo, and the mother must have smelled the food. It is not often that we see kittens this young, and their mother practically begged my mother to feed them, which she did. One was black, one was black and white, and the third was a Calico. The winter of 2003-2004 was an extremely cold one, and we were afraid the kittens wouldn't make it. One of them, the black-and-white kitten, didn't, and our neighbor discovered it one day in the snow. The mother disappeared when the kittens were around three months old.

But the black one and the Calico did make it through that winter. They were very close to one another, and my mother continued to feed them. Then, sometime in the summer of 2004, the Calico kitten disappeared, leaving only the small black cat. My mother continued to feed her. Over the past few monthEventually, my mother had her spayed, and she became much easier to identify (there is another black cat in the neighborhood who looks like her) because of her shaved underside.

Tonight, she was either hit by a car or suffered a catastrophic internal malady that caused her death. My father discovered her in the middle of the street - almost exactly in the middle of the street. She was lying on her side, not a mark on her. The image of her lying dead in the street is one I will never forget. It was a terrible perfection; her lying centered in the gutter, a small black animal, eyes open, mouth agape. Our Princess was dead. Not lost, but dead. Oh, how I wish she were just lost instead.

The black and white cat died in the snow, and our neighbor picked it up. The mother cat and the Calico she arrived with on our doorstep a year and a half ago disappeared. If they died, we did not see it. Perhaps they simply moved away. Perhaps someone else took them in. We lamented their disappearance, but we had the black cat.

That cat caused so much trouble; our indoor cat, Apricot, who is about 14, resented her and rebelled. Since the kittens were about five monthes, Apricot has been marking all over the house, especially around the front door, because Princess liked to hang out on the porch. I don't have to tell you what it smells like in the morning when a cat makes on the radiator in the middle of the night. But we couldn't abandon Princess, and she wouldn't abandon us.

She became more affectionate and survived the blizzard of January 2005, which dumped nearly 2 feet of snow on us. She was gone for three days that time, and my mother was sure she had froze. I figured that since she had survived a more brutal winter as a kitten, she would return, and she did. The last month, she had become even more affectionate with us. She survived a lot outdoors.

I'm very sad about all of this, and my mother is sadder. This cat became our baby in a way Apricot never was, because Apricot was already 5 months old when he arrived on our doorstep, and he was not affectionate until the past few years. I feel like crying, and I did cry with my mother for about a half an hour, and then on the phone with Irina. I can't stand to think of anything suffering. I can't fathom what happens to people in war-torn societies who see loved ones murdered before their eyes. I feel weak and helpless in the face of unalterable death.

Bollinger Part III: Teaching and Scholarship

2005-04-08T15:22:00.000-04:00

I served as the co-chairman of the Student Advisory Committee on the Evaluation of Teachers (or was it Teaching? I can never remember.) while I was a student at Vassar College. Our mandate was fairly limited; we served as a student voice in the tenure process, reviewing student evaluations and making recommendations to the faculty tenure committee based on that review, noting what we perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate.

University teaching is a strange animal. At the elementary and high school levels, we have testing for teachers to evaluate their ability to manage a classroom, their knowledge of subject matter, and so on. Most elementary and high school teachers student teach and are mentored in some way. University teachers usually student teach as graduate students, but there appears to be little effort to ensure they are actually good teachers in addition to being good scholars.

Lee Bollinger claimed that the system of faculty committee and tenure was of the highest integrity. That's a big stretch. No system is perfect, but the tenure system is fraught with structural problems. One question that arises is what the priorities of these committees should be. For the students, it is necessarily teaching, because that is what makes up the bulk of student evaluation questions - the organization of the course, the ability of the professor to convey knowledge, the accessibility of the professor, and so on. For the faculty, it seems to be scholarship. My experience, anecdotal though it may be, suggests that while a faculty member who is an awful teacher may survive at a university because of the volume of that professor's scholarly output, a great teacher who is less widely regarded as a scholar may be turned down. This happened at Vassar numerous times; we would see a professor with good student evaluations not promoted or not given tenure.

The integrity of this process is certainly not beyond question. When department hire professors for the first time, or place a teacher in a tenure track position, nepotism can play a nefarious role. The music department at Vassar was responsible for an egregious example of this when I was a senior, giving a teacher whose classroom manner could be desribed as lackadaisical at best a tenure-tack position because of personal ties members of the department had to that person and the person's husband.

And since Bollinger believes that faculty should police themselves, there is an obvious problem with faculty hiring and tenure committees, some of whom are overwhelmingly liberal, and a few of whom are overwhelmingly conservative, hiring and promoting like-minded candidates. This appears to be what goes on in certain departments, and only the most naive would come to believe that professors who are political activists outside the classroom, particularly those who claim victimhood and decry the unpopularity of their views in the greater society, would not act to add those who agree with them to their departments. The same problems apply to publishing; most academic journals are run by professors, who may tilt the table in favor of those academics who think like those professors. It is another reason why the faculty cannot properly police themselves and another reason why professors who are hardcore political activists should be examined closely by these committees.

But I said university teaching was a strange animal, and the reason I say so is because the teachers student enjoy the most are often the worst teachers. Student have academic freedom, but they are not scholars, and they are not at an age where balance and moderation are virtues. For young people, action is the virtue, and students are forever ready to give themselves to those professors who lend them a cause for their righteous indignation, not an old fogie who is constantly saying, "On the other hand . . ." It is rare to find the kind of professor who can do both - convey knowledge in a balanced AND passionate way.

It is hard to think of a good solution to the problems of the tenure process. Administrators should not be making these decisions. But the priorities need to be rejiggered, and hirings should be more rigorously reviewed by faculty deans for conflicts of interest based on the personal relationships hiring committee members have with candidates, and the prospective ability of candidates to teach in a balanced and passionate way in the classroom. There might be some sense in separating evaluations of a candidate's teaching ability from a candidate's scholarly ability; there should be a structured way in which students and faculty members alike can evaluate a candidate's ability to teach, not just the candidate's ability to get published.

I imagine I'll have more to say on this matter in the future.

Life and Death

2005-04-03T00:26:00.000-05:00

This week has been an exceptionally difficult week. No less than three people I knew well died this week, and none of them were the Pope or Terry Schiavo.

On Tuesday, Irina's grandmother, Sura Ratsuskaya, passed away. (Irina's my girlfriend.) Irina has posted part I of her quite incredible biography. Sura spoke many languages, but not too much English, so I couldn't communicate much with her verbally. Sometimes, though, you can take measure of a person without speaking to them at length. Sura, I think, was a person who led by example. She was early to bed, early to rise, and she knew enough English to let me know that I should try going to sleep at a normal hour when she caught me staying up late and reading (though according to Irina's biography, this was not something she did when she was younger). The devotion of her daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters to her (caution: people who marry into this family may not have such an easy time having a son) gives one a hint of the devotion Sura showed to them. I would have wanted Sura to meet my own Grandma Ruth, who passed away in 2002. I think they would have had an interesting time comparing notes. My grandmother was not the intellectual type, but she matched Sura for the common wisdom of raising and managing a family.

On Sunday, Dr. Jerry Bloom passed away. Dr. Jerry Bloom was a mix of brilliance, humanity, and literal sweetness that made him a beloved congregant of my shul, Congregation Sons of Israel. He had encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects, from Jewish history to
medicine to art to law (he gave me his well-worn copy of Anthony Lewis's famous book, Gideon's Trumpet, about the case Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the constitutional right to counsel for the accused). He was also a mensch, one of the nicest men I ever knew. And he was sweet, known among the children in my congregation as the shul candyman, handing out lollipops to all those children who came to the mens section to wish him a good Shabbos, and all those who were sugar fiends and wanted a lollipop. It kept a lot of kids coming to shul from week to week, including, at the beginning, me. These last few years, he has been debilitated by a stroke, and his absence in shul has been very deeply felt.

His two sons take after him in all respects; they are smart, kind, and sweet.

On Friday, Larry Laurenzano, the former Music Chairman at Fort Hamilton High School, passed away. My dad played a role in bringing Mr. Laurenzano to Fort Hamilton, where, in traditional budget cutting style, they made this professional musician chairman of the music, business, and art departments. I met him several times, and he was a very kind man. More importantly, he was beloved by his students, and the catalyst for the creation at Fort Hamilton of one of city's most vibrant high school music programs, encompassing several choirs, an orchestra, a band, a musical drama, and more. A few years ago, Fort Hamilton named its very large auditorium after Mr. Laurenzano, an appropriate tribute and a remarkable one for a man who spent maybe a decade or so there, remarkable for what he accomplished in a short period of time in fragile health.

All three will be sorely missed. May their memories be for a blessing.

Faculty [Ir]regulation: The Ad-Hoc Committee Report is Dropped Upon Us

2005-04-01T04:58:00.000-05:00

How should a classroom be regulated?

Lee Bollinger, like most college presidents, does not want the government involved in the regulation of universities. Bollinger spoke of the University as a "fifth estate" (the press being the "fourth estate"), implying that universities and colleges ought to be free of government regulation if academic freedom is to have any meaning.

So how should higher education be regulated, if at all?

Bollinger supports self-regulation by faculty members. Faculty should set its own standards of scholarship, much like lawyers set their own standards of ethics.

But this approach is fraught with problems, illustrated best by the atrocious and self-serving report released today by the ad-hoc committee supposedly created to investigate the controversy, but in reality created to provide a cover for the faculty. In the process, the report managed to give a misleading picture of the actual controversy, show Columbia University to be a weak, thin-skinned institution, and worst of all, blame the victims.

The report is available here.

Two of the five committee members signed anti-Israel divestment petitions. Another was a thesis advisor to Joseph Massad, a radical pro-Palestinian professor at the center of the controversy. These are all textbook examples of conflicts of interest, and Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment advocate who advised the committee, should disown this report if he has any integrity.

Their bias comes through most jarringly when they discuss events in the Middle East leading to unrest on campus, and mention Israel's incursion into Jenin (which caused some professors to cancel their classes to attend pro-Palestinian rallies), but not, as it turns out, the suicide bombings which gave rise to that invasion.

Much of the report is comprised on childish whining about the role of outside groups in fueling the controversy, an attempt to drive home the point that the stereotype of the university as an ivory tower is not just a stereotype, but apparently a goal of the academic institution. Yes, the professors of Columbia University, with its billions of dollars, should be immune from the likes of little critics on shoestring budgets like Daniel Pipes' Campus-Watch. Boo, Martin Kramer and the David Project, outside bogeymen who disturbed the orthodoxy of the campus.

Lee Bollinger echoed similar themes in his address to the City Bar, decrying "outside forces" whose motives were not pure enough for his taste (as if people like Joseph Massad, he who wishes the world would get past the Holocaust and start seeing European Jews as colonial oppressors already, were pure as the driven snow). Bollinger and most of his faculty do not, apparently, grasp that the professors most complained about are part of the those very outside forces. Joseph Massad writes a fairly regular incendiary column for Al-Ahram Weekly the English weekly edition of a major Egyptian newspaper. He's written at least of couple of articles there about this controversy. (Hint: His audience for the articles is not Columbia students.) When Bollinger said it, his comment could reasonably be read as being critical of pressure groups from both sides. The committee, however, makes pretty clear it is the Jewish outside groups - the David Project, the ADL - the organizations who dared to suggest that professors like Massad were part of a bigger problem - are the outside groups to which they are referring. Columbia's grievance process stinks. The David Project makes Columbia Unbecoming as an avenue for the grievances of students who feel that certain professors tried to intimidate them in the classroom and elsewhere. This is Columbia's fault, not the David Project's fault, and the trope, used against virtually every organization that sought to give voice to the student allegations, that their interests as an "outside organization" were not in Columbia's best interest is both beside the point and totally indicative of ivory tower intellectuals who react like children to criticism from the outside.

The Committee's report, in this regard, fully validates the complaints of those who testified and came away complaining that the Committee was more interested in how outside groups were able to cast the University in a negative light than in investigating the allegations made by student eyewitnesses and allowing grievances to be aired.

That the Committee plays political favorites within the faculty is illustrated by its harsh and completely uncalled for condemnation of "faculty . . . [who] encourage students to report to them on a fellow-professor's classroom statements . . ." This appears to be a criticism of Professor Dan Miron, a Jewish professor who has been widely cited as being a shoulder for those intimidated students to lean on in past years. Mr. Miron, one of the good guys in this story, could only be seen as a bogeyman by people who explode at those who do not accept their views. People like Joseph Massad, and apparently, faculty members like the knuckleheads on the Committee.

The Committee finally blames the victim by spending more space condemning so-called unregistered auditors who came to lectures by certain professors and asked "incessant questions" and made "[incessant] comments". This is apparently frowned upon and such behavior "make[s] a powerful argument for banning them from classes except where they have the explicit, prior permission of the instructor."

There are apparently such things as stupid questions. A stupid question is a question which disputes the professor's viewpoint that the professor is too annoyed to answer. And when he gets annoyed, he can kick you out. That's academic freedom for you.

I thank the Ad-hoc Committee for putting to rest once and for all the lie that faculties can regulate themselves or protect academic freedom. If this is the dreck that a self-regulating faculty produces, at an Ivy-League institution no less, it is clear that the faculty is far too conflicted to carry out this task. That doesn't mean faculty regulation is the government's responsibility; it is not and should not be. But this report is a disgraceful example of why, nevertheless, all-faculty bodies are ineffective at protecting anything except the faculty's own particular orthodoxy.

In the future, ad-hoc committees of this kind should be made up of faculty, students, and most importantly, have a majority of people who are neither - respected citizens who can investigate without allowing personal biases to intervene. Floyd Abrams shouldn't have been an advisor. He should have been a committee member.

Abe Foxman issued a statement on the report calling it a "sad day for Columbia". I'd say it's a sad day for those who believed that intellectuals were scholarly enough and professional enough to handle their own affairs.

Lee Bollinger, Academic Freedom, and Me (Part 1)

2005-03-25T01:10:00.000-05:00

Wednesday night, I attended the Cardozo Lecture at the New York City Bar Association. The lecture, on the subject of academic freedom was delivered by embattled Columbia President Lee Bollinger, whose institution is presently at the center of a controversy over whether certain professors in Columbia's Middle East, Asian Languages and Cultures Department, particularly those teaching courses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, have intimidated students who have offered points of view contrary to their own.

This controversy is of great importance for three reasons.

There are three large questions that go beyond the scope of the allegations made against Joseph Massad, George Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, and a number of others.

The first is the role of the professor in the classroom. Lee Bollinger's enduring contribution to the definition of academic freedom and what it means in the classroom will be his concept of professional scholarship, which he defines as the ability to examine the entire complexity of an issue, to truly open one's mind to all possible points of view. In the classroom, Bollinger posited that the best teachers were the ones who fostered this same appreciation of intellectual pursuit in their students, not necessarily by failing to take a point of view, but by creating an atmosphere where divergent views may flourish. Promoting a political point of view in the classroom should be handled with the greatest amount of care, and should, in my humble opinion, be uttered with an exposition of the possible counterarguments. Indeed, this is what every reputable social science professor expects from his students' papers - not just an position, but a critical examination of that position and alternatives to that position.

Professors who are able to accomplish this ideal in the social sciences without putting their students to sleep are few and far between. One reason is that the passion students hope for from classroom professors is often a byproduct of the strong ideological viewpoints held by those professors. (I had only one professor at Vassar who met this ideal completely, Andy Bush, though many came admirably close, such as Wilfred Rumble, and perhaps most admirably, Andy Davison, who teaches Middle Eastern studies classes at Vassar. I mention Andy Davison because I think he has the greatest challenge given the subject, and I know he spent and spends an enormous amount of time preparing his classes.) Professors who are able to stay objective seem too often to sound about as exciting as a C-Span lecture on endangered fish.

The ideal professor is one who stays objective while teaching with passion.

Part two of the controversy will be in the next post.

Lang Lang Plays Rach 2 and the Rach Paganini Variations

2005-03-10T23:49:00.000-05:00

I'm currently listening to the new Lang Lang CD. It's good, but nothing remarkable. It is mostly conventional, and it has some of Lang Lang's negative qualities as well as some of his arrestingly great one.

This may well be the most technically exact rendering on disc. The notes are so clear, the repeated notes and runs so sharp in this live performance, that one can only marvel at this supreme technician in a time of supreme technicians. But this razor-sharp execution sometimes works against Lang Lang, as it does in his rendition of Balakirev's Islamey, where a great showpiece came out sounding mechanical. Some passages in Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto sound lifeless, the antithesis of the awesome vitality which is Lang Lang's trademark in his best moments.

There are also some eccentricities; Lang Lang plays the opening chords of the Concerto at an extraordinarily deliberate pace, in an attempt to ratchet up the drama. But the effect fails because it is too calculated.

It is possible that Lang Lang, who at his worst can display a maudlin sentimentality, paid close attention to Rachmaninoff's own recording of the Second Concerto, which is quite simply the most unsentimental rendition of the work on record. But the genius of Rachmaninoff's own playing was Rachmaninoff was able to play with great vitality and drama without resorting to mannerisms and without the wide fluctuations in tempo that characterize Lang Lang's playing in this and the Tchaikovsky concerto. Lang Lang's Rach 2 avoids some of the excesses of his Tchaikovsky, but does not join the higher echelon of Rach 2 recordings with this effort. (The upper echelon is not that big. It includes, for me, Rachmaninoff himself, Artur Rubinstein, Jorge Bolet, and more recently, Evgeny Kissin and Helene Grimaud. Incidentally, Lang Lang need not fret; his Rach 3 is in the upper echelon of Rach 3 recordings, along with Horowitz, Van Cliburn, Lazar Berman, maybe Alexis Weissenberg, Arcadi Volodos, and a few others. Lang Lang's recording of Rach 3 was gorgeous, Berman's golden tone with Horowitz excitement.)

The Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini was better. Here, Lang Lang invested the music with much more drama, and Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra provided especially vivid accompaniment. Lang Lang is bumming around New York playing the Rhapsody this week with the China Philharmonic. Here, the Twenty-Second Variation, an alla breve was especially memorable, a great example of Lang Lang's ability to exite and electrify the listener.

It is not on the level of the Rachmaninoff recording, but no recording I've heard is.

Columbia Unseemly

2005-03-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

It amazes me that Lee Bollinger, a lawyer, was stupid enough to believe that he was going to get away with putting together a committee to investigate intimidation of pro-Israel students by Columbia's Middle East professors with so many conflicts of interest. Nat Hentoff has written about it, and spoke about over the weekend at a conference held at Columbia. I cannot understand it. Bollinger simply cannot be that dumb.

It is, on another note, naive to think that anything the New York City Council does is going to make any difference. Resolutions like the one passed by the Council calling for an independent investigation into the Columbia Unbecoming allegations are toothless documents produced to curry favor with interest groups in the city. Columbia is not about to change the committee on the Council's urging, which it probably views as tiresome meddling in its affairs. It will change only if there is a larger public outcry, particularly from Columbia students, combined with pressure from donors and trustees.

I see two paths. One is for interested organizations like the Anti-Defamation League to continue to work behind the scenes on the problem. The low-key approach has two benefits. The first is that it allows Columbia administrators the space to act without every decision being written up in the press. It does NOT help pro-Israel students that the only paper out in front of the matter is the ultra-conservative New York Sun, which is almost certainly perceived as a hostile newspaper on Columbia's campus. Students are not going to rally around it. So far, the New York Times' entry into the matter has been a typically condescending effort, illuminating the bickering going on between both sides rather than the muckraking quality of the New York Sun's reporting. The other, more important, benefit is that the low-key approach will avoid further polarizing the Jewish and Arab communities on campus. These two communities, from what I understand, got along fine before this scandal broke, and now relations are quite strained.

It serves no one's interest, not the Jews, not the Arabs, and not Columbia's, to import the Middle East conflict to Columbia's campus.

The more public option would marshall meaningful public support for the students. Meaningful means concentrating on the people who matter, namely Columbia students and press organs who are not so politically polarized as is the New York Sun. City Council resolutions are not going to cut it. The students need to coordinate with other students who have faced similar problems on campuses around the country and even around the world that it has become acceptable in far too many places to tolerate what was thought a generation ago to constitute antisemitism and assorted hatred.

Part of the problem with the whole Columbia issue is that it pales in comparison to some of what goes on elsewhere in the world. The student government of the School of Oriental Studies, which is part of the University of London, is openly antisemitic, and has attempted to ban all Jewish speakers who are not avowly anti-Zionist while permitting a full range of Muslim speakers, including Holocaust deniers and open advocates of terrorism.

This issue with the professors is familiar to most students who have encountered what might be called the Arabist element that is so prominent in Middle East Studies today. The head of the Middle East Studies Association is Juan Cole, a guy who refers to everyone on the issue he disagrees with as "far-right" and appears to believe in frankly ludicrous theories of Jewish influence in Washington and elsewhere. I think he is more the norm than the exception. A public approach would highlight these people without doing the McCarthyite thing and adding additional accusations to their dossiers a la Daniel Pipes made to make them look anti-American and generally evil people. Our argument is stronger than theirs. Our principles are stronger than theirs. This is what has made us effective in the past, not the nasty, self-defeating bullying tactics that guys like Pipes tend to favor.

In the end, I think a little bit of both strategies would serve us well, along with a commitment to promote Jewish-Arab dialogue on campus to ensure that college campuses do not become full-blown extensions of the conflicts as they have in Europe and elsewhere.

OpinionJournal Sucks

2005-03-03T18:16:00.000-05:00

I used to like reading James Taranto's OpinionJournal for a mix of decent conservative ideology and an admittedly funny skewering of some of the excesses of modern liberalism. (I confess, despite holding many liberal positions, to enjoy this kind of skewering, which I used to read in US News and World Report written by John Leo, because I found a lot of it to be accurate.) Now I can't stand him; it seems like the whole point of OpinionJournal is to bash anything left of center and to serve as a shill for the Republican National Committee. There is not an original idea left in the daily diatribe Taranto sends out.

What really sucks is that Taranto wastes time on stories that are so old that it is annoying to read about them. Today's post is a perfect example; it contains yet more Dan Rather-bashing, yet more Max Cleland-bashing, yet more bashing of the anti-war organization, Move-on.org. Kerry-bashing continues (Taranto has the childish habit of calling people names and identifying them by disrespectful phrases). A mention of Ted Kennedy does not come without a reference to Chappaquidik. Kerry is referred to as "haughty" and "French-looking".

This is like, really lame. Taranto should cut this nonsense out of his daily post and try and come up with an original idea for a change.

Update to Links

2005-02-26T15:56:00.000-05:00

I have included a link in the "Israeli Newspapers" section to the new English edition of Yediot Acharonot. It is the most widely-read newspaper in Israel.

Also, I have removed the link to Blueear.com, which ceased publication last week. Blueear was good while it lasted, but apparently Ethan Casey just didn't have enough time to devote to it. Its successor is called "Globalear". Blueear was very good as an edited set of pieces on varied topics by writers from around the world. Then it changed into just another discussion forum posting board. The new edition needs an editor, and needs to return to the old format.

New Letter in the Jewish Week

2005-02-24T12:23:00.000-05:00

I finally got a letter into the Jewish Week after a number of unsuccessful attempts.

This one is in response to an article in which Nathan Laufer characterized Ariel Sharon as a latter-day Korach.

The extreme settlers and their allies have been writing in the most heated terms (guess I can't really blame them, since they're about to lose). I thought this particular op-ed was noticeable for being exactly 180 degrees from reality.

Sharon’s Legitimacy

Nathan Laufer has Korach and Moses mixed up (“Legality Vs. Legitimacy in Gaza Pullout,” Feb. 18). Today it is Sharon who is Moses, and the opponents of disengagement, some of whom are threatening to use violence to disrupt the government’s policy, who are Korach.

Mr. Laufer’s thinly veiled extremism leads him to compare Ariel Sharon, a democratically elected leader whose policies are supported by the majority of Israelis, with Henri Petain, a Nazi quisling —yet another regrettable instance of the extreme wing of the settlers and their allies comparing Ariel Sharon to a Nazi for evacuating Jews from Gaza.

It is time to end this incitement, and for people like Nathan Laufer to realize that it is they who represent the threat to legitimacy and legality in Israel, not Israel’s democratically elected, overwhelming popular leader.

Michael Brenner
Woodmere, N.Y.

The Republican Jewish Coalition: A Bunch of Hacks

2005-02-17T21:42:00.000-05:00

The Republican Jewish Coalition is apparently trying to show that they can play as dirty as the Republican National Committee by trying to link Howard Dean, the new Democratic National Committee chair, to terrorism. Except that it's not so funny because as any responsible Jewish leader knows, Israel is not a political football; it has bipartisan support. That's why National Jewish Democratic Council does not use Israel as a political tool against the Republicans.

It's no surprise, I guess; if Jews can be radical leftists, there's no reason they can't be radical rightists as well. This falls more in the stupidity category, and will backfire.

The Knesset Situation

2005-02-10T13:31:00.000-05:00

Talks have resumed this week between Israel and the Palestinians (and the Egyptians and the Jordanians). Headheeb has a great post about the political struggles Ariel Sharon faces at home.

Headheeb places the chances of Ariel Sharon pushing the budget through at 70 percent. When you read his post, you will find that even when something is 70 percent certain in Israel, it still takes a Megillah to explain why. No one ever said democracy was pretty, but when it comes to Israel . . . I'll just say that sometimes you don't want to know how gefilte fish is made before you eat it.

Jonah Goldberg and Juan Cole

2005-02-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I posted my email discussion with Juan Cole based on inaccurate comments he had made about the Middle East Media Research Institute. Cole dismissed me in his arrogant way. Now Jonah Goldberg of the National Review finds himself in a similar fight. He cites the posts of yours truly in his latest salvo as an example of why he finds Cole to be arrogant, and why he thinks debating him on the Middle East would be a waste of time. The original post refuting Cole's MEMRI critique is here and the post featuring my email discussion with Cole is here.

Anti-Zionism or Antisemitism: You make the call

2005-02-06T01:59:00.000-05:00

Apparently, the Student Union at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies has been taking lessons from the Mark Elf School of Debate, where opposing views are censored. According the Guardian, the Union

set a policy last November which made the elimination of "foreign occupation, apartheid, [and] Zionism" as a prerequisite for peace a fundamental belief of the union. Hosting an official from the Israeli embassy would compromise this, [Kavita Meelu, co-president of the union responsible for its societies] said in an email.

This policy was cited by the Union when they tried to ban an Israeli embassy official who had been invited by the Jewish Society from speaking at the school as part of a debate. To their credit, the school's authorities stepped in and forced the Union to reverse that decision.

Is the Union anti-Zionist or antisemitic, or both? Doubtless, the leadership of the Union will defend this policy on anti-racism or anti-imperialism grounds.

Don't believe the hype.

A quick perusal of the website of SOAS's Islamic Society, which is under the Student Union's jurisdiction, reveals that they have hosted such speakers as Professor Yakub Zaki, a UK-based Islamic fundamentalist and Holocaust denier who has claimed that Jews were not gassed in concentration camps, and Azzam Tamimi, who has declared himself an advocate of suicide bombing. It is clear from this double standard that the student union's banning of Zionist speakers, besides being an act of censorship, is an ugly example of anti-Jewish hatred disguised as anti-racism.

New Letter in the Guardian

2005-02-02T04:41:00.000-05:00

A letter on the Palestinian elections in the Guardian. For some reason, the Guardian didn't put a link to it on its Israel page, so I missed it until now.

The letter summarizes how I feel about elections. Don't get me wrong; elections make me happy. In truth, I would change one thing; democracy is contingent on more than Abbas making reforms. It should be an effort of the entire Palestinian leadership, not just the efforts of one man. Anyway:

Though the Palestinian elections should be welcomed, the international community should wait to see Mr Abbas's governing style before pronouncing the Palestinian Authority a democracy. Yasser Arafat's so-called democratic election ushered in an era of corruption and despotism. If Mr Abbas does not make the necessary reforms, the PA will be no closer to democracy than it was during Arafat's time. Democratic elections do not a democracy make.

Michael Brenner
New York

New York Times article on Sharansky

2005-02-02T04:23:00.000-05:00

An article in today's Times on Sharansky and the role his book has played on the President.

Evaluating Sharansky

2005-01-30T02:28:00.000-05:00

Natan Sharansky, as I wrote a few days back, is my choice to become the next Israeli Prime Minister. It's becoming apparent to me that he's very misunderstood.

AngryArab asserts that he's opposing Sharon from the right, which makes him a right-wing fanatic. Barry Freedman, who is a right-wing fanatic, wrote in the Jewish Star, a Long Island paper, that he's all for Sharansky because Sharansky insists that the Palestinians democratize before Palestine becomes a state. Then he says he's completely opposed to a Palestinian state under any circumstances.

It's a shame, but Sharansky's image as a right-winger is pretty much solely based on his pro-democracy stance. His criticism of Sharon is not the Barry Freedman-brand, the simple call for Greater Israel. It is that Sharon does not care enough about what is going to happen in Gaza after the Israelis leave. Sharansky's core belief is that a Palestinian entity that is non-democratic is not worth making peace with because the peace will not last. But unlike the right-wing fanatics, he's not a rejectionist. And contrary to the assumptions of the anti-Zionists, being against Disengagement (which many of them are anyway, which should clue them in) does not a right-winger make.

Two things that Sharansky could do to help his case though:

1. He should criticize the Bush administration for its soft stance on Saudi Arabia. The place is a fascist state.

2. He should explain better how Israel can help the Palestinians develop democratic institutions. His op-ed pieces, which are rightly critical of Israel's position of not caring what kind of government the Palestinians have, should now explain, with specifics, what Israeli leaders should do to help Palestinian democracy along.

New Letter in the Jewish Press

2005-01-30T02:03:00.000-05:00

I had a letter in the Jewish Press last week, but for some reason they forgot to put the January 19 letters on the website. The letter criticizes the Press's chastisement of Senate Democrats for occasionally using the filibuster to squelch particularly ideological Bush nominees. As I point out, Republicans did exactly the same thing during the Clinton administration, and far more often too, except that because they had a slight majority, they could bottle nominees up in Committee. This was done to the point of leaving Appeals Courts short of judges.

Anyway, here's my letter:

To the editor:

The Jewish Press is incorrect to join conservative hacks in
complaining about the Democratic use of the filibuster to deny
President Bush a few radical judicial appointments. The truth is that
Republican leaders blocked far more appointments during the Clinton
administration. The difference is that these nominees never made it
to the floor for a vote; Republicans used their majority on the Seante
Judiciary Committee to make sure that never happened. I could be
wrong, but I don't recall the Jewish Press complaining about use of
antidemocratic procedures like these before 2000.

The vast majority of President Bush's judicial nominees have been
overwhelmingly approved. The few that were not were highly partisan
appointments, judges with reputations for being judicial activists
rather than temperate interpreters of the law. Since Democrats do not
have the power to misuse the Senate Judiciary Committee as Republicans
did in the 1990s, the filibuster is the only tool left to them to stop
the President from politicizing the judiciary with conservative
activist judges. Judicial nominees should be uncontroversial enough
to get 60 votes from a body that normally gives judicial nominees far
more than that.

While it is true that the filibuster was used to quash civil rights
legislation through the 1960s, it is also true that the passage of
civil rights with the two-thirds majority to gain cloture of debate
and defeat the filibuster made clear the overwhelming support of
Americans for comprehensive civil rights legislation in 1964. Had
such important legislation passed with a close majority, it might very
well have denied the President the political capital necessary to
enforce the Civil Rights Act properly in Southern states, and we might
have had a continuation of Jim Crow policies. When the Brown v. Board
of Ed decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, Chief Justice
Earl Warren worked hard to make sure that the decision was unanimous,
because he realized the risk that a close decision might be ignored in
the South, undermining the rule of law.

A final note: regardless of Bush's reelection in 2004, it is utterly
disingenuous to suggest that this signalled public approval of
Administration policy on treatment of detainee at Guantanamo Bay and
Abu Ghraib. The overwhelming majority of Americans were outraged by
the Abu Ghraib pictures, and it is more than fair to surmise
Gonzales's role in forming policy on the detainees. Many Democrats,
and conservative Republicans such as Lindsay Graham and Chuck Hegel,
want are straight answers to fair questions on these issues, and Mr.
Gonzales has rightly garnered criticism for not providing them.

Michael Brenner, Woodmere

The original editorial is here. It starts around the middle of the page.

More on Binationalism

2005-01-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

An expansion on yesterday's comments.

Tony Judt has called his idea Binationalism, but by labeling Zionism an "anachronism", he took himself out of an historical line in Zionist thinking which called for a binational state. The binational view was propounded by Judah Magnes, the first President of Hebrew University, and Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher. Before my Zionist friends issue immediate condemnations of both of them, I remind them that in the 1940s, when it was not at all clear that Israel would become a state, the binational solution made much more sense than it does today. (Nevertheless, this history disproves any Judt attempt to cast his idea as somehow original.)

Nevertheless, Judt insists that he has not called for the destruction of Israel. I have no idea how he reconciles his two views. He doesn't believe in a Jewish state, that much is clear. His solution is guaranteed to lead to a Palestinian majority, that much is clear. The Palestinians are not going to be keen to let Israel be a Jewish state, that much is clear. He's therefore for Israel's destruction.

I made reference to the charge that Judt has internalized the anti-Zionist invective that has been hurled at him. This is the view of Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, and can be found here. His article, a response to Judt's New York Review of Book piece, is one of the better defenses against anti-Zionism available today.

An anti-Zionist Gains Undeserved Prominence

2005-01-27T01:55:00.000-05:00

Academia seems to love anti-Zionist Jews nowadays, and Tony Judt is no exception. Judt, a European scholar who has, like many anti-Zionist intellectuals invited to speak in academic fora, no apparent academic link to either the Middle East or Jewish Studies, suddenly became prominent in 2003 when he penned an article in the New York Review of Books entitled, "Israel: The Alternative". In this article, he called for a binational state, labelled Zionism an "anachronism", and called Israel "bad for the Jews". More recently, he published an article in the Nation magazine, in which he laid blame for the recent worldwide spike in antisemitism at Israel's feet, and repeated in print what he had said in public, accusing the American Jewish community of exaggerating the threat of antisemitism and writing that some aspects of US foreign policy were "mortgaged" to Israel. Mr. Judt has expanded on his theories in public comment, which can be heard here.

In his comments, he levels a number of charges which are simply not true; among them, that debating Israel's existence is something that would never find its way into the New York Times, a thinly-veiled attempt to claim that the Jewish lobby controls the media. In fact, the Times has allowed a number of such views to appear on its op-ed page, most recently PLO counsel Michael Tarazi's. Another is that he is simply being honest and that most Israelis have no problem speaking about the topics he addresses. It's simply not true; despite the heroic place he claims for himself, no one, least of all eastern college campuses, is suppressing anti-Zionist speech, and the vast majority of Israelis remain Zionists. And people who evince support for a Jewish state are not being dishonest. He finally uses a disingenuous device to suggest that a large segment of Israel believes in ethnic cleansing, citing Effi Eitam's statements as if they were indicative of mainstream viewpoints within Israel. They are not.

He has clearly internalized the anti-Zionist hatred that has probably been hurled at him by European and American colleagues, though he vehemently denies this.

What has gotten me on his case is that my alma mater, Vassar College, has invited him to deliver the Sitomer Lecture. The Sitomer Lecture is a lecture on some Jewish-related topic given in memory of Maurice Sitomer, a Poughkeepsie native who was a leader in the Anti-Defamation League and a longtime pro-Israel activist. Judt has clearly devoted the last two years to belittling the antisemitism problem and to delegitimizing Israel at the same time, and it is simply inappropriate to honor him in this way.

Debate in Britain

2005-01-16T15:00:00.000-05:00

From the people who brought you such debating topics as, "Breathing Not Needed to Live" and "Killing Yourself Slowly Is a Great Virtue" comes a debate with a resolved entitled, "Zionism Today Is The Real Enemy of The Jews". The debate was sold out. I hope they have a transcript; it should make for some amusing (or amusing if it wasn't so scary) reading.

The motion carried by a small margin. ALERT: Anti-Zionists of the British sort will pounce on this in a sorry effort to prove that the anti-Zionists in the debate won. In reality, it means little except that there were more anti-Zionists in the audience than Zionists. As the website will show, one recent audience voted for the statement, "The British Empire was a Force for Good". So either it's all about the audience in attendence, or the anti-Zionist movement is full of people who endorse British colonialism. Not that I would put it past them, since some left-wing newspapers like the Guardian still see no hypocrisy (let alone antisemitism) in refusing to use the word "terrorism" to describe what Palestinian suicide bombers do, but describing as terrorism Jewish actions against British targets in the pre-state era, but I think the former explanation is the right one. (Another past audience voted for the statement, "The Sharon Plan is Currently the Best Hope for Progress in the Middle East").

That Amira Haas appears on this panel as a working journalist is quite strange to say the least. Gideon Levy, at least, makes no secret of his pro-Palestinian politics. I would think that this confirms her bias and it would only be common sense to read her dispatches, which I often do, with a finer tooth comb now. Perhaps she drank too much of the sea in Gaza.

Scalia and Breyer on Foreign Law and the Constitution

2005-01-15T22:24:00.000-05:00

Justices Scalia and Breyer had a very important discussion on the use of foreign law in constitutional cases. The transcript may be found here.

Stalinists of the Israeli-Palestinian discussion

2005-01-12T14:49:00.000-05:00

Well, Mark Elf, the anti-Zionist of Jews Sans Frontieres, has taken to erasing my comments when I dare to take him on at any length. Of course, he has a right to do so; it's his blog, his propaganda. That's not going to stop me from losing all respect for him in the process, though; one who erases views one disagrees with does not have the courage of his convictions. If it were me, I'd love having people with contrary views post comments. Perhaps I will take his advice and simply post more on my own blog, which he hopefully won't try to erase. Mark can have his closed-minded echo chamber and cover his ears when he hears something he doesn't like. Just like a three-year-old.

Jews Sans Frontieres is a fairly typical example of what anyone right of radical left can expect at an anti-Zionist blog; most of the posters are nasty people, and logic is not their strong suit. They are retrogade when it comes to history, and they are often not even up on their own arguments.

The Cowards of the anti-war left

2005-01-09T13:18:00.000-05:00

Nick Cohen has written a good article in the British Observer on his problems with the anti-war left.

How The Arab Street Views Terrorism (Warning: May Shock the Squeamish)

2005-01-08T04:41:00.000-05:00

In light of all this talk about what is and what is not a terrorist
act, a new poll shows, among many other frightening things, that the
average joe in the Arab world does not have time for fancy-schmancy
liberal European distinctions between Jews in settlements and Jews
within the Green Line. Scarily enough, they don't have time for the
even more fancy-schmancy distinctions between Jews within the Green
Line and Jews anywhere else in the world either. The poll appears to
show that most of the Arab world supports the murder of innocent
Jewish people, no matter where they are, despite the way the poll's
author, a Jordanian, attempts to spin the results.

Some results of the poll can be found at:

http://opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-103-2298.jsp

Hopefully, Europeans who love to blame Israelis for Europe's
antisemitism problems will take note of this poll and put the blame in
the right place.

The Arabs need to dig themselves out of this, and we as Americans must find a way to help them. Numbers like these are not simple politics, as the author of the poll suggests. Numbers like these suggest that these views are at least a little entrenched.

Sharansky for Prime Minister

2005-01-06T23:56:00.000-05:00

It was a something of a shock in 2003 when the Jerusalem Post endorsed Natan Sharansky, then head of the Yisrael B'Aliyah party, for Prime Minister, but it was the right call.

While President Bush's pro-democracy statements are difficult to take seriously because of the gross incompetence of his administration's handling of Iraq, Natan Sharansky's are tried and true. And his critique of Oslo and Israel's attitude toward the Palestinians, restated in Thursday's Ha'aretz, are very close to my own.

In 2001, when I was finishing out my four years at Vassar College, I had a weekly column in the school newspaper. What I never liked about Oslo was exactly what Sharansky disliked about it; Yasir Arafat was going to be the Palestinian leader. But it wasn't only because Arafat had so much blood on his hands. It was because he was a despot, and because the Palestinian Authority would become a dictatorship under his rule. And when I asked an Israeli high up in the Consulate about what Israel was doing to ensure that the Palestinians developed a democracy, I got the standard answer. Israel really didn't care, I was told. It's up to them how they run their nation. Israel just wanted to be rid of them.

This made me unhappy, because I knew deep down that even if the Oslo process produced an agreement, it was not likely to endure for long if it was a cold peace, a peace where Israelis and Palestinians did not care about what happened to the other. Israel cannot afford a despotic Palestine, and cannot afford to have with the Palestinians what they have with the Egyptians.

So when I got back to Vassar (I had asked the question during an information session at the National Model United Nations conference, where I was participating as a teaching assistant/assistant coach for Vassar's team), I wrote a column about it. The column was also a plug for a conference at Vassar that I helped put together.

Here's the column, from the April 27, 2001 edition of Vassar's Miscellany News (with minor copy edits):

On Tuesday, April 24, in Rocky 300, there will be a panel on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that will include prominent, non-governmental affiliated panelists from both sides. I urge all of you to come. As one of the organizers of the panel, I had, like others, envisioned it as an educational endeavor. But after hearing both Israeli and Jordanian foreign officials speak on the peace process at the National Model United Nations conference down in New York City this week, I don't think the combination of professors, writers, and clergy that we will have with us this week could do worse than the high-ranking public servants that I observed and questioned this week.

How bad was it? Well, I'll characterize my feelings by saying that my previous enthusiasm for the peace process has officially finished dying a slow and painful death.

The Israeli representative gave his talk, and it was pretty much what I expected. No negotiation until Arafat puts a stop to Palestinian violence, blah, blah, blah. I asked him this question: "Sir, people say that Arafat has become very marginalized lately, and this is at least in part because he runs the Palestinian National Authority as a corrupt dictatorship. What is Israel doing, and what is being done within the peace process context, to ensure that the Palestinians have at least some small chance to develop a democracy?" His answer startled me.

"Well," he said, "We're just interested in making peace. We don't want to impede on the sovereignty of a new Palestinian state. And with regard to the Arab world, we can't wait for democracy. We're going to negotiate with whomever is in charge."

Sovereignty? The Israelis are worried about Palestinian sovereignty? A border state is about to be created from the old territories, and the Israelis don't care what kind of government it has? This is your "cold" peace, which is not peace at all. This is what happens when negotiations sink to the lowest common denominator and peace becomes a euphemism for the much lesser accomplishment of ceasing hostilities. It's like saying that if Mrs. Smith places Timmy and Tommy at opposite ends of the class so that they can't fight, it means that they'll become friends and won't fight after school. Separation is no permanent solution. At the very best, it could be part of an overall solution to eventually unite both peoples if it was accompanied by educational and infrastructural mandates to eliminate the hate that exists toward Jews and Israel in the Palestinian and Arab worlds and strengthen the programs that exist in Israeli schools. But it's clear that right now, neither side is thinking along those lines.

While the Israeli diplomat highlighted the absence of long-term thinking among Israeli peacemakers, the Jordanian diplomat, who was educated in the West like many members of the Arab aristocracy, highlighted the fundamental problem that results when elites fail to remember that foreign policy is supposed to be conducted on behalf of their peoples, rather than on behalf of themselves. There were two things he said that were particularly telling. The first prompted my question which, in turn, prompted the second. In a short speech, the Jordanian nobly announced that when he had visited Israel about 20 years ago, he had been startled by the country's development and had become convinced that Israel was in the Middle East to stay.

I raised my hand. "Sir," I said, "I can't tell you how happy I am that you've personally decided to recognize Israel as a geographic reality. Unfortunately, the refugees tend to disagree with you. Many of them see Israel as the Zionist enemy, and yet, they want to return and live there, citing UN Resolution 194, which predicates the right of return on the desire to live in peace. Why should the Israeli government accept them?"

"Well," he said, "I think this is an issue that the Israeli public is afraid of, but you know, government inevitably progresses and eventually leaders have to make decisions and pull the people along with them. I think that this is eventually what will happen with the Israeli government. Barak was an example of that."

In truth, he wasn't too far off the mark. The problem was that he was describing the way Arab leaders traditionally do business. Foreign policy is conducted by the people at the top with no input from the population themselves. It is then handed to the people. Barak was an example of that; he acted like an Arab leader rather than as a representative of a democracy when he tried to craft an agreement with Arafat at Camp David without public or parliamentary support. He was, in a manner of speaking, guilty of what Israel and the United States often accuse Arafat of doing - not preparing his people for peace. Like Arab leaders, he did little internally to secure the blessing of his population before he put most of the sacred cows of the Jewish people on the table. For this, he lost his job.

The peace process has turned into a race to the bottom; in the frenzy to end violence for a while, both sides have become blind to the larger picture. If the Israelis think democracy in the Arab world is not an essential element of peace, they are setting themselves up for more strife and suffering in the future. And as long as Arab leaders persist in their belief that peace can be made for those who desire no such thing, they will find themselves at continued odds with the State of Israel. Until both sides state recognizing the conflict as something mroe than an issue of ceasing hostilities, peace will not be anywhere near the horizon.

Sri Lanka is NOT rejecting aid from Israel

2005-01-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

In a blow to anti-Zionists everywhere, Sri Lanka is not putting the views of anti-Zionists above saving the lives of its own people.

I now have it on pretty good authority that Sri Lanka is indeed gratefully accepting Israeli help.

Now, why would the BBC and so many others misreport this story?

See below, a letter that was sent to synagogue Presidents across the US.

Dear Fellow presidents,

I have just seen a link sent to us all to a BBC story that Sri Lanka has
rejected help from Israel. Please be aware, my husband works for Magen David
Adom USA and that Sri Lanka (and the other countries) are indeed accepting
help from Israel. Israel is coordinating their efforts with the IRC to
ensure that the most effective help will arrive in a timely way. They have
already sent medical supplies and teams of doctors and others to help in
rescue efforts. Despite what you have read (and really folks, how often do
the papers, especially the BBC get it wrong!!) Israel is sending help and it
is very gratefully being accepted.

If possible, please let your congregations know that what they have read is
definitely incorrect.

Cynthia Palmer-Kenzer
President
Kehillat Shalomm (40)
Skokie, IL

Sri Lanka and Israel scandal - A Lot of Hot Air?

2005-01-02T01:54:00.000-05:00

The more I look at this Sri Lanka-Israel story, the more I'm convinced that it's nonsense, and that Sri Lanka refused the IDF team becauuse they simply had too many requests to deal with. A inquiry to Honestreporting came back with a tentative answer that this is probably what is going on.

The only question is why the story was reported as if this was a diplomatic incident.

Tsunamis and Politics

2005-01-02T01:15:00.000-05:00

The Tsunami story is undoubtedly the story of 2004 and should become one of the major stories of 2005. It has to be; a natural disaster that causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people must be a major priority.

Donations can go to a number of a organizations; I recommend the American Jewish World Service, which has long specialized in providing help to the developing world.

Around the world, there are a number of other possibilities:

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
The B'nai Brith is also helping.
In the UK: World Jewish Aid

When I wrote a couple of days ago that certain people care more about hating Israel than loving their own, some mistook me to mean Muslims. I made no such statement, and regret any misunderstanding.

Anyone who refuses Israeli government aid for political reasons is in this category. Anyone in the West who supports nonsense like this on anti-Zionist grounds . . . don't come near me for a while, because right now, I don't much feel like talking to you.

I am holding off any more comment because I want to find out more about this story before I say anything else. Something about this seems reporter created.

Hating Jews More Than Loving Their Children

2004-12-30T01:57:00.000-05:00

Two stories on the Albawaba, an site that is one of the Middle East's largest content providers, features two articles that truly suggest that certain people in this world hate Israel more than they love their own people.

One, very sadly, is about the refusal of Sri Lanka, recently hit by the Tsunami Earthquake, to accept an Israeli rescue team. The other is an antisemitic article questioning why a Jewish doctor was allowed to treat Yasir Arafat.

Just to put things in perspective, one of the founders of Albawaba is Brian Whitaker, the chief Middle East correspondent for the Guardian in England.

Two good pieces in Ha'aretz

2004-12-28T22:10:00.000-05:00

Two excellent pieces in Ha'aretz today.

The first is by Yoel Marcus, my favorite Israeli columnist and one of the best political writers around. It analyzes the new blood in Israel's Labor Party. The second is by Jacob Lupu, discussing the recent High Court decision in Israel to suspend government funding of Haredi yeshivot who fail to offer secular studies to their students, and provides a long history of the often acrimonious debate over whether such studies should be offered.

Middle East Transparent: Let the Liberal Arab Revolution Go Forth

2004-12-27T20:26:00.000-05:00

Next time someone tells you there is no hope for the Arab world, direct them to Middle East Transparent, a new website devoted to the views of Arab liberals. Yes, there is a considerable helping of neoconservative writing here too, but the writers include Abu Khawla, the former head of the Tunisian section of Amnesty International.

Khawla's latest piece analyzes why the Arab World has maintained a deafening silence on the Sudan crisis, where the Arab government has carried out of program of enslavement and murder of both Muslim and Christian Black Africans.

Another interesting article on the site discusses the ethnic cleansing of Iraq's 2600 year old Jewish community in the 1940s and early 1950s. Some anti-Zionist have sought to deny the themes of this story or to blame Israel for the dismantling of Iraq's Jewish community.

Both articles recommended.

Furtwangler and Brahms Fourth

2004-12-11T03:41:00.000-05:00

Schroeder, of Peanuts fame, once said that when he wanted an uplifting experience, he listened to Brahms Fourth. (For those of you who think Schroeder's a one-composer cartoon character.)

I have a few recordings of Brahms' Fourth Symphony, but one stands out from all the rest: the Berlin Philharmonic's recording under Wilhelm Furtwangler's direction. This is a live recording . . .

I have to interrupt; that moment in the second movement is playing, the one with the swelling strings that is the emotional core of the Fourth's slow movement. Every time I listen to this version of it, this moment, and the one about minute and a half later where the french horn play the movement's theme for a final time, gives me goosebumps, literally. I get warmed up. It's the sound of the orchestra, the commitment of the orchestra. It's a wholeness in the sound. It's something that only Furtwangler seemed to able to do, and only when he was conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. It's a moment here and there when it gets to me like this; something similar happens when I listen to the same forces at the beginning of the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert from 1954, where the BPO plays with a darkness that I have not heard equaled by anyone.

And yet, this was most likely made in 1943, in Nazi Germany, in an orchestra purged of its Jews which included its concertmaster, Szymon Goldberg. I feel guilty enjoying it as much as I do.

Furtwangler helped to save the Jews in the BPO, and yet, he is the subject of debate because he chose to remain in Germany during the war. For those who accord the artist responsibility during wartime and tyranny, Furtwangler is a villain who at best allowed himself to be used by the regime. For those who are less demanding, Furtwangler is a man who never became a Nazi, fought the regime as best as he knew how by doing things like standing up for Paul Hindemith in 1934, saving Jewish friends when he could, trying to refuse requests from Nazi leaders to play concerts in Hitler's honor (though he didn't always succeed), getting plainly mistreated by the regime, which sullied his reputation abroad by suggesting that he was a Nazi when he wasn't and by purposely talking up Herbert von Karajan, a real Nazi, in order to dull his prestige, and giving performances that are, frankly, considered some of the greatest performances of basic repertoire there are.

I've always wondered about this paradox. Furtwangler arguably gave his greatest performances during the war. They stretch the music to its limits; the greatest example of this is the 1942 Beethoven 9th, something unique for its blazing intensity, the utter commitment of slowness of the third movement. It's the work of a troubled genius, and more than one critic has speculated that performances like these were in part artistic statements against the regime.

Brenner and Cole Discussion

2004-12-02T15:20:00.000-05:00

My email discussion with Juan Cole. I invited him to comment. He refuses:

BRENNER:

Dear Professor Cole:

I have posted a response to your post on MEMRI on my own blog,
http://mlbrenner.blogspot.com and would be interested in your
comments, particularly to the concluding portion of my post.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Michael Brenner

COLE:

Dear Michael:

There are some positions (positions, not people) that don't lend
themselves to fruitful dialogue. The one you have sketched out is one of them.

I have not "admitted" that I have no source for my figure on MEMRI
financing. They declare almost $2 million a year in the US alone and have offices in several capitals, and scanning the entire Arabic press would not be an inexpensive operation or one that could be done from Washington, DC.

Far from being "anti-Israeli," I wrote against the European boycott of Israeli academics, and am among the few Middle East experts from the US to be involved in a multi-year joint project with Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities.

It is true that I abhor Ariel Sharon and everything he stands for. In that I think you will find I have many Israeli analogues.

JRIC

BRENNER:

I have heard this line of reasoning before and disagree with you,
acknowledging that if by fruitful dialogue you mean a discussion where there is a good chance that I might take on some of your opinions, it is not likely. I have noticed that when people fear losing an argument, they decline to participate, citing the risk of fruitless discussion, regardless of political position. If, however, we can have a discussion on topics that leads to increased understanding, then I think it is worth it.

You seem too sensitive to semantic minutiae, especially for someone
who is not averse to throwing around political labels like "far-right" and so on. You are not pro-Israeli, though I'm relatively sure you would say that your criticisms can only help Israel, not hurt it. You do not seem to be especially friendly to positions which acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. You are entitled to characterize your own position as you like. Labels are an admittedly imperfect form of communication, and if you take issue with mine, you can ignore them. But when I see someone citing MERIP and people like Kurt Nimmo and Robert Fisk, I have a hard time concluding that such a person is friendly to Israel.

I sincerely commend you on your stand against the European boycott,
though I must say that standing against an act of racism like that
does not matter either way for assessing your position on the
conflict.

I still think you played fast and loose with the facts here. You have not set out a source for your $60 million number, and that is your responsibility, since you made the original claim. I sincerely hope that your thought process was not to extrapolate that because MEMRI is essentially an organization run by Jewish people with American and Israeli funding sources, that it therefore must have a great deal of money behind it.

And I don't think MEMRI reads every Arab newspaper every day. It
looks at government presses and probably pulls most of its stuff off
the Net. It translates a few articles a day, if that.

And as I said, there would be no need for them for others like
yourself presented an accurate picture of the Arab world, a place
where, unfortunately, hard-core antisemitic beliefs have taken hold.
This was my central point.

It is interesting that you felt the need to remind me that you abhor
Ariel Sharon even though I did not mention Sharon in my post. MEMRI
does not profess to be pro-Sharon, even though both of its founders
were opposed to Oslo, and I would wager that a good number of MEMRI
readers are not pro-Sharon either. (And why does their position on
Oslo make any difference?) Thomas Friedman and New York Times are
certainly not pro-Sharon.

If it is pro-Sharon to point out instances of antisemitic hatred in
the Arab press and trumpet liberal Arab voices, then you are
illustrating my point, which is that the left has become soft on
antisemitism. And these voices are secular and religious, contrary to what you claimed.

I myself think the major reason for this is that the Left relies a
great deal on class warfare, and because it sees Jews as a successful minority group, it sees antisemitism as a less important issue. I'm not necessarily averse to class warfare, but it is ironic that the people most protected by ignoring antisemitism in the Arab world are ultra-wealthy Arab elites who use the stuff to keep their peoples in line.

I again extend an invitation for you to comment and appreciate your
writing back to me.

Thank you,

Michael Brenner

COLE:

This is dreary. I have repeatedly said that I support Israel's right to exist as a Jewish stated.

Please find someone else to argue with and/or demonize.

cheers Juan

BRENNER:

I'm sorry you feel that way. Your refusal to engage in a very
legitimate and moderate form of debate is really quite unfortunate.
With regard to what you describe as "demonizing", you are hardly a
model of level-headed critiquing. I have no intention of demonizing
you; I am merely positing an argument. I've been quite polite in the process of doing so.

I believe I have made clear my view that the Left is not taking
antisemitism as seriously as the Right and is thus ceding moral
capital to the right in the process. Your playing fast and loose with the facts in evaluating MEMRI is merely symptomatic of this
phenomenon; I don't believe you would be as damning of a pro-Arab
organization if it did the same thing. I'm not accusing you or
demonizing you in any way; I don't believe you are antisemitic, much
as you sometimes rely on sources that I would describe as antisemitic.

As I said, you are free to ignore my approximate labels if you wish,
since they are not essential to my argument.

If this is indeed the attitude you insist on taking, I can see why you view debate as a fruitless endeavor. It is an unbecoming attitude for an intellectual, in my view. If this is indeed your attitude, I am not sure why you bothered to respond to me in the first place. I hope you don't treat your students this way. My Middle East studies professor at Vassar, Andy Davison, who holds many views similar to yours, was far more welcoming of opinions from across the political spectrum.

My invitation to you to comment remains open.

Sincerely,

Michael Brenner

The Deceptive Juan Cole and MEMRI

2004-11-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

Academics do themselves and their students a great disservice when they substitute preaching for teaching. Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, runs a blog called "Informed Comment" which has received considerable attention, much of it from the echo-chamber on the far-left. However, Cole touched off a wider debate this month when he decided to take a shot at a favored anti-Israel target, the Middle East Media Research Institute, better known as MEMRI. Cole's accusations were typically exaggerated and unbalanced, probably intentionally so.

Cole's original comment on MEMRI was almost comical in addition to being wrong. He accused MEMRI of:

1. Having $60,000,000 budget (yeah, you read that right);

2. "[C]leverly cherry-pick[ing] the vast Arabic press, which serves 300 million people, for the most extreme and objectionable articles and editorials. It carefully does not translate the moderate articles."; and of being

3. "[O]ne of a number of public relations campaigns essentially on behalf of the far right-wing Likud Party in Israel that tries to shape American perceptions of Muslims and the Middle East in a negative direction."

Yigal Carmon, who runs MEMRI, proceeded to e-mail Cole and threaten him with a lawsuit. Carmon said that he had no idea where Cole got the $60 mil figure from, reminded Cole that MEMRI does not, in fact, look only for antisemitic articles and articles critical of the United States, but also for progressive Arab articles, and told Cole that he had nothing to do with the Likud party.

Cole admitted
that he had no source for his $60 million quote, mischaracterized Carmon's reminder that progressive Arab voices were emphasized on MEMRI, and repeated his guilt-by-association accusations that MEMRI was a Likud house organ because Carmon and Meyrav Wurmser, who is MEMRI's co-founder, are identified as being on the right.

Cole's well-known as an anti-Israel activist, but his MEMRI claims are worth commenting upon because a number of left-wingers have made them.

I read a lot of what MEMRI puts out, and they are (surprise), not in the business of providing the Arab world with good public relations, which monarchical ambassadors with good English who school at Georgetown and Harvard, along with European leaders like Jacques Chirac and Western Arabist professors like Mr. Cole who dominate Middle Eastern studies in the US and Europe, are quite adept at doing. They do indeed spend time translating what people like Mr. Cole do not, the daily barrage of antisemitic filth that appears in the Arab presses. Mr. Cole seems to believe that this practice is unjustified because it does not include the moderate voices, but he fails to ask the obvious question, which is: Why aren't any of the pro-Arab organizations and academics he is constantly boosting doing what MEMRI is doing in addition to providing their take on the Arab world? Why are accusations of rampant antisemitism in the Arab world met with accusations toward Israel first rather than condemnation first?

And why isn't Mr. Cole thankful that MEMRI provides progressive Arab voices from the Arab media to an extent that few others do? These articles (which are not, as Mr. Cole erroneously claims, all written by secularists) suggest that there are indeed voices in the mainstream of the Arab world who are horrified by the hatred that is a part of the mainstream Arab discourse. They suggest that the problems of the Arabs are not insoluble. Mr. Cole apparently prefers not to highlight these voices; it suggests, as I have argued before, that so-called progressives are not progressives at all, but merely left-wing conservatives who simply cling to a different set of orthodox values. Like many ideologues, these folks do not allow the truth to get in the way of their politics.

There is little question that highlighting antisemitic articles in the Arab press and providing self-critical Arab voices is a favorite activity of right-wingers. The response should not be to question the motivation. The response of left-wingers should be to ask why highlighting antisemitic hatred is not a favorite activity of self-styled left-wing progressives as well. Left-wing progressives claim to be against antisemitism, but they are awfully weak on standing up to it when that means criticizing their unarguably non-progressive de facto allies in the Arab world.

Letter in the Jewish Press: Homosexuality and the Jewish Community

2004-11-19T21:13:00.000-05:00

A new letter in the Jewish Press. My remarks are on homosexuality, in regard to a recent scandal involving the Union for Traditional Judaism, the traditional wing of Conservative Judaism. They had revoked ties with a Brooklyn synagogue who had hired Rabbi Steven Greenberg, a openly gay Orthodox rabbi, to give the sermon on Rosh Hashanah.

This is an exceptionally difficult issue for an organization like UTJ and it illustrates the difficulties caused by mixing modern life with religion. UTJ has taken a firm stand against homosexual relationships, and they felt that allowing a rabbi who is open about his homosexuality to be on the pulpit was against their principles. I thought they made the right decision without causing too much carnage. My general feeling, though, is that the Jewish community must develop a policy for addressing homosexuality that does not alienate gay Jews. Homosexual relations (not homosexuality per se) are, according to a Torah, a sin, but there are far worse sins in my view, and since most Jews commit them in some form (think Lashon Hara), it seems hypocritical, and indeed, a form of copying the nations insofar as the attitude toward homosexuality has been copied from Evangelical Christianity.

Anyway, the Jewish Press has published an editorial opining that the UTJ's response wasn't strong enough.

Here is the letter:

Flawed Editorial?

In a recent editorial, you condemned the Union for Traditional Judaism as a "(watered-down) bastion of halachic rectitude" for failing to come out unequivocally enough against the Montauk Minyan`s inviting Rabbi Steven Greenberg, an openly gay Orthodox rabbi ordained at Yeshiva University, to give a sermon on Rosh Hashanah. You also decried the notion that the halachic views of one who violates a fundamental Judaic precept are deserving of respect. You even claimed that such an idea "would indeed come as news to generations of codifiers and explicators of Jewish law, spiritual giants whose priority was sanctification, not homogenization."

I could not disagree more. The UTJ response to the Montauk Minyan`s invitation to Rabbi Greenberg deserves commendation precisely because it stands in stark contrast to the scorched earth approach taken by too many rabbis and others on the hard right of the Orthodox spectrum, an approach which (wrongly) condemns homosexuality (even though the oft-quoted Vayikrah verse condemns homosexual sex, and not homosexuality per se). One need not agree with the entirety of "Trembling before G-d,” the film in which Rabbi Greenberg was featured a couple of years ago, to understand that this self-defeating approach has only driven gay people away from Judaism, rather than helped them to understand traditional Jewish views on the subject.

The UTJ did not attack Rabbi Greenberg`s character. Nor did it condemn his scholarship. It defended a principle without trying to destroy an individual who it felt did not meet its standards. The UTJ had the courage to acknowledge that which some rabbis less secure in their Judaism do not: Rabbi Greenberg deserved a chance to present his case in some forum, even if his ideas are considered by the majority of traditional leaders to be inconsistent with Halachic principles. The principle of open inquiry requires no less.

It is utterly incorrect to claim that the halachic views of one who violates a "fundamental" Judaic precept are unworthy of respect, assuming for our purposes that the invocation against homosexual sex is a fundamental Judaic precept. (My personal view is that homosexuality is very, very far down on the list on the threats we face as a people if it is on the list at all.) The Talmud, where disagreements over fundamental Jewish practices are common, is inclusive of the views of those who violated what are considered today fundamental principles. Pirkei Avot, our ethical lodestar, includes the views of heretics like Elisha ben Ahuvah. There are rabbinic figures of our own times whose opinions are properly valued though their ethics, sexual and otherwise, have been called into question.

A final point: I cannot help but note that even the UTJ makes the mistake of referring to homosexuality as a "lifestyle." This kind of terminology, by suggesting that the raison d`être for the existence of a gay person is his or her homosexuality, perpetuates the destructive approach I am talking about. The purpose of referring to homosexuality as a lifestyle is clear; by reducing a person who happens to be gay to his homosexuality alone, one can ignore the rest of the person`s attributes, those things that might endear him as a human being to one who otherwise believes that homosexuality is inconsistent with halacha. (It also begs the question of just how people who have seemingly spent little time with homosexuals know so much about the "homosexual lifestyle.")

Michael Brenner
Woodmere, NY

You can also find this letter here, at the bottom of the page. The original editorial may be found here.

Review: Schiff the Eccentric

2004-10-30T01:07:00.000-04:00

The pianist Andras Schiff came to Carnegie Hall Thursday night Irina and I sat in nosebleed land to hear his traversals of the major piano works of Leos Janacek, a set of polkas by Bedrich Smetana, and the third Sonata of Frederick Chopin.

Mr. Schiff has become well-known in part for his ability to new ideas to old works, but in Janacek's deceptively simple On the Overgrown Path, Book I, Mr. Schiff displayed the polyphonic sense which has made him a renown Bach player. He brought out the inner voices of Janacek's sullen rustic score, giving us a feint rustle of leaves here, the eerie stillness surrounding the hooting of an owl there. The score was written in part as a memorial to Janacek's daughter, Olga, who died of typhoid fever in 1903. Mr. Schiff's clear ability as a colorist came through in these short pieces.

Smetana's Poetic Polkas, Op. 8, were somewhat less successful. Smetana attempted to do with these Polkas what Chopic did for the Mazurka; he wanted to elevate a national dance to a high art form. These are charming pieces, but Mr. Schiff took them a bit too seriously, and some of the spontaneity of the Polkas was lost.

Janacek's two major works, his 1.X, 1905 Sonata, and his suite, In the Mists, were well-delivered; the Sonata, a somewhat awkward piece was written to commemorate October 1, 1905, the date a Czech student protesting in favor of a new university was killed by police.

Chopin's 3rd Sonata, his Op. 58, was sluggish and mannered. Known for eccentricity, Mr. Schiff's admittedly original interpretation left much to be desired; he apparently decided to reinterpret Chopin's tempo marking. The first movement Allegro Maestoso was all Maestoso and no Allegro, and was slowed down to such a extent that the movement was robbed of its drama. The Scherzo received similar treatment, coming at a pedestrian stroll rather than at the light, quicksilver Molto vivace that is marked in the score. The Finale continued on this path. Overall, it was a ponderous reading. (The New York Times disagreed with me and called it "sparkling and regal". Regal, yes. Sparkling? Not exactly.)

Mr. Schiff's encores were much better, a Chopin Mazurka and Nocturne, followed by an excellent performance of Mozart's A minor Rondo, K. 511. That Mr. Schiff can play with lucid beauty is self-evident; that he will be different for difference's sake is also self-evident.

International Influence and Constitutional Law

2004-10-22T16:16:00.000-04:00

The opening night of the International Law Association's International Law Weekend began with bang-up discussion of the Supreme Court's recent citations of international law in last term's decisions, and the prospects for its use this coming term. The scholars tend to refer to such citation as a subset of "comparative constitutionalism". Personally, I think that's a bit overwrought; but let me present the views of the panelists before I go further.

Four interesting views were presented by four leading constitutional scholars, and all had merit. Two were con, two were pro. The first was Roger Alford, who attempted to bridge the gap between the court's citation of international law, and the theories of analysis which underlie many of the court's decisions. Alford's theme was that this could not be comfortably done. Originalists, who believe the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of the Founding Fathers and are today's conservatives on the court, use comparative material (Scalia has a yen for Blackstone), but only comparative material that is very old. Majoritarians, who embrace sovereign exercises of majoritarian will in their decision making, necessarily eschew comparative constitutionalism unless it fits within the will of the majority. Living Constitutionalism, which Alford described as "interpretive majoritarianism", views the Constitution as a document which must be reinterpreted by each generation to fit the needs and believes of that generation, generally base their conclusions in the national experience, and thus, according to Alford, are unlikely to find international law useful and thus would not be a good theoretical candidate.

The final part of Alford's presentation a presentation of two good theoretical candidates for an application of comparative constitutionalism: natural law and pragmatism (putting aside for the moment that pragmatism is not much of a theory). Natural law advocates, says Alford, are likely to use phrases such as "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty", the modern definition of substantive due process rights first used in the free speechPalko case, and thus, may see the weight of international opinion as further proof of the correctness of their decisions. The pragmatists, who will necessarily use whatever is necessary to prove their point, will use international law as well, albeit as a gloss on other materials.

Michael Ramsey was the second con. Ramsey, a former Scalia clerk, argued that those who sought to use international law ran into a logic problem. The problem was that those who favored using international law and opinion to make decisions wanted to rely on international law and opinion, but only when it suited them, suggesting Alford's pragmatist view. This, he argued, was hardly principled. If one was going to rely on international law and opinion, one would have to take the good with the bad to be consistent. If the juvenile death penalty were overturned because the vast majority of the international community is against it, why not abandon the Fourth Amendment's protections, since they are further-reaching than almost anywhere else in the world? If international law is a reason to invalidate sodomy laws which persecute gays, what about those countries, and there are many, that continue to hold the homosexuality is an abomination?

The problem with Ramsey's argument, airtight as it was from a certain logical standpoint, was that it was effectively a condemnation of all dicta and all persuasive citation. When a New York court examines a matter of first impression that two other state courts have examined and come to disparate conclusions upon, does not the New York court citation of the opinion of the court it agrees with constitute the same logical problem?

The Pros will come in my next post.

International Law Weekend

2004-10-15T21:08:00.000-04:00

Attended the first full day of the International Law Weekend. I have many things to tell, but you'll have to wait until next week for the details. I'll say only this for now: you learn a tremendous amount at conferences like these, but talking about international law gets depressing when you hear all of these intellectuals speak about how every major problem is insoluble.

As one professor, an optimistic one, said to a pessimistic panelist, "C'mon! You're a creative lawyer!" I think of myself as a creative lawyer. I like to think I think out of the box. The problems of creating an accountable, workable international court system, for instance, are old and difficult and fraught with political realities that we don't like to mention, but if the Soviet Union can fall, anything can happen.

Or maybe these are formally optimistic intellectuals who have encountered reality and have crashed.

Who knows? I'm still young and optimistic enough to look at pessimism as useless.

International Law Weekend 2004

2004-10-14T17:14:00.000-04:00

Tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday afternoon, I will be attending the International Law Association's International Law Weekend at the New York City Bar Association.

The topics are scintillating. The opening session is entitled, "Using International Law to Interpret the Constitution". The court has, of late, been citing the decisions of foreign and international courts in its opinions. A particularly controversial example came in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, which overruled Texas's sodomy law, effectively destroying the final vestiges of laws against homosexuality. The case overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 case which had upheld a similar law in Georgia. In the opinion, Justice Kennedy cited both British decisions, and (this made the originalists, like Justice Scalia, real mad), cited a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.

The two sides of the issue go something like this: those who favor the practice hold that a good court will look to all sources of law to craft an opinion that is well-reasoned and well-founded just as a good student uses as many relevant sources as possible to write a research paper. The superior courts of many countries, Israel in particular, cite foreign courts in their opinions. The originalists argue that to cite international or foreign courts (as opposed to treaties properly ratified by the U.S. Senate) is blasphemous activism, the validation of a body of law that was not made by any democratic process in the United States. Robert Bork, is, predictably, especially critical of the practice of citing international laws and decisions.

I'll have more to say about the conference in the next few days.

Malkovitch plays Copland

2004-10-14T16:36:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, I attended the junior recital of an old friend of mine, Ben Malkovitch. Ben's a pianist and cellist, and like everyone else who is not lucky enough to four arms, he does not play both instruments at the same time. This time, he used his two arms to play the piano.

The recital was given at Hofstra University's Monroe Hall. It was a multimedia effort; Ben gave a presentation on the music he was to perform, which consisted of an interesting little Toccata by Marion Bauer, J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto, Chopin's D-flat Nocturne, Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer (sung wonderfully by another Hofstra student), and Aaron Copland's Piano Sonata, written between 1939 and 1941. The time in between the lecture and the concert was filled by a recording of Mahler's First Symphony, a theme of which arises in the Songs.

The Copland was new to me, and, I bet, new to just about everyone else in the audience. The Sonata has a experimental feel to it, but it is not weighed down by the hyper-intellectualism that pervades many atonal works. Copland was a composer who never allowed the rigor of a form to get in the way of the music. The second movement, a Vivace, is jazz-influenced, though the short motifs that form the foundation of movement tend to obscure the jazz feeling. Twentieth century composers seems to have had a tough time infusing jazz into forms that were not jazz-like; Samuel Barber tried to do the blues in the second movement of his Excursions, and, like a number of other attempts, it came out sounding pretty labored because Samuel Barber, great as he was, was not a jazz musician. Perhaps notating that which is usually improvised is a futile exercise (though Morton Gould pulled it off nicely with his Boogie-Woogie Etude.) Copland is not making such a direct attempt at writing jazz, so perhaps it takes a second listening to pick up.

Gershwin plays Gershwin

2004-10-11T13:49:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting here listening to George Gershwin playing his own arrangements of his own songs for piano. Gershwin recorded eight of these arrangements, four from his show, "Oh, Kay!", and four from "Tip-Toes", all in 1926. I have them on a record with his recordings of Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, his recording of his Three Preludes for Piano, and the first recording of "An American in Paris", Gershwin's tone tryptych of Paris in the 1920s. These recordings represent the balance of Gershwin's studio recordings.

Musicians often flock to composer recordings for obvious reasons - they provide lessons in interpretation straight from the horse's mouth. Not so with Gershwin. Gershwin's recordings are very straight, flat really. His Preludes are delivered with little of the Tin Pan Alley style which makes them such a trip when they are played with feeling. Rhapsody in Blue suffers from a different problem; it's cut short by about half. The most likely is that RCA Victor wanted to get the recording on two sides of a record (a 12 inch 78 RPM record holds about 4 minutes and 30 seconds). But the recording is of great significance because it delivers Paul Whiteman's original jazz band, which will not sound like anything you've ever heard; the wa-wa effects of the trumpets and sound effects written into Ferde Grofe's orchestration come through with a certain freshness.

Gershwin's song arrangements are great, but according to Edward Jablonski's liner notes, they were recorded with the intention of being used as dance records, so they are metronomically monochromatic. And indeed, it's hard to believe Gershwin, the great improviser, would have played them this way were he playing them at some 1920s New York house party or in some Harlem nightclub.

My favorite recording of Rhapsody of Blue is by the pianist Ivan Davis with a jazz orchestra conducted by Maurice Peress. It is part of a 2-CD set entitled, "The Birth of Rhapsody in Blue: Paul Whiteman's Historic Aeolian Hall Concert of 1924". Rhapsody in Blue was premiered at this concert, which Whiteman subtitled, "A Experiment in Modern Music". The recording recreates the original performance. The Aeolian Hall concert was a kind of overview of American popular music written in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The concert featured a collection of songs played by Whiteman's orchestra, novelty pieces for piano, including some fantastic novelty piano works of Zez Confrey, and concluded with the Rhapsody, the 22nd piece on a program which must have at least three hours. (The Confrey pieces, incidentally, are played with great pizazz by Dick Hyman, the jazz piano.) The recording comes with extensive liner notes including a recreation of the original program from the concert. Unfortunately, the recording does not appear to be in print, but it is worth hunting down.

2004-10-03T19:11:00.000-04:00

This picture was taken on the Golan Heights.

New Format

2004-09-28T16:18:00.000-04:00

Hi folks,

I've changed formats to take advantage of Blogger's version of comments and other things Blogger offers. For some reason, it wouldn't work with the other template.

Israel's Minister of the Interior, Avraham Poraz

2004-09-28T11:07:00.000-04:00

Saw Avraham Poraz speak at the ADL this morning. He didn't speak for
very long; it was about half-speech and half-questions.

Among the things I heard at the meeting:

The ADL has been meeting with the PMs and FMs in town for the UN
General Assembly (convenient, since they are right across the street). The new Egyptian FM, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, is apparently a smoothie.
Gheit was asked by the ADL what it would it would mean if
Egyptian-Israeli relations were normalized; one of the things he
mentioned was a pipeline, and Poraz agreed with that assessment.
(Does anyone know what happened the Ahmed Maher?)

Mostly, Poraz talked about the Shinui agenda and disengagement. He's
apparently a diehard - he was there at the founding of the party 30
years ago. He wants, first and foremost, for Conservative and
Reform conversions to be recognized so that young couples do not have
to go to Cyprus to get married. He wants a separation between
synagogue and state.

My take on this guy (and I didn't get a straight answer when I asked)
is that he's as much interested in being anti-religious as he is in
being a secularist, and on that basis, I am not sure he is good for
Israel. Some things, like breaking the Orthodox monopoly, are
important, but this guy seems like the type who will not be able to do
without being needlessly offensive. Militant secularity is in its own
way as bad as militant religion.

He had basically nice things to say about Israeli Arabs, and took
pains to inform the gathered audience that he did not view them as a
big problem, primarily because he thinks most of them are happy where
they are, in Israel.

Glenn Gould and Indigestion

2004-09-19T21:35:00.000-04:00

This Rosh Hashanah I had too much to eat. By the morning of the second day I had indigestion, and that made me think of Glenn Gould, the eccentric, but brilliant, Canadian pianist known especially for his performances of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. (Gould lived from 1932 to 1982, his early death at 50 one of a number of tragic losses suffered by the piano world in the second half of the twentieth century.)

Glenn Gould's playing was truly unique, but for me, it is his playing of fugues that has made him more than just another pianistic superstar. A fugue is "a composition, or compositional technique, in which a theme (or themes) is extended and developed mainly by imitative counterpoint. It involves two or more voices, and what makes it so difficult for a pianist to play is that usually the voices operate independent of one another. One person must handle the polyphony. So the major challenge for the pianist is to separate the voices from one another so that each one is given its due. Glenn Gould remains unmatched in his ability to do this.

Gould was an intellectual, though, and he wondered what would happen if he tried to apply the idea of a fugue to spoken voice. So he produced a number of radio programs, the first one called, "The Idea of North", in which two or three people spoke at once on a particular topic. The entire episode which led Gould to produce "The Idea of North", and two other programs like it, is masterfully depicted in the 1993 Francois Girard film, 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould. Gould sits in a diner, and listens to a lovers' quarrel, a trucker telling a story to his teamster friends, and a customer ordering a piece of pie. Expert sound editing simulates the way Gould mind's tunes each person in and out.

From time to time I've tried to do this - listen to 2 or 3 conversations at once, with varying degrees of success. Varying degrees of limited success. It's very difficult. That second morning of Rosh Hashanah, I simply listened to all of the sounds of morning, a sort of symphony domestica without the Strauss. My father coming down the steps, turning on the radio, remembering it's Rosh Hashanah and turning off the radio, making hot cereal in the microwave. It was oddly soothing.

Prager's Problems

2004-09-15T16:08:00.000-04:00

Dennis Prager annoys me. Prager is the conservative ideologue and moralist who promotes what I would describe as the equation of Judaism with conservative values. He’s one of those moralist people who, conveniently enough, doubles as Republican hack. (His favorite books include the anti-Kerry screed, Unfit for Command His latest piece, entitled What American Jews need to think about this Rosh Hashanah came to me via the Congregation Sons of Israel listserv (my hometown shul in Woodmere). The sum of his thesis is that American Jews should do teshuvah (repentance) for their reaction to Mel Gibson’s “The Passion”, which he asserts was anti-Christian. (How much is David Limbaugh paying him?) We Jews should also, according to Prager, take this High Holiday time to acknowledge that American Christianity has been a blessing for American Jews. (How much is David Limbaugh paying him?) I made this response on the listserv:

I find this article insultingly smug. Prager too often comes across as just another Republican hack and as a Jewish spokesperson for the Christian Coalition. American Jews do not owe American Christians any apology. Jewish communal organizations were right to express concern over a movie thatdepicted crowds of Jews chanting for the death of Jesus and Pontius Pilate as a sympathetic figure; I saw the movie and can attest to its perniciousness. I don't recall many saying serious antisemitic consequences would result from the film. We would be naive, given our history, to trust anyone to the extent that Prager suggests we should trust conservative Christians.

Prager writes:

The prevalent idea among American Jews that a secular, rather than a Judeo-Christian, America is better for America, let alone for its Jews, is so obviously wrong, only the irrational can hold it. For proof, ask the Jews of France.

Prager is wrong. The agenda the Christian Right supports is at oddswith Jewish practice. Jews do not support a comprehensive ban on abortion. We do not, by and large, support the anti-constitutional and anti-freedom idea of state-sponsored school prayer. And we do not support the Christian right's blatant campaign of incitement and hatred against Muslims and Arabs, which has included agendas to convert Muslims to Christianity and the promotion of anti-Muslim zealots in a manner similar to the way anti-Jewish zealots were promoted by the Christian right a half-century ago. Prager's argument against a secular society is particularly short-sighted; in a France that is now ten percent Muslim and growing, the long-range choices are not between a secular society and a Judeo-Christian one, but a secular society and a Christian-Muslim one where Jews would almost certainly be less safe. France's failure to protect its Jews has many causes, but the country's secularity is not one of them. Indeed, the implication of Prager's argument is that it would be better to maintain a Judeo-Christian society (which, let's face it, is really a Christian society) in a country with six million Muslims is to marginalize those Muslims even further than France's supposedly secular society has already done so. This would result ingreater violence directed toward France's Jewish citizens, not less.

Prager writes:

[T]he majority of Jews have substituted liberalism for Judaism, andthis has been a Jewish and American calamity. Given Jews' professional success and social activism, Jews tend to have an influence on society quite disproportionate to their numbers. Unfortunately, though, nearly allthose Jews who attempt to influence society have little or no connectionto Judaism. They are guided far more by The New York Times and its valuesthan by the Torah and its values. And they ask, "What do I feel?" far morethan "What do 3,000 years of our world-changing religion teach?"

I have no idea what Prager thinks the values of the New York Times are. I suspect Prager is guided more by the values of the New York Post and Wall Street Journal editorial pages than he is by Torah values, which he has made a practice of expropriating for conservative causes in the same way some left-wing Jewish activists have done for liberal causes. (A particularly jarring example is his defense of the death penalty.) Liberalism is responsible for our ability to live comfortably as Jews in this society. No less. The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s allow us to enforce our ability to live in this way. The conservatives that Prager fronts for were by and large anti-civil rights, and we would suffer if they ever gained control of the Congress. If the views of the Christian right prevailed, we would have less freedom, not more, as government would become deeply entrenched in the game of dictating moral values to the country. This is anathema to free society, which trusts citizens to make their own decisions so long as they do not encroach upon the rights of others.

Prager writes:

We must face the fact that American Jewry is declining in numbers because Jews are not taught Judaism, not because Jews are becoming Christian. . . Jewish concern with Christian missionizing is therefore both un-American (in a free society, everyone is entitled to spread his message) and lazy (it is the Jews' obligation to keep Jews Jewish, not the Christians').

This is a straw man argument; no one has claimed that Christian missionizing is a bigger problem than deficient Jewish education. For Prager to claim that it is un-American to worry about it is really uncalled for, particularly when it takes such forms as converting unsuspecting seniors in nursing homes and misguided college students.I think we ought to worry about our own transgressions, instead of listening to a demagogue who would expropriate Rosh Hashanah toattempt to equate liberalism with sin.

2004-09-09T15:06:00.000-04:00

So the Larry Franklin spy scandal is working its way through the media and predictably, the anti-Israel brigade is coming out of the woodwork. The response at the Internet's bastion of radical-left antisemitism, Counterpunch, has had a number of predictable responses, ranging from accusations of dual loyalty, to proclamations that this is just the tip of the iceberg, to, most humorously, questioning of the story for accuracy on the basis that Israel has no need to spy on a country it already controls. But the conspiracy theorizing has made its way into the mainstream press; the Los Angeles Times published a story (no longer available online) in which several intelligence officers assert that Israel has a wide spy network in the US. Surprise, surprise, none of the sources gave their names for the story.

I believe, as many do, that this will soon blow over, but there is fallout; many Jewish communal groups are running scared, wondering if the FBI is spying on them as well. Some Jewish leaders, however, are blasting the White House for not responding more quickly to what they perceive to be an antisemitic attempt by anti-Israel forces in the CIA and State Department to discredit AIPAC.

Pat Buchanan more or less summed up the view of these elements on Meet the Press this past Sunday when he called for an investigation into whether there was a "nest of Pollardites" in the Pentagon, referring to AIPAC as the "Israeli lobby", code for accusing AIPAC, an American Jewish organization, of dual loyalty.

The New and Improved Blog of Michael L. Brenner

2004-09-03T12:37:00.000-04:00

After careful thought, I've decided to focus my new and improved blog
on four things: Israel, the law, Judaism, and classical music. (Yes,
I will occasionally post on other things.) I feel like I'm designing
some bizarre college scholarship. Presenting the Michael L. Brenner
award (which, if I turn out to be a really successful lawyer would
become the M. Leon Brenner award) for the student with the highest
combined GPA in Music, Politics, Jewish Studies, and Law. What? No
one took courses in all of those subjects? Again?

2004-09-03T01:05:00.000-04:00

A new letter in the Guardian.

I am including both their version and mine because they made substantial changes to my original text. I believe it diluted the meaning, so I include both below, their's first, mine second. Daphna Baram's op-ed continues the long Guardian tradition of ignoring the entire Israeli mainstream in favor of anti-Zionist far-left fringe figures who lose no opportunity to cast all Zionist politicians as evil. It is, for me, the modern equivalent of the Catholic Church's use of converted Jews in the Middle Ages to bash Jews who remained steadfast in their faith. It is extraordinarily harmful to Jews in mainstream peace movement, who must contend with rightist attacks identifying them with those Jews who are opposed to Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Sir:

Daphna Baram appears to cast the entire Israeli political mainstream as evil warmongers. In 2000, Israel's Labour party was ready to approve a proposal that handed the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, dismantled nearly all of the settlements in the West Bank while providing land-swaps for the others, and allowed more than 100,000 refugees to return.
Michael Brenner
New York

You can the link for this letter here.

Daphna Baram's original may be found here.

The original text of my letter read:

Sir:

Daphna Baram appears totally ignorant of the Oslo peace process in
attempting, as so many anti-Israel leftists do, to cast the entire
Israeli political mainstream as evil warmongers. In 2000, Israel's
Labour party was ready to approve a proposal that handed the Gaza
Strip to the Palestinians (how this constitutes "turning Gaza into a
huge prison" Ms Baram does not explain), dismantled nearly all of the
settlements in the West Bank while providing land swaps for the
others, and allowed more than one hundred thousand refugees to return.

Michael Brenner, New York

Slightly more biting, don't you think?

2004-08-31T15:29:00.000-04:00

Me in Brighton Beach

Letter in the New York Times

2004-07-27T00:26:00.000-04:00

To the Editor:

It is appalling that after the mass murder and enslavement of black
Africans by Arab militias in Sudan, the collective response of the
international community has been to have a debate about whether a
genocide is taking place.

A far better exercise would be to ask whether we are all complicit by
standing aside and watching it happen.

Michael Brenner
New York, July 23, 2004

Bar Exam Follies

2004-07-06T03:06:00.000-04:00

I've never seen multiple choice questions like the ones on the bar exam.

I'm the type who usually beats tests like this - decent IQ, quick
worker, and so on. The experts say people like me should be doing
well on tests like the bar exam.

They may be right. I am likely to figure all of this out in the next
three weeks.

Then again, most experts probably never had a good look at these
sadistic questions.

Every subject has a special quirk all its own. Contracts questions
are infamous for having no rhyme or reason; the professor who reviewed
Contracts with us constantly made comments like, "I'm telling you to
memorize this - because it makes no sense. And the bar examiners will
test it." And there are no tricks to these questions. Contracts
questions are blinding.

Property questions seek to crush you under their weight. They are
long, boring, and incomprehensible half the time. And since the rules
are arcane and the language antiquated, your time has expired by the
time you've finished reading the questions.

But my favorite so far is Torts. The torts questions are the
cruellest of all, because they lull you into a false sense of
security, and blindside you and stab your confidence to death. They
sound easy and look easy. The fact patterns are short. And the
answers seem reasonably clear.

Then you get 6 out of 17 on the drill.

Fortunately, I'm up to about 60 percent on the Torts practice (which
is reasonably safe for now).

This test is like the army; you have to be broken down to be built up again,

Had to get that off my chest.

Back to work.

A Quick Technical Note

2004-06-26T01:38:00.000-04:00

A quick tip if you're having difficulty loading this blog with
Netscape (sometimes you get a long list of gobbledygook), or you're
not seeing the long list of links on the right side: hit "refresh" on
your browser and the whole thing should load. I think it may have
something to do with either the length or the JTA ticker.

2004-06-23T23:52:00.000-04:00

I don't have tremendous regard for Yossi Beilin, the former Israeli Justice Minister and Oslo negotiator (or Oslo "initiator", as he described himself here) because he's a little self-regarding for my taste, but I recommend watching his 45-minute spot on C-Span's Washington Journal from June 19, 2004. It's one of his better appearances and a good representation of the peace movement in Israel. Washington Journal is one of the best shows on television. Its moderators don't have big egos, its guests get a chance to give more than soundbytes, and the audience ranges from well-informed to crazy. And it's all online.

A new letter in the Jewish Star

2004-06-22T20:23:00.000-04:00

I've gotten a long letter into the Jewish Star, a Jewish newspaper in
the Five Towns on Long Island. It is in response to a column by Barry
Freedman.

I am disturbed that The Jewish Star continues to publish the columns
of Barry Freedman. Many of Israel's detractors attempt to smear the
Jewish state by casting the Jewish residents of Judea, Samaria, and
Gaza as fascistic racists and religious fanatics who wish death to
Arabs and the replacement of the state of Israel with a theocratic
dictatorship. I often have to remind these misinformed critics that
most settlers are normal people who moved into these suburban
communities to raise their families away from the rat race of the
city, the same reason many of our own families moved to Long Island
from New York City.

Unfortunately, Barry Freedman's latest column suggests that he fits
the negative stereotype of the settler fanatic. He freely admits to
being a follower of Meir Kahane, a person who advocated the violent
expulsion of Arabs from Israel and whose party was outlawed for
inciting hatred, even as he admits that Kahane's platform and party
were anti-democratic. He even criticizes Benny Elon, who is himself
on the far-right of the Israeli spectrum and also believes the Arabs
should be expelled, for believing too strongly in the power of Israeli
democracy.

The argument that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acted
undemocratically by ignoring the Likud referendum and firing the
far-right ministers in his cabinet is specious. Disengagement from
Gaza is a policy supported by roughly two-thirds of all Israelis, as
poll after poll has suggested. Likud holds one-third of the seats in
the Knesset. About three-fifths of those who voted in the referendum
voted, after an intensive campaign led by yet another extremist, Moshe
Feiglin, against the disengagement plan. Three-fifths of one-third
equals one-fifth, around twenty percent. Barry Freedman would have us
believe that it is democratic for twenty percent of the electorate to
dictate policy to the other eighty percent. He would further have us
believe that it is the Prime Minister's duty not only to provide
cabinet positions to tiny parties with minimal Knesset representation
(National Union holds seven seats, less than six percent of the
Knesset), but to allow these parties to do what they please once they
are there and act as an albatross around the neck of the country and
the vast majority of its citizens. Freedman seems to think that
Sharon owes his job to Elon and Avigdor Lieberman, who once advocated
bombing Arab marketplaces. It is the other way around. And the fact
of the matter is that in the end, a compromise plan was approved 14 to
7, which would have made Elon and Lieberman's vote completely
irrelevant to the final result.

I have sympathy for those who are demoralized and dejected at the
prospect of leaving their homes. Though it may be a necessary evil to
bring about peace, it is an evil nonetheless that Jews should not be
permitted to live in a future Palestinian democracy just as Arabs
rightfully live in Israel's democracy today. I do not, however, have
sympathy for those racists and fanatics who would hold the rest of
Israel hostage to an extremist agenda and undermine the moral
foundation of a democratic Jewish state by advocating policies and
tactics that resemble those of our enemies. I do not say this because
of what the international community might think; I say this because we
Jews ought to uphold the ideals of democracy and basic human rights,
which for us means respecting the will and legitimacy of Israel's
government and Israel's people and understanding why the expulsion of
Israeli Arabs or the purposeful killing of Arab civilians advocated by
Kahanists like Barry Freedman should be instantly repulsive to us as
Jews, no matter how we stand on the issue of the settlements. Our own
wellbeing as a people depends on our ability to distinguish moral acts
of self-defense to pursue terrorists from immoral acts of
self-destructive revenge which would needlessly kill innocent people
in our name. We do not need to take these cues from the United
Nations. We need to take them from our own traditions and history and
our mandate to serve as a light unto nations instead of just another
people who convinced themselves that the only path to survival is the
death and destruction of enemies real and imaginary.

Michael Brenner

2004-06-17T04:23:00.000-04:00

2004-06-16T14:59:00.000-04:00

Hi, here is a piece on peace studies I posted to MidEastWebDialog, which I encourage all those with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to join. Comments welcome.

Here is my view on Peace Studies (here at Fordham it is called "Peace
and Justice Studies").

When I was at Vassar, I had occasion to attend a local Chabad sales
pitch session, one of those get togethers where Chabad serves some
food, shows a movie, and talks about Chassidus. So the guy there
started to talk about what Chassidus was, and basically defined it as
(I am paraphrasing) "those who are more pious". So I asked the guy if
that maybe was a little bit immodest. Isn't this saying, "I'm a
better Jew than you"?

I feel similar about purveyors of Peace Studies. Inherent the idea of
peace studies is a self-righteous notion that says "I'm for peace, and
therefore I'm better than you. We're the angels, you're the
Hobbesians making this world horrible." There's a touch of
mind-numbing political correctness to the whole idea.

This is not a knock against peace studies professors per se any more
than my anecdote is a knock against followers of Lubavitch. It is
clear that they are capable of decent analysis; there is a guy at
OpenDemocracy.net called Paul Rogers who writes very good and
interesting columns on security policy who is a professor of peace
studies. But the visible Peace Studies people at Fordham are so
hopelessly leftist and anti-Israel that it's hard to see Peace Studies
as simply an ingathering of Marxist humanities scholars (and not
Rousseau followers who believe humanity is good). Even Rogers has his
books published by the Pluto Press. And intellectually, they push a
vision of peace that is just about indistinguishable from pacifism. I
don't honestly see them supporting any war.

This is not to let guys like Steinberg off the hook. There is no
question that hardcore Hobbesians have a political agenda (Pipes the
example par excellance) purportedly designed to minimize violence in
the long term. Realism can seem very much like a self-fulfilling
prophecy, and I think part of the idea of Peace Studies is to break
out of that thinking. But by definition, this requires the conscious
inclusion of advocacy in research.

It seems to me the difference is that Peace Studies people are
broadcasting the fact that they come to political analysis with an
extreme bias, an accepted-definition of peace without which nobody
else is allowed to join their club. It's not enough to simply do
research and state views. You have to take a loyalty oath of sorts.
I don't think that's a particularly good or fair idea, and it's
something of a reflection of the problems we often have talking to one
another across political lines.

2004-05-28T21:54:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, I graduated from law school. Strange event, this graduation. You sit for nine hours waiting for your name to be called. And you listen to speeches which bring new meaning to the terms "platitude" and "redundant" (which reminds me of this great Robin Williams joke: "Under redundant in the dictionary it says, 'see redundant'). And so does your whole family. One person I know swears she will not attend any graduation ever again.

Unless, of course, the speaker rises above all that. I was fortunate to have such a speaker at my own graduation; it was Stephen King. Who can forget his asking us to imagine our class graduation 100 years from now, with almost all of the seats empty, and wondering what each deceased person has accomplished? OK, it's a variation on the carpe diem theme like all speeches, but believe me, it was an unforgettable image.

Now, of course, I'm ready for the bar exam. No, wait, I'm not remotely ready, which is why I'm taking the BarBRI review course like everyone else except the Pieper cult people. So you're telling me that a six week review course prepares me for the bar after three years of law school drudgery? Yep.

Today I had the first part of Evidence. It was taught by a guy who sounds like he took one too many elocution lessons. The first two days were the criminal section, taught by a professor who sounds like great teacher (either that, or a crooked televangelist, though the guy who will teach the Civil Procedure portion fits that bill much better). I will not soon forget his telling us not to worry about any bestiality questions on the bar exam, acting out the part of the furry creature who would have the unfortunate distinction of having to be molested for such a question to exist. Neither will I forget his recollection of the his Southern mother writing him upon the violent death of Ernesto Miranda, the career criminal whose case happened to give us the Miranda warnings. She wrote what a pity it was that the man who gave "so much" to the criminal justice system had passed on.

By the way, Irina T. has put up a new blog. It is called "The Noble Experiment" and ca be found at http://sicat222.blogspot.com. I was pulling for something slightly more exciting, like "Bizarress of Brighton Beach". Then again, I named my blog after myself, which is doubtless the ultimate in conceit and unimaginativeness.

Back to (re)-learning evidence. . .

2004-05-21T16:42:00.000-04:00

Hey folks,

I am posting my review of Mel Gibson's The Passion here. Comments are welcome.

Review: The Passion

The Passion, Mel Gibson’s runaway hit, might be best compared to the movie Pearl Harbor. Both movies purport to depict historical events. Both feature finely-hued cinematography. Each broke the bank at the box office. Both movies rank among the worst movies this critic has ever seen.

There are so many things wrong with “The Passion” that it is hard to know where to begin. Great dramas treat human beings as characters. “The Passion” has one identifiable human character, and that is Pontius Pilate, depicted here as a weak Roman Governor who tries repeatedly to save Jesus from the Jewish mob braying for his blood. In the end, Pilate decides to allow the mob their wish to crucify Jesus, fearing another Judean uprising will cost him his job – and maybe his head. He washes his hands of the matter and, like a parent throwing in the towel with an incorrigible child, disclaims all responsibility for what will happen to Jesus.

This offensively inaccurate depiction of Pilate, who killed so often that he was eventually removed from his post as Governor by a regime not known for its pacifism, contrasts with Caiaphas, the high priest who is the arch-villain in the film. Caiaphas is depicted as a cartoonish villain, as are the rest of the priests who comprise the Sanhedrin, the screaming mob, and the Roman soldiers who tear Jesus apart with all manner of whips.

And tear him apart they do. What can be said about the violence in this movie that has not been yet said? It is played up for all it is worth and then some. Many viewers will doubtless ask how Jesus made it to the cross (let alone carried it); normal human beings would have died from the blood loss and the internal hemorrhaging caused by the endless and comprehensive flaying. There is little left for the viewer to do but seek relief in irreverent thoughts. Jesus takes one for the team. Jesus takes one for the whole league. This movie is very boring. Can’t Jesus die already? I wish Jesus was played by Mel Gibson and the movie was a reality TV show.

Like most bad movies, “The Passion” is unintentionally funny and cries out to be parodied. If you don’t believe me, just picture how the script read for the whipping scene. Jim Cazaviel and the actors who portrayed the Roman soldiers sit round a table during a read-through stepping on each other’s lines, mixing up screams of agony (AH-AH) with cackling laughter (HA-HA).

And even in its detailed depiction of violence, Gibson’s vision fails. By the time the crucifixion (better called a “crucifixation” for all of Gibson’s disgusting detail) rolls around, the audience is desensitized to the violence. The squishing of flesh on the soundtrack as the Roman soldiers drive nails through the bloody wonder’s hands and feet is expected and has little of the visceral impact a crucifixion ought to have. The crucifixion is an anticlimax.

Two questions must be seriously addressed because of film’s success: Is it antisemitic? Is it healthy for Christians?

Passion plays, particularly those that repeat the blood libel as Mr. Gibson’s does, are to Jews what cross-burning is to African Americans. They are symbols of hate toward Jewish people even as film depictions embraced by a country that has embraced Jews like no other in human history. And so Jews have every right to feel apprehensive about a movie that is a Passion play perfected, a movie that depicts a sympathetic Roman leader, an orgy of violence toward Jesus and an angry Jewish mob that loves every minute of it. This reviewer only wished more Christians understood this.

This reviewer wishes Christians also understood that in a post-Holocaust world, the idea of striving for a literal rendering of burdening Jesus with the sins of humanity is itself horribly misguided. In a world stained with atrocity after atrocity, many committed by Christians, Jesus gets off easy in this movie; being flayed and crucified does not begin to approximate the sins of humankind. The devil is right; the burden is far too heavy for one man to carry. The Jesus depicted in this movie does not carry it. And neither could anyone else, no matter what evil braintrust is consulted to devise ever more inventive forms of torture.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the fundamentalist community has embraced this movie as it has, if not encouraging the overtly antisemitic lessons of Passion plays past; what better tool can there be to engage in the fearmongering that is a strain in all forms of fundamentalism than this? Fundamentalist preachers who have pressured their congregants to see this movie show a shrewd understanding of the effect of cinematic gore. This explains the gross hypocrisy of their general condemnation of violence in American media and their embrace of this most gratuitously violent of all movies; if secular violence turns youth away from the Church, religious violence can bring them closer to it.

But using gratuitous violence to bring Christians closer to the Church is not any healthier than using gratuitous violence to drive them away from it. Responsible Christians should be frightened by anyone who bases their faith on what is depicted in this movie. They should worry about how Christianity itself comes off in this film, instead of taking for granted that because Christians dominate the Western world, the image of Christianity is not at issue. Much has been written about the effect “The Passion” will have on the way Christians feel toward Jews. Little has been said about how “The Passion” will make people of other faiths feel about Christians after the suggestion that the driving force in Christianity is an orgy of violence directed toward Jesus rather than the moral principles the Galilean preached about from Judean mountaintops, the ideas which have contributed mightily to some of the best of Western civilization. Christians should perform good deeds, sincere atonement, and live noble lives because of the golden rules Jesus propounded, not because they watched as fake blood dripped from Jim Cazaviel’s arm in Mel Gibson’s decadent contrivance.

2004-05-07T20:20:00.000-04:00

One more thing: I have another letter in Al-Ahram. It criticizes a piece by Khalid Amayreh, the newspaper's West Bank correspondent and the correspondent for Al-Jazeera's english site. In his latest piece, he claimed that Jews controlled the American media and that Likudniks wanted to take over parts of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The first claim is boilerplate antisemitism; the second claim is just wacky. I've actually had it out with Khalid in mideastwebdialog (where he used to post) and in a new, thoroughly anti-Israel group called PeaceandDialogue where he currently posts. His ideas about Judaism are - strange.

Here is the letter:

Not so conspiratorial

Sir-- Khaled Amayreh's 'In the kill zone' ( Al- Ahram Weekly, 29 April - 5 May) includes two highly misleading statements about Jews and Israel.

The first is his repetition of the commonly held myth that Jews control American media, evidenced by what he perceives as a lack of criticism of George Bush's endorsement of Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.

In fact, many newspapers here did criticise it, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post. The second, is his claim that some members of Israel's Likud Party would like to take over parts of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Though scholars believe that parts of these countries were part of the biblical Israelite kingdom, there is no evidence whatsoever that Israelis wish to take them over as part of a greater Israeli state.

Michael Brenner
New York, NY
USA

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/689/letters.htm

2004-05-07T20:08:00.000-04:00

The Jewish Press's Brenner/Plaut debate on the death penalty ends with a second exchange. Jason Maoz, the editor, has informed me that this will be the final round. Plaut has put the letters on his blog as well, calling me a leftist, which I guess places me somewhere to the left of Attila the Hun. Members of the Joe McCarthy club and the J. Edgar Hoover Society (where men in pink dresses denounce pinkos), take notice. Plaut has a thick skin, so I'm sure he'll take the humor in stride.

Joshua makes a good point in the comments to letter one, pointing out that a defendant is more likely to be sentenced to death for murdering a white person than for murdering a Black or Hispanic person, and that this is the primary racial disparity in the death penalty's administration. I agree, though I maintain that the disparity I pointed out exists.

Irina suggests that we need more accurate forms of juror screening, a point with which I concur given that the current system makes it easy for juror to lie, though Irina's system of questionnaires is potentially too time consuming. Do you concur? Leave a comment.

Here's the letter. You can find Plaut's response here.

Brenner Vs. Plaut: One More Round On Capital Punishment

Steven Plaut`s response to my argument
against capital punishment (Letters, April 30) can
be boiled down to two main points. The first is that
the views of legal scholars on the death penalty,
including those who have performed empirical
studies, are irrelevant because, according to him,
legal scholars are incapable of empirical analysis.
The second is that I am simply unhappy with the
decisions made by sentencing judges.

There are at least three major problems with
Mr. Plaut`s response. The first is that the school of
economic analysis of the death penalty he cites,
fathered by economist Isaac Ehrlich in 1975, has
not held up over time and has been widely
criticized for faulty statistical analysis. (See
http://www.justiceblind.com/death/ sorensen.html)
No one appears to question the viability of
Ehrlich`s methods, but as the Sorensen article
makes clear, Ehrlich`s conclusions have not held up
and are not, at any rate, widely accepted. Mr.
Plaut`s claim that the evidence is overwhelming
thus remains unproven.

Deterrence is difficult to analyze because so
many other factors have to be isolated. Crime is
cyclical; the homicide rate rises and falls for many
reasons. Indeed, the fact that there is no death
penalty in Europe, where the homicide rate is a
small fraction of the U.S. homicide rate, strongly
supports the theory that the death penalty makes
little if any difference. And as I pointed out in my
last letter, most legal scholars believe that the
deterrence argument is unproven, which is why
death penalty advocates have turned to moral
arguments.

Whether the death penalty is or is not a
deterrent is not the only question a death penalty
advocate must answer. The real question is not
how many lives the death penalty saves, but how
many more lives it saves than life imprisonment
and whether there are other ways of reducing
homicides without resorting to the death penalty.
Plaut must additionally prove that it is a better
deterrent than the alternatives, such as life im-
prisonment. And on top of that, given the great
cost of trying death penalty cases (and that cost
will be high whether there are extensive appeals or
not), he must prove that the cost of bringing these
cases does not wipe out any deterrent effect the
death penalty might have by diverting resources
that might be better used elsewhere. These
questions are all apropos because the death
penalty is irreversible and has a tainted past here
in the U.S., which is why we must examine it with
such close scrutiny.

Deterrence proponents argue that not
executing inmates is tantamount to condemning
future victims to death. This is misleading and, to
my mind, immoral. We do not punish criminals to
prevent a hypothetical future crime. We punish
criminals because they are guilty. Taken to its
logical conclusion, deterrence theory suggests that
we ought to punish innocent people if it can be
proven that such punishment deters later crimes
and saves more lives. It`s the old torture-a-child
question: Would you torture an innocent child to
save the world? Deterrence absolutists would
answer affirmatively. Would the wise rebbeim of
the Talmud? I think the answer is no.

Plaut himself shows a brazen willingness to
punish or kill innocents if it will deter criminals, as
he makes clear by arguing that families of suicide
bombers should be jailed or executed if it will help
stop suicide bombings. Is the imagination of death
penalty advocates so limited that they assume that
the eight or so murders purportedly deterred by a
state homicide (as the death penalty is officially
called on a death certificate) cannot be avoided in
any other way? How about better police work or
reducing poverty or a better system of public
education? All of these correlate with reduced
homicide rates. Yet I suspect Mr. Plaut is not about
to call for them before and after he flips the switch.

Mr. Plaut argues that the fact that people on
death row have been exonerated proves the
American system works and that my argument is
based solely on my personal opinion of judicial
rulings. Neither argument holds water. Mr. Plaut,
like many of his allies in the law and economics
movement, has criticized the long appeals process
that is often a part of American application of the
death penalty. He cannot now argue in favor of it
as proof that the American system works. And he
again refuses to draw the rational and logical
conclusion, which is that if DNA evidence (evidence
which has come to light largely through the work of
non-governmental organizations like Barry
Scheck`s Innocence Project, and not the judicial
system) has resulted in the exoneration of so many
defendants, there are doubtless many others
innocents who were killed in pre-DNA era.

Ethel Rosenberg`s case is an example of the
due process violations which befall those
disadvantaged in society. I could just as well have
used Ruben Carter, the boxer who was exonerated
after being on death row for triple homicide. (Mr.
Plaut ignored my other example of Sacco and
Vanzetti, which is applicable both as an example of
killing the innocent and a conviction based on
political association and national origin.) The
generally accepted view is that Ethel Rosenberg
was at most an unwitting accomplice, certainly not
deserving of the death penalty. And anyone who
knows anything about the case knows it was a
travesty, presided over by a cowardly judge who
was more concerned with proving his patriotism
than in conducting a fair trial and prosecutors who
broke rule after rule. The Rosenbergs` trial was
more about the Rosenbergs` Judaism and
affiliation with the Communist Party than about
whether they had committed any crime. That
pernicious attitudes toward blacks and Hispanics
influence some verdicts today is undeniable. All of
this is to bring out a simple point: even the best
justice system is human and fallible. In every
instance besides the death penalty, these mistakes
can be remedied. With the death penalty, however,
there is no going back.

One final, but very important point: Plaut`s
reference to Falluja is a very dangerous one. The
death penalty is a criminal justice concept, not a
military concept. I cannot stress enough the
importance of keeping war and criminal justice
separate. It is important for our sanity and
extraordinarily important for Israel`s hasbara. The
killings of Yassin, Rantisi, and other terrorists are
legally and morally defensible only on grounds that
they were combatants in war, and indeed, I and
much more learned people such as Alan
Dershowitz have gone to considerable lengths in
other fora to defend them on that basis. In war,
many things, including the unintentional killing of
civilians, are permitted that we would not
countenance as part of a just criminal system.

Michael Brenner
New York, NY

2004-05-01T11:37:00.000-04:00

I just discovered another letter in Al-Ahram weekly from a few weeks ago that I'd forgotten about. It is a response to an article by one Curtis Doebbler, a self-styled "international human rights lawyer" who has done such illustrious things as advise the government of Sudan on human rights, which, I think, makes my characterization of him as an "inveterate consoler" more appropriate than I imagined when I wrote the letter. To be fair, he has also done a lot of NGO human rights work opposing the Sudanese government. He is a lecturer at the American University in Cairo.

Basically, I take issue with his legal analysis of the assassination of Yassin, which is done in the criminal context, and not in the war context, which I think is the proper mode of analysis, since Israel is at war with Hamas. Yassin was a combatant, and was thus a legal target. I have written recently in the blog comments to the Jewish Press letter below of the importance of keeping these two contexts separate.

Here's the letter:

Irrelevant argument
Sir-- Curtis Doebbler's legal argument against Israel's assassination of Yassin in 'Israel's unwitting tribute' ( Al-Ahram Weekly, 25-31 March) omits one important fact, rendering the whole of his argument incorrect: Israel and paramilitary Hamas are at war. His entire analysis, which is appropriate to the criminal context and not to a context where each side has declared war on the other, is irrelevant.

The legality of Israel's action is thus subject to simple proportionality analysis. Yassin was the leader of a terrorist organisation, and thus not a civilian. His assassination was carried out in a way that harmed few civilians and was thus permitted under international law.

Doebbler's analysis in defence of a man who sanctioned the murder of children, is that of what Immanuel Kant, referring to lawyers who did such things, called an "inveterate consoler".

Michael Brenner
New York, NY
USA

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/684/letters.htm

You can find Doebbler's article at:

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/683/op113.htm

2004-04-29T02:11:00.000-04:00

Quickly, because I've got two finals next week.

I've got a long letter in this week's Jewish Press on the death penalty. Steven Plaut wrote a piece in the Press a couple of weeks ago in favor of the death penalty. He said some things which ranged from the outright falsehood to the highly debatable. They published it with Plaut's response, which will get a counterresponse from me in next week's issue if I can help it.

By the way, I'm against, in case it's not clear from the letter. I say in the letter that there are extreme circumstances where I'd consider the death penalty conditioned on a whole lot of things going right with the American judicial system. Anyway, enjoy.

Plaut's response can be found below my letter and one other on the subject at the link provided.

I was somewhat disturbed, if not surprised, to
read Steven Plaut`s defense of capital punishment
(“Preserving Human Dignity Through Capital
Punishment,” Jewish Press, April 9).

Mr. Plaut claims that there is an enormous
amount of evidence proving capital punishment is
an effective deterrent. I would like to know how he
came to this conclusion, especially since he so
brazenly dismisses the views of most legal scholars
that it is not an effective deterrent without citing a
single source for his contention. An article
discussing several inquiries into the question of
deterrence published in the University of
Pittsburgh Law Review in 1999 (see 60 U. Pitt L.
Rev 321) found no empirical evidence to support
the deterrence theory and no difference in the
homicide rate between states that have the death
penalty and states that do not. Given Mr. Plaut`s
penchant for bashing left-wing opinions as lacking
empirical evidence, it is strange that he would offer
a claim of his own that is completely devoid of it.

It is particularly naive to argue that capital
punishment could deter terrorism, and completely
illogical to argue that it could deter suicide
terrorists. Islamic fanatics are clearly willing to die
to perpetrate atrocities. Why on earth would they
be frightened of the death penalty if they already
value death over life? Deterrence depends on the
perpetrator valuing life over death.

Mr. Plaut does what many conservatives have
been doing now that the theory of deterrence has
largely been disproved; he claims the death penalty
is moral. Perhaps it is. But the moral death
penalty, particularly as discussed in the Torah and
Gemara, assumes a compassionate criminal justice
system staffed by wise elders using the death
penalty sparingly and putting someone to death
only after a very high bar is met regarding
witnesses and testimony.

The Gemara says that a court that executes a
man once in seventy years is cruel. In my view, the
Jewish approach to the death penalty shows a
concern for evidentiary standards and due process
that far exceeds what we find in the Unites States.
Were these the values of the U.S. justice system, I
would consider supporting the death penalty in
extreme cases — though I fail to see why it is
implicitly any more moral and ethical than life
imprisonment. Must we define morality solely in
terms of extracting maximum retributive
vengeance?

The death penalty in the United States is not
administered in a way that is ethical or moral. Mr.
Plaut claims, totally incorrectly and again with
absolutely no source, that there is no serious
evidence that an innocent person has ever been put
to death in the U.S. Does Ethel Rosenberg ring a
bell? Sacco and Venzetti? DNA evidence has
exonerated many defendants on death row. Only
an ignoramus would fail to draw the obvious
conclusion: before DNA evidence was available,
innocent people were put to death. Mr. Plaut seems
totally ignorant of these facts. (His bizarre
argument that other government agencies and
activities kill people is beside the point. Those
deaths are unintended and accidental. The death
penalty is administered purposefully.)

Defendants can be convicted on as little as the
testimony of one witness in a circumstantial case.
Defense counsel is often incompetent, overworked,
and underpaid. And though Mr. Plaut may dismiss
this as more political correctness, those put to
death are overwhelmingly poor and
disproportionately minority; there is evidence that
shows that a minority defendant is significantly
more likely than a white person to be sentenced to
death for committing the same crime. This state of
affairs cannot be described as moral or ethical
under any reasonable definition of either term.

Mr. Plaut is entitled to make a moral case for
the death penalty. He is not, however, entitled to
ignore the facts or to arrogantly dismiss all those
who disagree with him as politically correct, or,
worse, as people who place the rights of murderers
above those of victims.

Michael Brenner
New York, NY

http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3673

2004-04-18T00:48:00.000-04:00

A new letter today in the Guardian. The Guardian, and a lot of other newspapers, lost their minds over President Bush's approval of Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. So many predict doom. The Guardian had a big headline reading, "Bush Rips up the Roadmap".

I've been critical of Bush's handling of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the past; I thought he could have done some good had he been more engaged early. But to reference the history of diplomacy in the region as a good alternative to Bush's bluntness is a sad joke. This diplomatic history more of less consists of telling both sides what they want to hear and playing them off against the middle. Bluntness is not necessarily a bad thing.

In general, anyone who thinks Bush's statement is some great revolution either hasn't read it or doesn't understand UN Security Resolution 242. Bush only stated what everyone knows: Palestinian refugees will return to a Palestinian state, but not Israel. This is the essence of the two-state solution. It is not tantamount to giving up right of return. This is a subtle but important point for those activists who insist on ignoring all diplomatic nuance and reading whatever they want into these statements, including pro-Israel activists who think this is some sort of blank cheque.

With regard to what is being called an approval of Israeli settlements; this is simply an incorrect reading based on the fraudulent idea that Resolution 242 calls for a literal withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. It doesn't. It calls for withdrawal from "territories" rather than "the territories". That is an explicit textual omission to make clear that Israel would not withdraw to the 1949 armistice line because that line did not guarantee its security. Eugene Rostow, a US delegate, and the Israeli UN delegation negotiated that omission.

Israel can compensate the Palestinians for this territory, which is a tiny part of the West Bank, with land swaps, just as Barak offered at Camp David and Taba.

Here's the letter:

Suzanne Goldenberg (Analysis, April 15) was needlessly alarmist. All President Bush has done is say what everyone already knows, but is afraid to say for fear of antagonising an Arab world still bent on Israel's destruction: the two-state solution is premised on the idea that Palestinian refugees will return to a Palestinian state and not to Israel and that Israel will hold on to the big settlements adjacent to the green line. In return, Israel can give the Palestinians other land from pre-1967 Israel. None of what Bush said precludes this and does not amount to ripping up the road map.

Michael Brenner
New York

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1193070,00.html

Goldenberg's analysis, which was printed under the headline, "Bush rips up roadmap" can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1192128,00.html

2004-03-26T06:19:00.000-05:00

So this whatever-it-is paper I'm working on is driving me nuts, but here's the breakdown, for all you students of international law. For those of you from the ASIL list who have stopped by to take a look, I am very grateful for any guidance you can give me.

I am going to attempt to argue that should international regional criminal courts come into being, they should be the creation of the Security Council, an international institution, rather than a supranational creation, the result of several countries getting together and doing something. The intergovernmentalist-neofunctionalist debate is more of a side topic than I thought and will have to be dealt with in the introductory section and will be used as a Now that I have decided what this mishagas is about, I've got to rewrite the whole thing, so it might be published around 2010, perhaps slightly before then. Which means I should write it instead of talking to you, my non-existent audience.

The idea is this: Europe has, far more than any continent or community of states, tried to form regional organizations to perform certain actions. Analysis of how these institutions come into being has evolved to engage a more and more comprehensive picture of how and why states join these organizations. The functionalists had a basic explanation; experts unite. Nations joined these groups because they thought that certain problems involving regulation and adjudication could better be solved by experts, an supranational technocracy. Neofunctionalists took issue with this explanation, more or less because it was incomplete; neofunctionalism introduced a political element, arguing that it took more than an association of elite intellectuals to move national governments; it took a measure of political steamrolling. The experts would devise a solution politically palatable to as many member states as possible. These states would sign on. This would create political pressures for the others to join. The key is that these institutions are not as pure as the functionalist analysis holds; politics play a significant, even paramount role.

Neofunctionalists argue that politics played a role in the creation of these institutions. Intergovernmentalists take a still more realist view, arguing that the actions and legitimacy of these institutions was premised on political considerations. The intergovernmentalist critique has two prongs. The first is that judges in supranational institutions take political considerations into account when making decisions, and by that we mean that they take into account the importance of preserving their own political autonomy. The second part of this analysis focuses on how countries treat decisions of these courts. Intergovernmentalists argue that countries with sufficient power can disregard these decisions or evade them. And judges take this into account. It is thus not surprising that "neo-rationalism" is one synonym of intergovernmentalism.

The intergovernmental critique makes the most sense to me. On a global level, countries will disregard the directives and decisions of international institutions if they can. The most prominent example of this is probably the US's ignoring the decision of the International Court of Justice in the Nicaragua case. There are examples in the literature of the larger European countries like Germany and France evading or disregarding the decision of the EU courts when they felt it necessary. This doesn't mean international institutions are useless; the ones in Europe are quite effective and work well all the time.

I believe, however, that regional criminal courts raise different questions, particularly if regional criminal courts are to become a system internationally. Regional organizations to this point have been either economic or political organizations. the European Court of Justice and other regional courts try human rights questions. Regional criminal courts are different. They would entail much steeper sovereignty costs to the countries involved. Unlike economic policy, which is more and more globalized, criminal jurisprudence is considered a core function of the state and thus a core element of sovereignty. These increased sovereignty costs would be especially acute to regional powers. By regional powers I have in mind country-region relationships like Russia-CIS, Nigeria-ECOWAS/AU, United States-OAS, China-Asia. There is likely no comprehensive way to overcome these power imbalances, which are like those that exist in other regional relationships but magnified, so the challenge for scholars and theorists is to find modes of creating institutions that minimize these imbalances as much as possible.

There are essentially two ways an international institution like a regional criminal court can be created. The first way is supranational. Supranational means that the countries in a region get together and form the institution. The International Criminal Court is actually a supranational institution despite the presence of the word "international" in its name. It was the product of several countries coming together, negotiating an agreement, the Rome Treaty. The second way is international. My definition of international in this context is a top-down process, with the court being created by the United Nations and more specifically the United Nations Security Council. The International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda are international creations, created by Security Council resolution acting on recommendations of the Secretary-General and previous Security Council resolutions, and drawing upon the expertise of the International Law Commission at the United Nations. Because of the high stakes involved, the sovereignty costs entailed, and the unique need for consistency and legitimacy in the international criminal context, I believe that any court that tries international criminal cases must be an international, rather than supranational, institution to be viable. Though not perfect, courts created at the international level are more likely to minimize the power imbalances that would be magnified in a regional arrangement.

They are likely to do so for a couple of reasons. The first is that actions of international institutions, particularly the Security Council, carry a built-in legitimacy because the Security Council is the premiere international institution in the world. THis has been demonstrated in the international respect that has been given to the ICTY and ICTR. The second reason is that the sovereignty costs to a member state will be substantially less when the institution is created by the world rather than through supranational agreement. The international institutions are forced to consider the tough political questions of constructing the court and will, because the stage is international and the acting body has some legitimacy, be more likely to reassure regional hegemons and if necessary, bring pressure to bear upon them.

Criminal courts are different from other regional courts in that while there is room for some tailoring and variation in economics and politics, criminal matters demand consistency to be fair. If regional criminal courts are created by supranational agreement, the chances for maintaining consistency will be slim. There is a great variety of viewpoints regarding criminal law in different regions of the world, and this necessitates the need for the use of precedent and the need for some central body to act a supreme court. The ICTY more or less has fallen into this role; its appeals chamber serves both it and the ICTR. International criminal courts also have the benefit of better ensuring the evolution of an international collection of jurists to staff these courts.

This is admittedly not a perfect case by any means. But if we accept the assumption that regional criminal courts are a good idea, I think the international solution represents the best chance for creating viable courts that ensure the responsible evolution of international criminal law precedents and jurisprudence.

2004-03-24T03:33:00.000-05:00

The Guardian hasn't published one of my letters in a while. The Guardian's Middle East coverage basically parrots the pro-Palestinian line, but the coverage of Israel's assassination of Sheikh Yassin was especially disgusting. David Hirst wrote the obit and, get ready . . . he actually compared Yassin with Nelson Mandela. Hirst is pretty much an antisemite in addition to being a plagiarist; he published a smear against Judaism in the web edition of the now-awful Nation Magazine that was lifted from Israel Shahak's scurrilous book, "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel" (it drew a laudatory letter from Michael Hoffman, a Holocaust denier out in Idaho); but this is bad even for him.

2004-03-24T03:03:00.000-05:00

Still working on the Note.

Today I attended a lecture on the intersection of Halachic law and secular law in Israel given by Professor Daniel Sinclair, who is visiting at Fordham this year and teaching a course on Jewish bioethics and the law (which I hear is quite interesting). Sinclair gave three examples of how the Israel Supreme Court had used Jewish law to transcend inequities in Israel. In the first case, a woman divorced her husband. The husband subsequently became a Ba'al Teshuvah, and demanded the wife turn over the kids so that he could put them in a yeshiva. She refused. He went to a rabbinical court, which awarded him custody and refused to hear the mother's case. The decision was appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court found that the rabbinical court had failed to follow the Biblical precept that justice requires hearing both sides of a case before rendering a decision, and on the basis of this rationale, allowed the mother to present her case and ultimately to retain custody.

In the second case, a heroin dealer was being chased by police. He swallowed the bags of heroin in his possession. The police took him to the hospital, and against his will, had surgeons extract the heroin. In the US, this case would be resolved in favor of the defendant; unless a judge gives the order, a doctor usually may not perform surgery against the will of a patient. The Israel Supreme Court, however, found against the drug dealer, holding that the extraction of the heroin was justified on a Pikuach Nefesh rationale, the concept that saving a life takes precedence over virtually all other obligations.

The last part of the lecture addressed the issue of how Israeli courts have dealt with agunot, women whose husbands refuse to grant them a divorce. Apparently secular courts can now sanction the husband in a number of ways, including denying him credit. In addition, courts are devising ways to allow Agunot and Mamzerim (bastard children who may only marry other Mamzerim or converts) to enter into arrangements that are marriage in everything but name.

It was an interesting talk; Sinclair is an animated presenter.

I'd be interested to see comments on issues relating to this topic.

2004-03-19T00:55:00.000-05:00

Today (this morning), I discuss my work.

I am currently writing a Note for the world-famous Fordham International Law Journal on the question of regional criminal courts. The Fordham ILJ is the most oft-cited student-edited specialty law journal in the world. That's right, the world. We're bigger that U.S. Steel. Yeah, that's the ticket. OK, now I'm exaggerating - a little. The Journal office has like eight computers and is short of copier paper. The ILJ office is known as Jerusalem for cacti. Figuring out who spends time in the office is easy; we look for the Camel's hump. But we really are the most-cited and we are run by the coolest people at the school; that is not an exaggeration.

You've probably heard of the International Criminal Court. Regional criminals courts have been proposed as the next step in creating an international judiciary. I argue that these courts should be created by the Security Council, and not by the regions themselves. The major theoretical argument is that creations of the Security Council will be more legitimate and more viable because the imprimateur of the Security Council reinforces those qualities of legitimacy and viability. I'd tell you more, but I've got to get back to editing it and it might violate the deal I have with Dreamworks to turn it into a major motion picture called Game of Intergovernmentalism. I'm already working on the sequel, The Neofunctionalists Strike Back.

(To be continued . . .)

2004-03-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

Greetings . . .

Today's column of the day (thus far) goes to Christopher Hitchens, who, in Slate, argues very persuasively why it is wrong to see the attacks on Spain as retaliation for Prime Minister Aznar's support for the Iraq war. I am not a big fan of Hitchens because his orientation is so fanatically anti-religion, but he has a wonderful capacity to make a good argument from time to time.

My take on the Spanish government, though, is that they deserved to lose. It's quite clear that they consciously lied to everyone and tried to pin the attack on ETA/Basque because that was the most politically useful scapegoat. That says something very bad about the willingness of even democratic governments to baldly lie about matters of the highest importance. And I think that's the reason Spaniards dramatically rejected the Popular Party. Mendacity did the PP in, not their Iraq policy. And that's a positive thing, because it should send the message to other leaders that it is best, in matters of national security, to be as honest as possible. Those who support the Iraq War would make a big mistake if they accused Spaniards of appeasement, much as this is the prevailing European policy stance, it is not the correct analysis of the Spanish election in my view.