The members of a political website called The Seminal have joined up with Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake. They are going to run the diary portion of the website and invited me to be one of their featured diarists.

I’m actually a bit of a competitive guy and I’ve been jealous as hell of Phil Weiss, M.J. Rosenberg, Bernard Avishai and Helena Cobban, who were invited to be featured diarists at TPMCafe. For years, I tried unsuccessfully to interest TPMCafe’s Andrew Golis in my work. But I’m delighted that Alex Thurston of The Seminal invited me to participate in the new venture at Firedoglake. My first post, They Shoot Muslim Women, Don’t They is now up there.

After tiring of Huffington Post’s unwillingness to publish posts critical of the IDF, I’ve finally found a platform that will showcase my work to a wider online audience and not worry about whether I’m offending someone’s delicate sensibilities.

A self-proclaimed white supremacist with a history of threats and harassment was charged today under the state’s hate crime statute after he allegedly threatened a young Muslim woman with a knife while she was waiting in line for services at the Seattle Indian Health Board…

…Eric Lee Garner walked up to the woman on July 1, pointed at her head scarf and said, “you Muslim people scare people when you wear things like that!” He followed up with other derogatory remarks.

The woman, who was holding her six-month-old son, tried to reason with the 24-year-old Auburn man by saying that her “her clothing does not make her a bad person”…When the insults didn’t stop…the woman backed away from Garner and tried to shield her son from him.

Garner then cursed at the woman, got in her face and pulled out a large sheathed knife, court papers said. Garner told the woman he was going to “cut” the woman and her baby with the knife, charging documents said.

One report says he threatened to “cut her genitals.”  Another says he called her a “Muslim bitch.” Luckily a state employee intervened and took the knife away from the would-be attacker before he could use it, who later fled. The Seattle Police (who sometimes DO do something right) arrested him the next day.  He bragged to them that he owned an AK-47 which he’d purchased after 9/11.

Apparently, Garner is a real model citizen:

[He] has prior convictions for felony harassment, trafficking, theft, violation of a domestic violence court order, assault, indecent exposure and drug possession.

By the grace of God or a higher power, neither this woman or her infant were harmed. May SPD and the prosecutor learn a lesson from the German incident and keep this savage thug as far from his victim as possible during future legal proceedings.

Given the history of Muslim-Jewish violence in our local community, I believe it is imperative that the local Jewish community strongly denounce this Islamophobic act.  Despite the violence swirling in the Middle East, we Jews have much more in common with our brother and sister Muslims that what divides us.  We Jews too are often the victims of prejudice and violence because of our religious beliefs.  In fact, the wearing of a head-scarf, which provoked the German and Seattle attacks, echoes prejudice against observant Jews who wear a yarmulke.  If we focus too much on the violence of the Israeli-Arab conflict, we forget what we share.

I hope that local Jewish groups here express their outrage at this incident and solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters in the face of Islamophobia.  Rob Jacobs, local director of  Stand With Us, a pro-Israel group which often expresses hostility to Palestinians and Muslims in general did criticize the attack saying: “Of course an attack, or, as in the case you refer to, threatening to attack anyone is wrong.”  But along with this he launched into a harsh attack on me for even asking the question:

The last time I tried to communicate with you by email, you grossly edited what I wrote and posted selected portions up on your website that misrepresented much of what I’d written you. You have a history of doing that. You posted on your website selected parts of a private communication with a member of the Beth Shalom community and defamed him. There are now multiple websites dedicated to documenting the way you distort, misrepresent and quote out of context those with whom you disagree.

Since Rob attacks me for allegedly editing and misrepresenting what he said the last time we had contact, I’ve quoted him virtually verbatim to avoid that issue.  I don’t think it helps his cause much, but I’ll let you be the judge.  The incident of supposed “defamation” Jacobs refers to concerns a Stand With Us board member, David Brumer, who told me I should be “spanked” for my views of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Apparently, Jacobs feels that one of his board members who advocates attacking a fellow Jew should be shielded by the supposed “privateness” of the e-mail message.  And revealing to the public that such a statement has been made apparently constitutes “defamation.”

This is unfortunately what a number of us liberals in the Jewish community  have become used to on this question.  Lots of heat and very little light.  Paranoia and defensiveness but very little reason.

♦ ♦

With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry

Tal Nitzan and Rachel Tzvia Back, editors
Excelsior Editions, 2009, 169 pgs.

With an Iron Pen collects eighty-eight Hebrew poems written over the past twenty years, offering a powerful chronicle of the evils of the Israeli Occupation.  What I especially like about the collection is that it offers the lions of Israeli poetry like Yehudah Amichai, Natan Zach, Tuvia Ruebner, and Dahlia Rabikovitch, along with young rebels and lesser-known–especially outside Israel–poets.

This book confronts a profound literary question for political poetry.  How can one of the most sublime forms of human expression apprehend pure evil—human behavior that is devoid of humanity?  What feeble words from a poet’s pen do justice to the subject or provide a suitable rejoinder?  How can the suffering, banality and insanity of something like the Occupation be conveyed?  Can anyone responding on a pure literary plane to the Occupation really do the suffering it imposes on Palestinians (and Israelis) justice?  Is the job of the poet merely to record the evil for posterity or to encourage a more activist form of resistance?  What can poetry really do to combat such evil?  Aren’t mere words too little and too late?

To their great credit, these poets have made courageous attempts to accomplish the near-impossible.  Some fall short, some succeed intermittently with a powerful image, phrase or stanza, and others succeed sublimely.

Among the most timely, is Yitzchak Laor’s Order of the Day, which explores the abuse of the Amalek myth in contemporary Israeli political culture.  Recently, Bibi Netanyahu likened Iran to Amalek and justified an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  He claimed that like that Biblical tribe, the mullahs sought not only Israel’s, but the entire Jewish people’s annihilation.  Laor’s poem, dripping in sarcasm and irony, is like an inoculation of truth in the face of political-historical mendacity:

Remember
That which Amalek did to you
of course,
Over.
Do unto Amalek
what Amalek did to you
of course,
Over.

If you can’t
find yourself an Amalek,
call Amalek whomever you want
to do to him what Amalek did to you
of course,
Over.

Don’t compare anything to what Amalek did to you
of course,
Over.
Not when you want to do that which Amalek did to you
of course,
Over and out,
Remember.

The book takes its title from this stunningly evocative passage in Jeremiah 17:1:

The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen
And with the point of a diamond it is engraved
On the tablet of the heart.

One of the first things that came to mind after reading this is that the iron pen that writes the sin of Judah is also the poet’s pen as he portrays the crime of Occupation.  In this sense, the poet plays a role similar to Jeremiah, the prophet who records the sins for his contemporaries and subsequent Jewish history.  Both are doing the Lord’s work.  What is especially powerful about this notion is that it removes the issue of the utility of the protest poetry.  Of course, it would be useful for the poem to have a concrete impact on the political situation.  But given the hardened hearts within both Israel and Palestine, this seems expecting too much.  The invocation of Jeremiah transforms the act of poetic protest from a time- and earthbound, to a spiritual-moral act for the ages.

The above verse from Jeremiah also calls to mind one of the most powerfully dark stories of 20^th century literature, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. In it, a nation imprisons criminals in a colony where it etches their crimes into their bodies with an infernal torture apparatus that eventually kills the victim, but not before literally writing the crime and sentence into the skin of the victim.

As a blogger who has attempted since 2003 to analyze the moral and political bankruptcy of the Occupation, I am often troubled by the question of efficacy: who reads you and what impact, if any do you have?  What can you actually do to make the situation better in any material way?  Are you just writing for an audience of one and a few hangers-on?  The invocation here of Jeremiah reminds us that we have a duty to write the sins of Judah regardless of the impact we may have on mitigating them.

With an Iron Pen is replete with powerful poems by Israel’s finest poets.  One of these is Dahlia Rabikovitch’s Story of the Arab Who Died in the Fire.  It describes the immolation of a Palestinian day laborer, who slept in an abandoned Israeli warehouse (because it was illegal to live or sleep within Israel).  Jewish hooligans nailed shut the door before setting it on fire.  Rabikovitch describes in clinical details the process by which the fire consumed the victim’s body:

…The fire took him all at once,
Such a thing hath not its likeness,
It peeled away his clothing
Seized upon his flesh,

…God, they’re burning us, he screamed,
That’s all he could manage in self-defense.
The flesh was blazing…

By that point his mental faculties were gone,
The firebrand of the flesh
Paralyzed any sense of a future,
The memories of his family
The links to his childhood.
He was shrieking, no longer constrained by reason,
By now all the bonds of family were broken,
He did not seek vengeance, redemption, the dawn of a new day.

…From his throat issued inhuman voices
Since many human functions had already ceased
Except for the pain transmitted in electrical pulses
Along neural pathways to pain receptors in the brain.

In a subsequent interview with Yediot Achronot, Rabikovitch says strikingly that she wrote the poem because she “understood the fear he felt before he was saved by death.”  The notion that death is a respite from human suffering inverts the typical view of the civilized world that preserving life is an intrinsic good.  In this interview, the poet acknowledges that there are some human conditions which destroy the very fabric of civilization and make life no longer worth living.  In doing so, she forces the reader to confront the crime in all its goriness.  It is as if she is telling us: “This is what this Occupation is doing to us.  You must confront it.  I will not let you look away.”

Shlomo "Momo" Lifschitz hawks 'Sexual Zionism'

I really couldn’t help myself on that post title.  There must be a little of the Hollywood Variety headline editor in me.  At any rate, Jewish Week reports that Birthright tour impresario Shlomo “Mojo” Lifschitz, whose Oranim Educational Initiatives hosted more trips (50,000 “satisfied” customers) than any other tour provider, has parted company with Birthright.

For some odd reason, a guy who helped coin and market the term “sexual Zionism” has hit a wall.  I guess his hard-sell proselytizing for making Jewish babies and aliyah is no longer in favor.

I really couldn’t believe this 2005 Forward profile of Lifschitz till I sat down and read it.  It includes this passage:

Zionism always has had a sexualized aspect to it, [Habonim Dror's Alex] Sharone said, evoking a beefcake image of Israel’s early years. “The strong, bare-chested men working the land. All that talk of ‘blooming’ and ‘bearing fruit’ is so Freudian. And today, all the soldiers protecting the motherland. It’s definitely sexy.”

Maya Zachodin — a spry 21-year-old who described herself as having been “made in Israel, born in America” — met her sexy soldier boyfriend, Elon, on one of Momo’s Birthright trips. “The whole idea of Sexual Zionism became a main point in my life,” remembered Zachodin, who prior to the trip had dated only non-Jewish boys. “I came to [Israel], and I felt that my heart was completed.” Cut to Zachodin now living in Israel, plugging away in the Oranim office, working as a “Momo Propagandist,” preaching the big man’s message of Jewish life, love and fraternity.

Oddly enough, this was never an aspect of Israel or Zionism that appealed to me when I was this age.  My idea of being a good Zionist was reading Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea.  Now I see what I was missing!

In his happier days, he and Birthright actually believed that stoking a 15 year old Jew with tales of Zion, the scent of sex and plying him or her with liquor would sell aliyah and somehow create a proud Jewish identity.  He was also known to lecture his charges on the “unsurpassed beauty of Jewish women.”

This is precisely my problem with Birthright.  It is a cheap, by the hour, Motel Six version of Jewish identity.  There’s a vague tie to the land of Israel but little else.  No Jewish history.  No Judaism.  No Bible.  Except as adjuncts of the Israel connection.  Birthright will never learn, indeed CAN never learn that Jewish identity without Diaspora and without the deeper cultural, religious and ethical bonds is no identity at all.

For ten years, this former IDF officer has been pedaling his lowest common denominator message quite successfully.  Yet, in this day of settlement freezes and declining interest in Israel among the Jewish young, Birthright has decided that Shlomo Momo’s Mojo is passe:

He noted that Birthright had prohibited him from using the phrase “raise your children Jewish” or encouraging aliyah to Israel. And he said he could no longer promise his free Israel honeymoon gift to brides and grooms who had met during their Oranim Birthright trips.

With that kind of come-on, it’s a wonder Momo hasn’t single-handedly saved the Jewish people from extinction.  But I really think he should’ve gone the whole nine yards and offered a free apartment, car and college education for all those future Jewish babies his alumni “basherts” would’ve produced.

Reading a bit more about Lifschitz, he seems like a petty dictator/Meyer Lansky type:

…There were complaints about Lifshitz from participants who had intermarried parents and from others who said they were made to feel like second-class Jews if they didn’t marry Jews or move to Israel.

The official also suggested that Lifshitz had become difficult to work with — confrontational and self-important.

And, quel surprise, Momo was known for spicing up his dating tips with crass shpiels consisting of right-wing Israeli propaganda:

…Some participants were put off by what they saw as his hard line on Israeli politics.

“The right-wing perspectives presented were rather unsettling, and the indoctrination was unappealing,” said a 23-year-old 2005 Oranim trip participant, who requested to remain anonymous due to his work at an American Jewish organization. “[Momo] spoke to our group, saying, ‘Some people say the Iraq war was good for Israel. Wrong. The Iraq war was great for Israel,’ representing a rather astonishingly narrow viewpoint.”

Martyred German Musliim, Marwa el-Sherbini

Haaretz reports that a crazed neo-Nazi stabbed a pregnant Muslim woman to death in front of her 3 year old son and husband.  The murderer had previously taunted the woman and attempted to tear her head-scarf off her head.  She was pursuing a civil action against him in a Dresden court when the killing occured.  How in heaven’s name does a violent hater like this get a knife into a German courtroom?

Thankfully, the German Jewish community has had the sense to denounce this foul incident and visit the husband in the hospital where he is recovering from a stab wound inflicted by the killer and a bullet wound inflicted by a courtroom guard who mistook him (how?) for an attacker.

The leader of German Jews said:

All those people who have in the past belittled our concern about a phobia against Islam in Germany are seeing after this awful act how wrong they were…”

Officials from a German Muslim group and the country’s main Jewish group made a joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim’s husband is being treated.

“You don’t have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and you don’t have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism,” said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

I issue a challenge to Muslim-haters among us like Daniel Pipes to denounce this despicable act. Let us see whether there is any act of violence against Muslims which would trouble their consciences. We shouldn’t let people like Abe Foxman off the hook either since the ADL claims a mission of combatting racism and religious prejudice around the world.

It is worth noting that the attacker is an immigrant from Russia where neo-Nazi and anti-foreigner sentiments runs deep.  Vicious attacks on minorities of this sort are commonplace.  But how can the German authorities not have been more aware of the violent propensities of someone like this and done a better job of protecting the victims?

A journalist from Iran’s Press TV had the chutzpah to ask State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly what the U.S. government was doing to gain the release of four U.S. citizens (among them former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney) abducted and imprisoned by Israel for four days now.  Of course, an Iranian journalist had to ask this question becuase no native U.S. journalist cared enough about the story to ask the question themselves. 

Here, from Kelly, is a portrait in spinelessness:

“We can’t comment on any of the individuals or the number of individual American citizens on board.”

…the Washington, DC spokesperson added…that the US Embassy had been in touch with Israeli authorities and was seeking access to its citizens, and made a point of noting that “we don’t take any position regarding the Free Gaza Movement or any of its messages.”

In response to other questions about the fate of those on board and the ship’s medical and construction aid for Gaza, Kelly responded, “I don’t know the answer, actually. I think I have to refer you to the government of Israel.”

It is simply preposterous that the chief spokesperson for the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus would have so little interest in the welfare of imprisoned U.S. citizens and could respond so callously as to suggest those interested in their whereabouts should contact the country that abducted and jailed them. What about the U.S. government itself? Doesn’t it give a crap? And if it doesn’t, why is it behaving in such an inexcusable fashion?

You may remember the film Missing, about the U.S. citizen abducted and murdered during the Pinochet coup. Then too the State Department misled the victim’s family and lied to them and the press about what happened. I’m not suggesting quite that level of malevolence in this instance. But the State Department should be damned embarrassed about its performance in this entire seamy incident. It should get off its duff and do its job, which is to protect the interests of U.S. citizens in danger abroad.

Let’s compare U.S. apathy to the response of a government that genuinely cares about its own citizens: Ireland. Here is the statement from the Irish foreign minister about his two citizens also imprisoned in the Israeli Gulag:

Ireland’s Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin called for the swift release of two Irish nationals detained from the ship, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner…

“My immediate priority is ensuring the safety and welfare of Ms Maguire and Mr Graham and securing their release as soon as possible,” Martin said. “I would again renew my call for the release of Ms Maguire and Mr Graham as well as the other nineteen passengers detained on The Spirit of Humanity.”

“I would also call upon the Israeli Government to ensure that the humanitarian supplies for the people of Gaza being transported on The Spirit of Humanity are made available as soon as possible to the Palestinian authorities for distribution,” he added.

Why must is take a nation like Ireland to teach us what our own foreign affairs personnel should be doing? Why are the latter not fighting tooth and nail for McKinney’s release? Why are they not bellowing at the Israeli blackmail used to get her to agree to a 10 year ban on re-entry to Israel which would happen if she signs her own deportation order admitting violation of Israeli rules with which she vehemently disagrees?

Plunging squarely into one of the most sensitive issues in the Middle East, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. suggested on Sunday that the United States would not stand in the way of Israeli military action aimed at the Iranian nuclear program.

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week,” “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.”

“Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else,” he said, in an interview taped in Baghdad at the end of a visit there.

If Obama doesn’t backpedal on this then we’ll have to parse the meaning assuming his remarks were orchestrated internally. If so, this would mean that Obama is talking tough to Iran for two purposes–one internal and one external. Internally, he would be trying to steal thunder from the Republicans who are criticizing his Iran policy as consisting of all carrot and no stick. The conservative leadership of the Jewish community (including Aipac and the Israel lobby) would react very favorably to such an apparent change of heart.

Externally, Obama could be sending a signal to the Iranians that his patience is not infinite and that he is willing to sick the dogs on them if they remain intransigent about their nuclear program. This sounds to me like a Dennis Ross special. It has Aipac-Israel lobby spin written all over it.

If Biden did not go off the reservation (as I hope to God he did), then it would mean that Obama, is at least in principle, expressing a willingness to abandon his policy, which had been yoked to diplomatic engagement and which had eschewed military solutions. Bibi has specifically begged the U.S. for a green light to attack Iran and until now Obama (and Bush before him) explicitly rejected the entreaty.

In a related development, the Times of London reports that Israel has received tacit approval from Saudi Arabia to use its airspace should it attack Iran.  Uzi Mahnaimi, who wrote the story is not known for being the most reliable journalist.  In this report he claims that the Mossad chief, who held secret talks with the Saudi, assures prime minister Netanyahu that the Saudis would not object to such an Israeli attack that flew over their airspace.  This is a lame, incredible claim on its face.  But it does show an Israeli desperation to ratchet up the pressure on Iran. And it also indicates a rather “clever” attempt on the part of the Israeli intelligence services to support their claim that it has “allies” among Arab states who would be happy to see Iran humiliated by an Israeli attack.  Of course, no one in the Arab world has lent any credence to the Israeli claim.  But that won’t stop them from trying.

Yet another news report claims that Israeli submarines sailed through the Suez Canal on their way to the Red Sea.  The purported purpose was to signal the Iranians that Israelis subs could use their Cruise missiles as part of an attack on Iran.  Lots of saber rattling going on.  This is what the Obama administration has just encouraged.  If you wanted to stir up a nuclear hornet’s nest I couldn’t think of a better way to do it.

For Obama to turn away from a peaceful resolution of its disagreements with Iran would be a major breach and deeply disappointing to those of us who have supported him in the expectation that we would see a realist-pragmatist foreign policy in place of the Bush era Rough Rider approach to conflict.

Someone will have to explain to me how Biden’s words are any different than those delivered by Dick Cheney on the Don Imus Show when he raised the possibility that Israel would attack Iran and that the U.S. would be understanding of its reasons for doing so.  Is this why we elected Joe Biden and Barack Obama to office?  So they could parrot the policies of the previous discredited inhabitants of the White House??

I’m hoping that we’re going to see a response from the White House saying Biden misspoke.  If not, this is a cold wind that bodes ill.

UPDATE: This “clarification” from the White House is entirely disingenuous and dissatisfying and indicates that Obama thinks he can have it both ways (which he ultimately can’t):

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Biden’s remarks did not signaling any change of approach on Iran or Israel.

“The vice president refused to engage hypotheticals, and he made clear that our policy has not changed.”

Obama, while he never took military option off the table, never offered Israel any opening to attack Iran.  This is a new and deeply troubling page in Obama administration policy toward Iran.  Saber rattling has not worked for the Bushites regarding Iran and it will not work for Obama.  If you want a peaceful resolution you pursue that.  If you want war, you pursue that.  Trying to sit on the fence doesn’t work especially in a political-diplomatic environment which is so charged.

Just as an aside, when Norman Finkelstein was similarly and scandalously imprisoned by Israel when he attempted to visit a friend on the West Bank, he was willing to sign this deportation order, which I feel was a mistake on his part. But it’s hard to argue with the fact that spending an undetermined amount of time in an Israeli prison is one of the more unpleasant things that can happen to you and I can understand why one would seek to depart as quickily as possible. And he clearly isn’t planning or needing to spend any “quality time” in Israel anytime soon anyway. Feelings aren’t terribly warm and fuzzy between Finkelstein and the State of Israel (or its leaders anyway).

The Free Gaza Movement activists have not taken the bait and remain in prison. The U.S. government has not made the case a high profile one feeling it has bigger fish to fry regarding the settlement freeze issue. But the Obama folks are going to eventually face facts that having an ostensible U.S. ally holding four of our citizens for the crime of sailing a former ferry filled with medicine and other humanitarian aid to Gaza via international waters, is intolerable.

Someone will also have to explain to me how Gaza’s territorial waters have become Israel’s if the latter has truly withdrawn from Gaza as it likes to claim. The answer is the same as the one the White Rabbit gave: “a word means what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.” So Israel conveniently abuses international maritime law and appropriates Gaza’s territorial waters when it suits; and when it doesn’t it claims it washed its hands of Gaza long ago and has no interest in it.

Also, can someone explain to me why Fox News has been providing the most extensive coverage of this incident in all the U.S. media. Not a word in the N.Y. Times, whose correspondent, Ethan Bronner apparently can’t be bothered to cover such an ‘insignificant’ story.