The Contentious Centrist

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:31:00 +0000

Comments:

@ TNR: About Thatcher and Salander

@ Mick's: Facebook blasphemy

@ The Volokh Conspiracy: An "Israel-firster" kerfuffle

@ Rosie Bell: friends and enemies

@ TNR: Arab Spring
page 2
page 3

@ TNR: Happy Birthday to Egypt’s Doomed Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

Israel Derangement Syndrome - Part Two

Pursuant to this post, here is another deranged complaint about Israel that surpasses the vilest imagination, via Simply Jews:

"A Dutch lady spends some time in Israel, while pregnant. She goes through the usual rigmarole of prenatal tests, is diagnosed with some virus which is subsequently taken care of. Eventually, she gives birth to a healthy baby and here it starts: she pens an article The chosen people have to be perfect. It's her unique way to thank the Israeli medical establishment, I guess. With statements like this:

To be pregnant in Israel is comparable to a military operation. Countless echos and blood tests should produce the perfect baby, nothing can be left to the luck of the draw. The state demands healthy babies and a lot of them too.

Or like this:

What makes things even more emotionally charged is the Israeli demand to produce many children."

Please note how a well functioning health care system that actually goes out of its way to make absolutely certain that babies are born healthy is thus being demonized as a Nazi-like institution obsessed with "perfect babies".

Please note how the mother viciously concludes her insane diatribe :

"... finally we held this little baby boy in our arms that went through all those tests. When we admired his little fingers and toes we saw that one of his toes was too small. His personal revenge on the Israeli health system."

Her son being born slightly deformed she considers a revenge and a moral triumph.

One needs to hate unconditionally and without boundaries in order to be able to produce this piece of rhetorical poison.

_________

I sent this comment to Ms. van Heusden:

Hello Ms. van Heusden:

I read the report about your recent article about "The chosen people have to be perfect". I couldn't quite understand why the critics were so appalled by its contents. To me it seems like a very good example of how one can write trenchant criticism so ironically that readers can actually believe that you meant it to be understood straightforwardly. It is a brilliant, current day version of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal".

As you would know, he also wrote about babies. Swift, in his wisdom, suggested that impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. This ironic hyperbole mocked the heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as Irish policy in general. As your piece was clearly meant to mock antisemitic attitudes towards Israel and Jews and to prove how your intended audience can be so easily fed all sorts of monstrous tales about Israel. It seems impossible your readers are so easily duped into believing that a mother could actually rejoice in her baby's being born slightly deformed in revenge for the meticulous health care and supervision administered during the anxious pregnancy period by heartless Israeli physicians and nurses bent on making sure your baby would be born healthy and happy. But you pulled it off. The use of the serious tone and sincere feeling highlight the absurdity of your account and complaint and shames the gullibility and unconscious bigotry of your readership who will believe anything evil about Jews.

Congratulations, then, on the finest piece of ironical criticism I read in many years.

BTW, in his day, Swift's "Proposal' aroused an uproar of indignation, and many read it as an actual suggestion. So you can consider yourself to be in good company in that regard, as well.

So keep on the good work. We Jews need advocates like you.

Noga

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:00:00 +0000

This is not antisemitism,

says Prof. AbuKhalil, he of Angry Arab fame:

"Wednesday, January 11, 2012

It is official: it is anti-Semitic to blame Israel

"In letter to Chilean Ambassador to US, B’nai B’rith International says blaming State of Israel or Jewish people as whole for alleged actions of tourist is 'absolutely unacceptable and irrational.'" (thanks Khelil)"

The story is here:

"B’nai B’rith International has sent a letter to Chilean Ambassador to the United States Arturo Fernandois, expressing “our grave concern over the outburst of anti-Semitic activity that has occurred in Chile after the arrest of a 23-year-old Israeli backpacker, who is suspected of having accidentally ignited the fire of the Torres del Paine National Park.”

B’nai B’rith President Allan J. Jacobs and Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin wrote, “Undoubtedly, the fire is a national tragedy, and we share the Chileans’ sorrow for this very unfortunate incident. But blaming the State of Israel or he Jewish people as a whole for the ‘alleged’ actions of a tourist is absolutely unacceptable and irrational.

”In the wake of the fire in Chile’s Patagonia region, the outburst of anti-Semitic attacks and charges included outrageous claims made by Chilean politicians.

The vice president of the Christian Democratic Party wrote on his Twitter account, “I bet that the Israeli ‘tourist’ that burned Torres del Paine is one of those sent by his State after killing Palestinian children.”

According to the rationale of AbuKhalil, any hatred expressed for Jews, either in or out of Israel, triggered by the (accidental) act of one Jew, cannot be regarded as antisemitism, as long as someone somewhere somehow has invoked the Palestinians as the victims of Jews.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:53:00 +0000

Useful rules to memorize:

@ Mick Hartley's:

"It's a reasonable rule of thumb that when you have a detective successfully guessing the vital password, then you have a writer who's failing his audience."

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 11:03:00 +0000

Comments Trail:

@ Mick's: searching for lost time

@ Mick's: Three ladders

@ TNR: Spring Break

@ Simply Jews: About Fareed Zakaria's valium

@ TNR: A discussion about presidential candidates that managed to get away from the usual acrimony and actually gets some posters to enjoy each other's contribution. Page 2 Page 3

The Big Picture: Petroglyphs at Buffalo Eddy--Moonrise

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:52:00 +0000

"Our life is layered"

An excerpt from Ralph Angel's poem:

Evolving similarities

In the darkest of circumstances
I too have dialed the number
and thought twice and tested each one of them
as if anybody stands a chance around here
and no one carries our messages.
If there's something you still need
believe me
they will pick up the phone.
Because the body's not stupid.
Because the flesh remembers
and taking care comes first.
A young mother cradles an infant to her breast
and it feels like love.
Like we can do something.
Because you would save every last one of them
you are already forgiven.
It doesn't matter now
that nothing in this world is direct.
Our life is layered.
First we weep
and then we listen and eat something
and weep again
and listen.
And eat again.
And it doesn't matter anymore
at the bottom of your story
at the very-most bottom of recovery.
And confession. [-]

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:51:00 +0000

The Swollen Envy of Perverse Minds

I'm thinking of starting a regular feature under this heading. I often come across wonderful examples of this phenomenon, the swollen envy of pygmy minds, which is how Mark Twain defined antisemitism, but that can be appended and deployed in a variety of related or unrelated cases. Such a feature will act as a catch-all garbage bean.

And here is the first example today:

@ Simply Jews: A urine-soaked gloat from a urine-soaked creature

Norman Finkelstein on Christopher Hitchens:

When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism.

@ Prof. Abu Khalil's "News Service":Israeli team won the World University Debating Championships in the category of the English as a Second Language on Tuesday, securing the title for the second time in three years.

"Tel Aviv University students and brothers Omer Nevo, 26, and Sella Nevo, 22, traveled to Manila and brought home the gold as the first-place team and the first and second-place ESL speakers, respectively."

What did they have to do to win? Open their mouths? Or were the judges Americans? Or did they have to shoot their opponents and occupy their places?

And this, from the professor who teaches political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley:

"Public service annoucement [sic]

Please. If you are going to Tunis airport, wipe your feet well if you use the bathroom. Thanks."

If I did not read it with mine own eyes, I wouldn't be able to imagine it.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:50:00 +0000

Oy!

Solidarity, Reciprocity, and Discontent

The following is a partial translation of the first part of an article by the Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini. He is addressing the recent scandals involving Charedim behaving badly, that shook Israeli society out of its usually docile acceptance of its beleaguered life.

"Israel is in the throes of a much needed culture war, but not because someone spat on an eight year old girl or another yelled at a young girl who sat in the front of the bus. We need a culture war in order to rescue the state of Israel from becoming a state of minorities, while the majority is trampled upon. The problem does not lie in a lawless fringe group of zealots, who do not recognize the state of Israel. The problem is the thousands and hundreds of thousands who are excused from proper schooling, military service, or the workforce. The segregated sidewalks or buses are not even the cherry on top of the rotten icing. That’s not the problem. The problem is rooted in those who join the chorus of condemnations while shoring up the status quo. These include Shas and the PM, and others.

Many members in the Charedi camp are fed up with the deformed social structure they inhabit. While they want to lead a religious life, they also are not afraid of English or History studies. They want to do military service, be part of the workforce and are willing contemplate substantial reform to the conversion concept. Let’s not be mislaid here. Rabbi Amsalem, of Shas, is not some wild weed in Judaism. The entire Shas party is a weed. It was Maimonides who wrote that “he who decides that the study of Tora excludes working for one’s living, and is willing to live on charity alone, is tantamount to heretic and a scoundrel to the Tora”. In the matter of segregation between men and women, they know how to be disciples to Maimonides. In that respect they remained in the Middle Ages.

Contrary to high and mighty declarations, and illusions, when it comes to sharing space with the Charedi population, the option of shared communities is implausible. Secular, observant or traditional Israeli Jews will not dare reside at the heart of a Charedi community. Charedim, by contrast, are allowed to settle anywhere. This works well as long as they are the negligible minority. It becomes a problem when they multiply. Then they coercively wish to impose their ways upon others. The conclusion is that we must separate. Observant Jews, secular Jews, traditional Jews, Right-wing or left-wing Jews, all can live together. But this is impossible with the Charedim. It is not possible to co-mingle with them. This is the situation not only in Nigeria where various groups slaughter each other, or in Somalia where everyone blows up everyone else. But also in Britain and Sweden. It doesn’t work in Yavne-El, a township that gained much notoriety during the nineties due to the invasion by the Bratslav Chassidim. Problems only got worse over the years. However, the allegation -- promoted by predictable articles in the media – that this separation is de-facto racism is total nonsense. All those authors who make these allegations themselves live in neighbourhoods where others share in the same culture; they do not live among at the heart of a Charedi or an Arab neighbourhood. They wouldn’t want to live there. So let them not waste our time with ”racism” claims.

Those who are interested in partnership are welcome. One condition applies: that it be a two-way street, not a unidirectional exchange. Partnership between a man and his horse is regulated as between humans and beasts. And even that is being disputed nowadays. It ought to be completely clear, though, that this is not a model for partnerships among social groups. Separation among the different communities does not exclude partnership and solidarity, but only when it is reciprocal as between equals. Whoever is funded by public, tax-payers’ money must be required to assume their share of the general burden. There are rights, but then, there are responsibilities as well, such as national or military service, working for a living, or paying taxes. Solidarity – absolutely. Parasiticality – absolutely not.

Inbuilt into the structure of democratic societies is tolerance towards those who are different and “others”. This is the correct form. Still, a certain adjustment is called for. For example, we will happily accept and welcome emissaries from Kfar Chabad if they wish to speak at a Raanana center, provided a secular group from Raanana is allowed to make its case at a center in Kfar Chabad. No more uni-directional rights. No more taking advantage of liberal rights in order to put an end to liberal society. This applies to any type of fundamentalist group. What they don’t want done to them, they should not be doing to others.

Mixed societies can thrive peacefully only if those who join them share in a certain ethos. Secular people who try to live in the midst of a Charedi suburb are not about freedom of residential choice but a provocation. It’s the same as with Jews who insist on residing in the midst of Hashiloach Village or Arabs who want to implement the “Right of Return” in Israel proper. The national idea – and most countries in the world are nation-states – is based on communities sharing in a common ethos. Such an ethos can be culturally authentic or something that has evolved and consolidated over time. Communities are also self defined. There is no racism in the idea of people wishing to live in a culturally, religiously or nationally, familiar public space.

It is the weaker segments in society who always pay the price for the attempted co-mingling of communities. The strong and enlightened elites, as we know, are quite successful in preserving the boundaries of their own homogeneous living. If the elites have a right to choose their quality of life, a life that includes separation, they should not moralize different principles to others.

And like the Old Cato, I will recapitulate with the inevitable conclusion: Israel is a minoritocracy, not a democracy. Only a reform of the governance system will correct the warp that allows a few, relatively minor, pressure groups to trample upon the rights of the majority through political extortion. Until such a reform takes place, the current struggle will yield three indictments against three spitters or rioters, but for Israeli society, and especially its women, no good news will be forthcoming."

This article from the Jerusalem Post tries to unravel the very complex tangle of beliefs, mindsets, ways of life and behaviours involved in the kerfuffles:

"JUST AS important, however, the secular interpretation of events is sometimes no more accurate. Many secular Jews possess the absurd belief that all haredim, or even all religious Jews, are of the same mindset as the extremists. Former Meretz Party chairman Yossi Sarid declared that Judaism itself halachically mandates such behavior (!), and that all religious parties should be disqualified from the Knesset.

The widespread talk against religious Jews is no less offensive than the curses heaped by haredi extremists upon others. This also has the effect of encouraging the wider haredi world to adopt a siege mentality and prevents them from acknowledging any wrongdoing in their own camp – which in turn lends credence to the secular charge that haredim are indeed all of the same mindset. Thus, the ultra-secular and the ultra-Orthodox are locked into a vicious cycle which brings out the worst in each.

Yet another interpretation of events was apparently held by the groups that joined the rally in Beit Shemesh, who portrayed the issue as one relating to women. But aside from the question of whether some of them were seeking to force a rift between Netanyahu and his coalition, even those genuinely motivated by a desire to improve the status of women were missing the point."

These problems are only a part of what makes Israel appear to be , to quote the recently departed and much missed Christopher Hitchens, an abnormal country. Naturally, I disagree with him about Israel not being a normal country. Israel is the best functioning democracy imaginable under circumstances of extreme existential threats. These two articles are just a very random sampling of how Israelis are trying to fashion their democracy in such ways as can be both fully democratic and Jewish. Israel is not normal in the same way that the US or France or UK are normal countries. And it's not abnormal in the same way that Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Iran are abnormal. But on the continuum between the "normalcy" of a Western, law and order democracy, and the abnormality of third world theocracies and dictatorships in which law is to be feared rather than respected, Israel is just a notch away from the former end.

What captivated my attention in Ben Dror Yemini's article is his somewhat fumbling but worthy attempt to deal with an issue I have been thinking about more and more recently. That is the knotted issue of solidarity in our current multicultural ambiance. He says explicitly what the problem with solidarity is, namely, that it seems to flow, expected to flow, in one direction, from the mainstream majority to minorities. To this he says, no. No solidarity without reciprocity. When a minority expects to be accommodated on principles that are not only unshared by the vast majority but are reviled by it, then there is a place to ask by what right, and to resist.

Easier done in Canada, perhaps, than in Israel.

Perhaps, quite inadvertently, I just provided a possible angle by which to evaluate these matters: "When a minority expects to be accommodated on principles that are not only unshared by the vast majority but are reviled by it". There is an essential difference between an unshared value and a reviled value. I'll have to cogitate some more.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:22:00 +0000

Another 27 minutes well worth the watching:

Roger Scruton - The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:55:00 +0000

An interview with Irving Howe (Via: Alan Johnson) from the mid-seventies.

Well worth the 28 minutes of your life it will take to watch.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:51:00 +0000

Recognizing Righteousness: Italians and Jews

1. Gino Bartali

Gino Bartali was a famous Italian cyclist; he won the Giro d'Italia three times and the Tour de France twice. But these weren't his only achievements. Described here as 'one of cycling's all-time greats', Bartali is being considered for the honour of Righteous Among The Nations - awarded by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem - for the part he played in rescuing Jews in danger during the Second World War. One of those testifying to his efforts is Giorgio Goldenberg, now 78, whose family was saved by being hidden in Bartali's cellar in Florence:

The cellar was very small... A door gave way onto a courtyard, but I couldn't go out because that would run the risk of me being seen by the tenants of the nearby apartment buildings. The four of us slept on a double bed. My father never went out, while my mother often went out with two flasks to get water from some well. (Via: Normblog)

2. The Greek Lawyer (from "A Tale of Two cities" by Moris Farhi)

To date, the Germans had dispatched most of the men who had assembled on that Saturday to build roads and airfields. What the future held for other Jews, the lawyer dared not imagine. Reports from eastern Thrace and Macedonia augured the worst. The Germans had delegated the administration of these territories to their ally, the Bulgarians, but since the latter kept prevaricating on the matter of surrendering their own Jews, the Germans had decided to deal with the Jews of Thrace and Macedonia themselves. Lately there had been rumours that these unfortunates would be deported en masse to Occupied Poland. All of this made the lawyer look back regretfully to the time when the Italians had been the occupying power. The Italians had been humane, often in defiance of Mussolini's edicts. Throughout their occupation, they had persistently warned the Jews of the Nazis' racist policies and urged them to leave the country; on many occasions they had even granted Italian passports to those who heeded their advice. Ester might remember one Moiz Hananel, a distant cousin from Rhodes: he was now safe in Chile. But, alas, ester's father, Salvador, disinclined to liquidate his considerable investments, had procrastinated. Now the Italians had gone and Salvador's wealth had evaporated.

There the lawyer's letter ended.

3. Peretz

My father-in-law was the eldest son in a family of ten. He had parents, three brothers and four sisters. They all lived in Salonika, Greece. The mother was either a Bulgarian Jew or a convert to Judaism, upon her marriage to my husband's grandfather. This detail is not quite clear. She had blond hair and very blue eyes, which my father in law inherited from her. My father-in-law , as a young man of eighteen, was conscripted into the Greek army and sent to the front with Italy. He was due to be released in a few days when war broke out, and he was taken prisoner of war by the Italian army. He spent two years in an Italian prison camp and then, when the Germans invaded and occupied Italy, his Italian guards released him along with all the Jewish prisoners, fearful that the Germans would transport them to concentration camps. The guards advised them to head into the countryside rather than into the cities. My father-in-law attended this advice. (His fellow Jewish POW's disregarded the advice and decided to try their luck in the cities. as far as my father-in-law knows, none of them survived the Germans).

Peretz roamed the Italian countryside for four years, working on farms, wherever he could find some shelter. He spent a year in the basement of a monastery, urged by the monks not to even step outside for fear that he might be sighted, suspected, and reported to the Germans. Some of those who gave him shelter knew he was Jewish, some did not. When the war was over, he headed back to Greece, to Salonika. He found one sister, who had converted to Christianity and married to a local Greek policeman. She was saved because her husband's family concealed her identity. The rest of the family had been transported to Auschwitz, and that's the last that was known of them.

4. Giovanni

My Italian friend, Giovanni, grew up on a farm in Avelino. At some considerable distance from the farmhouse where the family lives there is a large pit, the size of a very small room, covered by some makeshift trap-door. Giovanni's father remembered working side by side with his own father digging this hole in the ground which was then used to shelter a couple of Italian Jewish families during the time when it was more dangerous to be Jewish and be known for it. Until he told me this story, Giovanni had no idea what an unusual account he was carrying in his memory. Which goes to show that for some people it never occurred that helping Jews avoid or escape the Nazis was the exception rather than the rule.

A pattern of decency emerges from these disparate examples, a certain self-evident and intuitive moral imperative that transcends, discards, disregards, any inclination, fed by millennium of religious indoctrination and antisemitic suspicion, to avert the gaze at one's own convenience. The people involved in these acts of kindness, were not educated on the lofty academic ideals of universal justice and the philosophy of mutual responsibility. They were as ordinary as all the other peoples among whom the Holocaust was taking place.

And this makes you think that if indeed there was a banality of evil loosed upon the world during those benighted years, perhaps there was also a partial antidote, the banality of the good.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:54:00 +0000

2012

Wishing you all a good year in 2012.

Recommended film to watch while smiling, with wine, food, music, and the right kind of love and friendship (smart, witty and stalworth) is

"A Good Year"

" You'll come to see that a man learns nothing from winning. The act of losing, however, can elicit great wisdom. ... It's inevitable to lose now and again. The trick is not to make a habit of it. "

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:07:00 +0000

Comments Trail:

@ TNR: Peretz's latest

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:52:00 +0000

Jane Austen, Redux

This year's most unexpected and delightful discovery was this portrait believed to be that of Jane Austen a year or two before she died. I've never been happy with the other portraits that exist of her. Too cherubic, perhaps? In this she looks more like a Virginia Woolf. Sharp features, gaunt, triangular, severe-looking, yet elegant, face. Penetrating, all observant eyes, watching the world with an ironic glint. What is she looking at? There is some thought behind the just pursed lips, neither aloof nor unfriendly "[w]ith a great deal of quiet observation, and a knowledge, which she often wished less" ...

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:57:00 +0000

A Holiday Gift

Here is a much neglected Canadian movie,

The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick (1988)

It's posted in its entirely on youtube. But I love this movie for these two particular scenes:

Minute 47:00 - 50.11 - Rabbi Teitleman as stand up comedian tells people what's what.
Minute 101.00 - 106.00 - Jewish Duende ...

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:29:00 +0000

Comments Trail:

@ Anne's Opinions: The truth about Palestinian refugees

@ TNR: On Hitchens
Page 2

@TNR: On Obama's Middle East policies Page 2 Page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6
page7
page 8
page 9
page 11

@ The Big Picture: Without a Hitch

@ Bob's: Unwatchable violence?

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:08:00 +0000

Tango Hanuka

Hanuka is upon us. This year it starts on Wednesday, December 21 and ends Wednesday December 28.

This is my Hanuka song this year.

Hanukah linda sta aki,
ocho kandelas para mi,
Hanukah Linda sta aki,
ocho kandelas para mi. O...

Una kandelika, dos kandelikas,
tres kandelikas, kuatro kandelikas, sintyu kandelikas, sej kandelikas,
siete kandelikas,
ocho kandelas para mi.

Muchas fiestas vo fazer, con alegrias i plazer.
Muchas fiestas vo fazer, con alegrias i plazer. O...

Una kandelika, dos kandelikas, tres kandelikas,
kuatro kandelikas, sintyu kandelikas,
sej kandelikas, siete kandelikas, ocho kandelas para
mi.

Los pastelikos vo kumer, con almendrikas i la myel
Los pastelikos vo kumer, con almendrikas i la myel. O...

Una kandelika, dos kandelikas, tres kandelikas, kuatro kandelikas,
sintyu kandelikas, sej kandelikas, siete kandelikas, ocho
kandelas para mi.

In Israel, the feast of lights, Hanuka, is celebrated differently than it is here, in North America. In Israel we feel the approach of the holiday by the aroma of fried doughnuts, those plump, jam filled "sufganiot" whenever you walk by a patisserie, or a bakery, or any coffee house. People get out their "menorahs" to polish and prepare for the the first night, they get the colorful candles that get more creatively elegant by each year, they wish one another Happy Hanuka, there are Hanuka songs playing on the radio. Some, traditionally minded people, prepare their "Mishloach Manot", gifts of baked goods to deliver to each other. My aunt is one of those but then, she likes to bake, and welcomes the opportunity to give. What we do not do in Israel is buy gifts for Hanuka. Gift giving are reserved for the two main high holidays: Rosh Hashana and Pesach (Passover). Instead, we give out chocolate money and new dreidels (svivonim). This would be the dreidel we give in the Diaspora. And this is what we give in Israel. What a difference one letter makes.

Such is the irresistible appeal of gift giving during the Christmas season that of course here in the diaspora gifting giving during Hanuka has evolved into an inevitability.

I am not complaining.

So, what what do I want for Hanuka?

Una kandelika
dos kandelikas
tres kandelikas,
kuatro kandelikas,
sintyu kandelikas,
sej kandelikas,
siete kandelikas,
ocho kandelas

And then maybe this or that and possibly the other ...

Beautiful Hanuka is here, eight candles for me ...

Chag Urim Sameach!

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:04:00 +0000

Comments trail:

@ TNR: Dang er Zone
Page 2

@ Norway- Israel blog about the activist who did not get enough hatred for Israel's Jews

@ The Big Picture: About Christopher Hitchens's passing and other somewhat related subjects

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:48:00 +0000

Chistopher Hitchens and his Vocabular Cornucopia

(A prayer of sorts)

Christopher Hitchens is playing chess with a grinning angel of death. The latter thought he had him, but not so fast, it appears. Hitchens is still going strong. Or rather, as he explains extensively in his article , weak. But going on, nonetheless.

In a short story by S.Y. Agnon, "Tehila", the author alludes humorously to a mystical theory in which each person is allotted a finite number of words to use during a lifetime. Here is the excerpt (translated by CC):

When I was a baby, I used to chatter all the time; from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, my mouth did not stop babbling on and on. An elderly man in our neighbourhood told the people who were greatly amused by my non stop chatter: What a shame about this baby, that she is wasting all of her words in her infancy. What will remain for her old age? I heard his admonition, and was acutely alarmed. What if I woke up and I was mute on the following day. In time I figured out what he had meant. A person must take care not to squander in a short time what has been apportioned to last a lifetime. I trained myself to consider each and every word before speaking it, and thus became a miser with words. And having exercised such great frugality, I am now possessed of a cornucopia of words. I have been given an extension on my lease on life, so I can use up the balance of the words accredited to me. And now you wish me to tell you my life story and fritter away whatever I have left in my word fund. If I tell you what you want to know, I’ll be abbreviating my life duration.

The scene came to my mind as I was reading this latest article from Christopher Hitchens, overflowing with a torrent of words, associations, images, emotions. I was thinking: He will not go away before he has exhausted his entire reservoir of words to speak. He will insist on living to the very last word that he has been assigned to say. He will hold God accountable to each and every iota, dot and comma in their contract. And as it seems to me that his reservoir of as yet unused words is simply oceanic, it cannot be drained.

He has all that, on top of the other two factors that comprise that inexorable will:

"Only two things rescued me from betraying myself and letting go: a wife who would not hear of me talking in this boring and useless way, and various friends who also spoke freely. Oh, and the regular painkiller."

___________

Update: Friday morning, December 16: Christopher Hitchens is no more.

— “Right at the very end, when he was at his most feeble as this cancer began to overwhelm him, he insisted on a desk by the window away from his bed at the ICU. It took myself and his son to get him into that chair with a pole and eight lines going into his body, and there he was, a man with only a few days to live, turning out 3,000 words to meet a deadline. And then finishing it and thinking, well maybe I’ve got an hour or two, I’ll write something on Memorial Day in English poetry. [...]

His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater's famous phrase, he burned "with this hard gem-like flame". Right to the end."

— Novelist Ian McEwan told BBC.

David Frum's obituary is worth mentioning:

"By the end, the one-time Trotskyist doctrinaire allowed no furnishings inside his mind except those that he had deliberately chosen and then shaped to his own use.

One sometimes hears of people who try to model their writing or their persona on Christopher Hitchens’ example. The results are usually absurd and sometimes perverse. Christopher did not offer a model of what to think. He offered a model of how to think – and how to live. Fully. Fearlessly. Joyously. And then, alas too soon, of how to die: without bluster but without flinching, boldly writing until the fingers moved no more."

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:27:00 +0000

Comment Trail:

@ TNR: Marty Peretz's through a glass, darkly.
Page 2

@ The Big Picture: A modest prophecy about OWS

@ Harry's Place: On the question of newting: Are Palestinians an invented people?

@ TNR about William Carlos Williams

@ Commentary: Rushing to Gutman's Defense

My comment (pending moderation):

There is a kernel of truth in Gutman's diagnosis. The kind of virulent Muslim antisemitism that we see in Europe and elsewhere is indeed fed by Palestinian animosity towards "Zionists" whom they just happen to misname as: "Yahud" . As we can see in the following example, cited by the Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini:

"Two researchers, Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik of “Palestinian Media Watch”, published recently a book “Deception”, in which they chronicle the systematic incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

Some of the evidence is already well-known, since the nineties when there was a joint Palestinian-Israeli committee for the prevention of incitement. The state of affairs, however, is going from bad to worse. Here is one example: The PA subsidizes a monthly youth magazine entitled “Zaizafoona” (name of a forest tree). Last summer that magazine carried a story written by a young girl about an imaginary encounter with four ideal historical personages: The first is the eighth century Persian mathematician Al-Khwaizmi (from whose name the terms "algorism" and "algorithm" are derived. The second admirable figure is the great Muslim conqueror Salahdin. The third is the Egyptian author and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfuz. From each encounter with the each figure, the young author learns something that contributes to forming her thinking and future endeavours. Then there is another historical figure in this roster of historical model figures: Hitler. And Hitler tells her: “I killed the Jews because I wanted everyone in the world to know that this is a destructive nation, that wreaks havoc and death upon the entire world”.*

The story is well integrated into other stories in that magazine that ostensibly speaks for values taken from the Human Rights discourse, and combined with Islamic, Arab and Palestinian pride. Until they get to Jews. Then it is another matter. Jews are evil beasts worthy of extermination. And in that context, Hitler morphs into a laudable figure. There is no editorial qualification accompanying the story, that would clarify to the reader about who Hitler was, or what Nazism is, or what the Holocaust was."

http://www.nrg.co.il/app/index.php?do=blog&encr_id=f2b4c1b55be76d1e6d7b777256ea0370&id=3068

Such virulence spreads by contagion, easily, among Muslims and Arabs. Where the good ambassador is wrong is in his displacement of the cause on to the Israelis. It is the Palestinian side of the conflict and their many fans in Europe that stimulate this kind of antisemitism, that for some reason they pretend serves the "peace process", or whatever it is that the Palestinians are after.

As in the case of the notorious "come back to Israel" ad campaign, Goldberg lacks the acumen to zero in on the real story. In his silly analogies and interpretations he reminds me of the meticulous editor who goes to a great deal of trouble to separate the wheat from the chaff and then publishes the chaff.

___________

Update December 14: The following story provides another proof of how antisemitism works in Europe today. The person who makes these accusations about Jews is a Turkish Belgian "Human Rights" activist:

"These people [the Jews] can get away with anything because they have money and financial power, but they also exploit our guilt [meaning the Holocaust]."

It comes to a point that whenever I read "anti-racist" I brace myself for some antisemitic rant following.

______________

* Update, December 25, 2011: (Comment by davem):

The magazine’s director, Shareef Samhan, did not dispute the translation, though he said the girl was “accusing” Hitler and not praising him. He said he had not been aware of the text and noted that Unesco was not a central backer of the magazine.

Hrmmmm.

توجهت للباب الثاني كان ينتظرني هناك هتلر
قلت: انت من قتل اليهود
قال: نعم و لقد قتلتهم حتى تعرفوا انهم قوم يعيثون فسادا في الارض. وانا اطلب منك الصبر و التحمل لما تلقاه فلسطين من عذاب على ايديهم
قلت: شكرا على النصيحة

which PMW have corrextly translated as

I turned to the next door; there Hitler awaited me. I said, ‘You’re the one who killed the Jews?’
He [Hitler] said: ‘Yes. I killed them so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world. And what I ask of you is to be resilient and patient, concerning the suffering that Palestine is experiencing at their hands.’
I said [to Hitler]: ‘Thanks for the advice.’

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:57:00 +0000

About Palestinians Hearting Hitler and other kinds of Plagues

Ben Dror Yemini, in his weekly Column in the Israeli daily "Ma'ariv", tackles four burning issues:

The case of the legislation aimed at curbing contributions from foreign countries to fund politically hostile NGO's active in Israel. He says: If France were to transfer funds to finance the British version of "Breaking the silence" NGO , the French ambassador would be expelled from Britain that very same day.

The manipulation from the Human rights factory "Yesh Din": When into the human Rights discourse you insert such terms as "war crimes" the result is not a reinforcement for the rule of law, or necessary criticism ina Democratic ethos. The result is another contribution to the industry of lies and slanders and de-legitimization of Israel.

About Hillary Clinton's criticism of the Haredi camp in Israel that is marching towards an Iranian model: Ben Dror supports Clinton's worries and again warns against the "talibanization" of the religious sector in Israeli society which has always stood for "Torah and labour".

About the launching of the book Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, authored by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik.

I picked out only the segment on "Deception" for (unauthorized) translation:

"Prof. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the author of a number of controversial and thought-provoking books, resigned in 2003 from Harvard to focus on researching and writing about genocide. According to Goldhagen, his interest focussed on what, do mass killings have in common and in resulted in his 2009 book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, about the global nature of genocide, and how to avert such crimes against humanity. In this book he examines the reasons and circumstances of 150 million killed or in fact slaughtered and exterminated, even when they were nor combatants or soldiers. According to Goldhagen, every mass massacre is preceded by systematic and mass brain washing, a long process of warranting genocide.

Israel averts its gaze, but right alongside us, practically within us, an on-going mass brain-washing campaign is taking place. Two researchers, Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik of “Palestinian Media Watch”, published recently a book “Deception”, in which they chronicle the systematic incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

“Deception” is packed with similar alarming examples, mostly recorded in the last few years, with a large part of them under the leadership of the most moderate duo, Mahmoud Abbass and Salem Fayad. But It is not only they who subsidize this periodical that encourages admiration for Hitler; funding was also provided by UNESCO.

This brainwashing is dangerous. Abbass and Fayad deserve some credit that at this stage -- and they always emphasize that only at this stage -- they control the organized violence. They were the main losers of that violence, anyway. But they are also helping in the process of justifying genocide. They assist in cultivating a new young generation full of virulent hatred in the style of the old anti-Semitism.

A large part of the financing of publications that feature hateful propaganda comes from the European Union, and individual European countries. In this matter no legislation can help stem the tide. In this matter what is urgently needed is very active diplomacy. The Foreign Ministry, for starters, can send out a synopsis of this book “Deception”, or even the book itself, to every organization, group, association, or foundation, and to each country in the West that are complicit in subsidizing this kind of dangerous brain washing. Fascism and anti-Semitism must be stopped. And certainly not financed. "

Or, as my cyber friend Terry Glavin would say: "¡No pasarán!

About the troubled (to put it mildly) relationship between UNESCO and Israel, I wrote here.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:18:00 +0000

Comment Trail:

@ TNR Peretz: Defending Israel against

@ Norway, Israel and the Jews: Sorrowing for a would be murderer

@ TNR: Israelis do not trust Obama on Iran

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:34:00 +0000

Etgar Keret

"“His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.”
― Etgar Keret

Yesterday as we were driving to an afternoon "Season's Greetings" party, we happened to hear on the radio an interview with an Israeli author whose name, Etgar Keret, sounded vaguely familiar but not anyone I ever read. I mentioned in the past that I do not like to read Hebrew literature with the one exception. Keret seems to be in the same genre as that exception, of writing bizarre, implausible, even irrational plots mixed with mundane recognizable reality, suffused with humour but containing horror and anguish.

As a child, he once recalled in another interview, he avoided crying or displaying any pain; he felt that no pain of his could compare to the suffering his parents had to survive and besides, he wished to spare them additional sorrow. That is why he began to write, he explained: in order to find a "hidden shelter" from life itself.

In the interview, Keret explained the meaning of his name: "Etgar" means challenge in Hebrew, and "Keret" is a Biblical synonym for "big city". So, he said, his name in English would be: Urban Challenge.

According to this article, "Keret’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and thus witnessed firsthand one of the most demonic transformations of the past century: the collapse of Germany’s civil society and the rise of Adolph Hitler’s genocidal dictatorship. Keret is fully aware of how his parents’ experience has shaped his world-view, and also slightly dismissive of its impact.

“You know, you go through your life thinking that you carry specific scars that other people don’t have, and then you date somebody whose father was a drunk who beat her up, and you know that everybody has some sort of difficult dialogue with their parents’ history and behaviour,” he says. “I remember that I once came home from school, when I was in elementary school, and I quoted my teacher, who said that anybody who didn’t experience the Holocaust wouldn’t be able to understand it. My father was very annoyed by this notion, and he said, ‘Why did she say that? Do you think that people in the Holocaust had a different set of emotions and feelings than you do?’ And he said, ‘If you know what it means to be afraid, or if you know what it feels like to be hungry, then you can know how it felt. You just have to multiply it a hundred times, and you’ll know exactly how it felt.’ ”

In the interview on the CBC radio, he explained that he was the youngest of three children. His older brother taught him to read when he was three years old. This same brother became a Radical Left activist in Israel. His sister went on to "convert" to ultra orthodox Judaism and for a while lived in a religious settlement in the West Bank. Just your typical, mainstream, middle of the road Israeli family.

Here is a short article by Etgar Keret, published on Tablet Magazine. It is a nice illustration of his special voice:

"When I was a kid, I used to try to imagine Poland. My mother, who grew up in Warsaw, told me quite a few stories about the city, about Yerushalayem Boulevard (Aleja Jerozolimskie), where she was born and played as a little girl, about the ghetto where she spent her childhood years trying to survive and where she lost her entire family. Apart from one blurred photograph in my older brother’s history book that showed a tall, mustached man and a horse-drawn carriage in the background, I had no reality-based images of that distant country, but my need to imagine the place where my mother grew up and where my grandparents and uncle are buried was strong enough to keep me trying to create it in my mind. I pictured streets like the ones I saw in illustrations in Dickens’ novels. In my mind, the churches my mother told me about were right out of a musty old copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I could imagine her walking down those cobblestone streets, careful not to bump into tall, mustached men, and all the images I invented were always in black and white.

My first encounter with the real Poland took place a decade ago when I was invited to the Warsaw Book Fair. I remember feeling surprise when I walked out of the airport, a reaction I couldn’t account for at the moment. Later, I realized that I had been surprised that the Warsaw spread before me was alive in Technicolor, that the roads were full of cheap Japanese cars, not horse-drawn carriages, and yes, also that most of the people I saw were utterly clean-shaven.

Over the past decade, I traveled to Poland almost every year. I kept getting invitations to visit and, although I had generally been cutting down on flying, I found it hard to refuse the Poles. Although most of my family had perished under horrendous circumstances there, Poland was also the place where they had lived and thrived for generations, and my attraction to that land and its people was almost mystic. I went looking for the house my mother was born in and found a bank there. I went to another house where she had spent a year of her life and found that it was now a grassy field. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel frustrated or sad, and even took pictures of both sites. True, I would rather have found a house instead of a bank or a field. But a bank, I thought, was better than nothing.

During my last visit to Poland a few weeks ago, for a book festival in another part of the country, a charming photographer named Elzbieta Lempp asked if she could take my picture. I agreed happily. She photographed me in a café where I was waiting for my reading to take place, and when I returned to Israel, I found that she had emailed me a copy of the picture. It was a black-and-white shot of me talking to a tall, mustached man. Behind us, out of focus, was an old building. Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born. If he were brave enough, he might even have knocked on the door. And who knows who would have opened it for him: the grandmother or grandfather I never knew, maybe even a smiling little girl who had no idea what the cruel future had in store for her. I stared at the picture for quite a while, until my 5-year-old son came into the room and saw me sitting there, eyes glued to the computer screen. “How come that picture has no colors?” he asked. “It’s magic,” I smiled and ruffled his hair."

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:07:00 +0000

Can anyone be this stupid?

To arrive at this level of stupidity and ignorance you need to be a "professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley."

Note to Snoopy: Please not a word of admonition. He is, as Prof. Higgins would say, so deliciously vulgar. So horribly dirty-minded. So perversely hateful. So sublimely unintelligent. He is practically irresistible.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Comments trail:

@ Simply Jews: Table manners

@ Mick Hartley: The law of rape

@ TNR: Thought the Muslim Brotherhood Was Bad? Meet Egypt’s Other Islamist Party.

@ The Big Picture: A poem and a reading

@ Bob's: The politics of rape or absence of