Syrian Rep Promotes Blood Libel at UN Human Rights Council and The United States Stays Silent ... and pays for the cost of the speech's reproduction.
Every now and then I do a Google search of this phrase: Obama Jewish voters buyer's remorse.
And that turns up blogs like this.
I wonder if Sarah Silverman has reconsidered?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
BP Gulf Oil Disaster – and Inevitable Ethnic Hatreds
(Almost) everyone on this planet uses petroleum and its byproducts. Plastic can be found in tiny, remote villagers. We're all culpable for the destruction that petroleum use causes, from dirty air to the Gulf Oil catastrophe.
But humans are very good at scapegoating ethnicities – "WE didn't do it! THEY did it!" – and some are scapegoating Brits, and Brits are lashing back.
Greenpeace has asked for redesigns of the BP logo. Several suggested designs locate the problem in Britishness. One suggested sign is a skull and crossbones with the caption "British poison." Another: "British Polluters." Oh, please. Only British people use petroleum? And Greenpeace's ships run on lemonade and moonbeams?
June 11's New York Times' front page featured this headline: "U.S. Fury at BP Stirs Backlash Among British." "Britons are irked" at Obama referring to BP as BRITISH Petroleum. The company dropped the word "British" in favor of the initials "BP" years ago.
Lord Tebbit condemned America's "crude, bigoted, xenophobic, display of partisan, political, presidential petulance against a multinational company."
"Many Britons are upset at …American anger" and "language that demonizes Britain."
So they are demonizing Americans in response, as did a representational internet post: "The rest of the world is fed up with the parasitic attitude of the US…I used to be a supporter of the US, but not any more. You want the oil? You clean up the mess."
Folks, THEY did not do it.
WE did.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Father Jerzy Popieluszko Beatified
Father Jerzey Popieluszko, a popular priest tortured to death by the communist government in Poland in 1984, was beatified on June 6.
Michael Chabon on Jewish Exceptionalism in the NYT
Novelist Michael Chabon, in the New York Times, addresses the belief that Jews are either smarter than others or are chosen for an exceptional fate.
New York Times readers respond.
Letter writer Stuart Rojstaczer's point is indisputable: self-examination and self-criticism are a part of, not just the Jewish, but the Judeo-Christian tradition to an extent that they are not in other traditions. The Catholic ritual of confession has played a huge role in the development of Western civilization. There is no parallel in other great faith traditions. Non-Muslims often complain, for example, that moderate Muslims do not critique terrorists. That wait is in vain. Islam does not inculcate in its followers self-examination and self-criticism in anything like the ritualized confession and atonement to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
New York Times readers respond.
Letter writer Stuart Rojstaczer's point is indisputable: self-examination and self-criticism are a part of, not just the Jewish, but the Judeo-Christian tradition to an extent that they are not in other traditions. The Catholic ritual of confession has played a huge role in the development of Western civilization. There is no parallel in other great faith traditions. Non-Muslims often complain, for example, that moderate Muslims do not critique terrorists. That wait is in vain. Islam does not inculcate in its followers self-examination and self-criticism in anything like the ritualized confession and atonement to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Two New Studies Demonstrate Jews' Genetic Similarity
Studies show Jews' genetic similarity.
From the New York Times:
"Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives.
That is the conclusion of two new genetic surveys, the first to use genome-wide scanning devices to compare many Jewish communities around the world… The shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City."
These studies refute the arguments of those who insist that today's Israelis are not genetically related to Jews who have lived in the Middle East for four thousand years. Of course, sadly, facts have never stood in the way of those who choose to hate.
From the New York Times:
"Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives.
That is the conclusion of two new genetic surveys, the first to use genome-wide scanning devices to compare many Jewish communities around the world… The shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City."
These studies refute the arguments of those who insist that today's Israelis are not genetically related to Jews who have lived in the Middle East for four thousand years. Of course, sadly, facts have never stood in the way of those who choose to hate.
Day 52 PB Gulf Oil Crisis. Forget Obama. Where's Mel Gibson?
Day 52 of the BP Gulf Oil Spill.
This isn't Obama's Katrina. This is Obama's Iran Hostage Crisis. Beginning in 1979, 52 Americans were taken hostage by Islamists in Iran and held for the next 444 days.
Night after night news reporters told their audiences how many days the hostages had been held.
It's like that now with the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Why can't someone just DO something? No doubt the answer is obvious to an oceanic petroleum engineer, but even overall-clad, alleged "hillbillies" have proposed answers that seem more reasonable than anything Obama's done.
This is a Mel Gibson moment. I see a big budget, summer blockbuster. Mel Gibson is a tough cop on the verge of retirement. But he's got one last job. Kidnapping BP CEO Tony Hayward and keeping him in a dreary, unfurnished room where Gibson, pushed beyond reason by environmental catastrophe, holds a gun to Hayward's head and orders him to "STOP THE SPILL NOW, PUNK! Or I'll show you exactly what a NYPD cop on the verge of retirement but pushed to the edge by environmental catastrophe is capable of!!!"
This isn't Obama's Katrina. This is Obama's Iran Hostage Crisis. Beginning in 1979, 52 Americans were taken hostage by Islamists in Iran and held for the next 444 days.
Night after night news reporters told their audiences how many days the hostages had been held.
It's like that now with the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Why can't someone just DO something? No doubt the answer is obvious to an oceanic petroleum engineer, but even overall-clad, alleged "hillbillies" have proposed answers that seem more reasonable than anything Obama's done.
This is a Mel Gibson moment. I see a big budget, summer blockbuster. Mel Gibson is a tough cop on the verge of retirement. But he's got one last job. Kidnapping BP CEO Tony Hayward and keeping him in a dreary, unfurnished room where Gibson, pushed beyond reason by environmental catastrophe, holds a gun to Hayward's head and orders him to "STOP THE SPILL NOW, PUNK! Or I'll show you exactly what a NYPD cop on the verge of retirement but pushed to the edge by environmental catastrophe is capable of!!!"
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Stalin Bust at National D-Day Memorial
The national D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, now includes a bust of Joseph Stalin. See news coverage here and here.
I wonder how many people will be as outraged as many Polish and other Eastern European Americans will be at this news. I wonder if they will understand our outrage. Not just Poles. Lithuanians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians…
We often ask this question: Why would a t-shirt with Hitler's image on it be abhorrent, but t-shirts with Mao or Che on them are socially acceptable?
Please ponder the double standard. Please consider the memories of people I know whose parents or grandparents were at home, living their day to day lives, when thugs came in the night, roughed them up, put them on cattle cars – and, for no crime other than their ethnicity, their Christian faith, their stamp collecting, that they wore glasses (yes Communists have prepared lists like this – "Arrest the stamp collectors. Arrest those who wear glasses") and sent them off into no-man's-land, where many died along the way. Only they weren't going to Auschwitz. They were going to places like Kolyma.
Please see Andrzej Wajda's Katyn. Please think of a person like Vasili Blokhin, a personal friend of Stalin, and the most prolific executioner in history, who, by his own hand, killed tens of thousands of human beings in the name of communism, including prisoners at Katyn.
I wonder how many people will be as outraged as many Polish and other Eastern European Americans will be at this news. I wonder if they will understand our outrage. Not just Poles. Lithuanians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians…
We often ask this question: Why would a t-shirt with Hitler's image on it be abhorrent, but t-shirts with Mao or Che on them are socially acceptable?
Please ponder the double standard. Please consider the memories of people I know whose parents or grandparents were at home, living their day to day lives, when thugs came in the night, roughed them up, put them on cattle cars – and, for no crime other than their ethnicity, their Christian faith, their stamp collecting, that they wore glasses (yes Communists have prepared lists like this – "Arrest the stamp collectors. Arrest those who wear glasses") and sent them off into no-man's-land, where many died along the way. Only they weren't going to Auschwitz. They were going to places like Kolyma.
Please see Andrzej Wajda's Katyn. Please think of a person like Vasili Blokhin, a personal friend of Stalin, and the most prolific executioner in history, who, by his own hand, killed tens of thousands of human beings in the name of communism, including prisoners at Katyn.
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