The difference between Gaza and the West Bank for the Palestinian Arab population is a difference between modernity in the latter and Islamic fundamentalism in the former. Democracy might have got Hamas elected to rule over the Gazans, but did the people really want an Iran or Saudi or Taliban-style government to rule them?
They may have wanted to rid themselves of corruption in Arafat's Fatah Movement and get more services for themselves. But a religious police? "The Free Gaza Movement" had better know what freedom they really want for the Palestinians. MM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Report: Gaza Religious Police Now Official
by Maayana Miskin
A violent group calling itself “The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” has carried out attacks in Gaza since shortly after Hamas took over the area in mid-2007. Now a female Arab journalist reports that the “unaffiliated” group is clearly an official branch of Hamas, charged with enforcing the group's strict interpretation of Islamic law.
The journalist, Asma abu-Ghul, told Al-Arabiya that she was stopped by the committee's policemen at the beach. Ghul said she was detained for allegedly laughing too loudly and appearing in public with uncovered hair.
The “prevention of vice” police body reports directly to Hamas's Ministry of Waqf Affairs, Ghul said. The force is increasingly visible on the streets of Gaza, she reported, and its officers patrol public beaches and parks as well as businesses such as restaurants and coffee shops.
Hamas Denies Connection
Hamas officials admit that Hamas police patrol beaches and may tell women who they believe are dressed immodestly to go elsewhere. However, Hamas has not claimed any affiliation to the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, and has refused to even admit that the group exists.
The committee lists its goal as hunting down “slaves of the devil who commit blasphemy.” Its first public act, in late 2007, was to beat a local singer for giving a concert. Soon afterwards, members of the group carried out a vicious assault on two residents of southern Gaza accused of “disrespect for Allah.”
A similarly-named group exists in Saudi Arabia as an official government body. The Saudi Arabia organization is tasked with enforcing religious laws, such as ensuring that men and women who are not immediate family members do not interact and maintaining Islamic dress codes.
Police forces responsible for enforcing Islamic law exist in other Muslim states as well, among them Afghanistan and Iran.
Hamas Funds Koran Studies, Supports Covering Girls' Hair
Hamas recently announced that it would cut its employees' salaries by 1% in order to finance Koran studies in Gaza. Former Hamas terrorists and those imprisoned in Israel report that Koran study centers are often the place where young boys in Gaza are first recruited to Islamic terrorist groups.
Last year, the group officially adopted the traditional Muslim criminal code, which includes penalties such as lashes, amputation and crucifixion.
According to the Jerusalem Post, residents of Gaza believe Hamas plans to make hair covering mandatory for all girls in school in the near future. The requirement would affect girls as young as age five.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
IRANIAN REVOLUTION #2.?
OBAMA/CHAMBERLAINE ATTEMPT AT RECONCILIATION.
So US.President Obama thinks that he should still pursue dialogue with the Iranian rulers.
The Mullahs, Ayatollas and their spokesman Ahmadinejad have chosen to rule according to "Mein Kampf", complete with the trappings of a "democratic election", setting up a Gestapo (Revolutionary Guard), the Hitler Jugend (Basij militia), spending vast sums of money on arms rather than on their people and of course getting stuck into the "Zionists to be wiped off the earth". Those theocratic rulers don't seem to care anymore than Hitler did, who gets killed in their boundless ambitions to expand their hegemony not only at home but over ever vaster territories and nations like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and beyond.They want a Shia hegemony apparently.
A policy of intimidation with all resistance to be quashed is part of it, but perhaps the Iranian people who are slightly more sophisticated and independent of thought than the Germans were, have recognised their leaders for what they are and are prepared to cast off this kind of rule.They probably realize that they will only lead them to the same self-destruction as did the Nazis.
Let us hope that at least some good will arise from the current Iranian people's sacrifices and not finish up to have been in vain, or all our free nations may end up suffering a WW2/3 fate,- in spite of Obama's Chamberlaine-like advances!
But with the US and its allies deserting the Iraqis, who will help the Iranian people now?
JUST AS THE AMERICAN ARMY IS PREPARING TO LEAVE IRAQ TO THE IRAQI ARMY, THE VIOLENCE HAS ERUPTED WORSE THAN EVER AGAIN, WITH DOZENS KILLED AND HUNDREDS MAIMED.
Perhaps Israel could save the Iranian people?! Wouldn't that be ironic!So much for their Islamic revolutions and Islamic Theocracies. Hopefully Hamas, Hetzbollah, Taliban etal. are taking note.
mm
So US.President Obama thinks that he should still pursue dialogue with the Iranian rulers.
The Mullahs, Ayatollas and their spokesman Ahmadinejad have chosen to rule according to "Mein Kampf", complete with the trappings of a "democratic election", setting up a Gestapo (Revolutionary Guard), the Hitler Jugend (Basij militia), spending vast sums of money on arms rather than on their people and of course getting stuck into the "Zionists to be wiped off the earth". Those theocratic rulers don't seem to care anymore than Hitler did, who gets killed in their boundless ambitions to expand their hegemony not only at home but over ever vaster territories and nations like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and beyond.They want a Shia hegemony apparently.
A policy of intimidation with all resistance to be quashed is part of it, but perhaps the Iranian people who are slightly more sophisticated and independent of thought than the Germans were, have recognised their leaders for what they are and are prepared to cast off this kind of rule.They probably realize that they will only lead them to the same self-destruction as did the Nazis.
Let us hope that at least some good will arise from the current Iranian people's sacrifices and not finish up to have been in vain, or all our free nations may end up suffering a WW2/3 fate,- in spite of Obama's Chamberlaine-like advances!
But with the US and its allies deserting the Iraqis, who will help the Iranian people now?
JUST AS THE AMERICAN ARMY IS PREPARING TO LEAVE IRAQ TO THE IRAQI ARMY, THE VIOLENCE HAS ERUPTED WORSE THAN EVER AGAIN, WITH DOZENS KILLED AND HUNDREDS MAIMED.
Perhaps Israel could save the Iranian people?! Wouldn't that be ironic!So much for their Islamic revolutions and Islamic Theocracies. Hopefully Hamas, Hetzbollah, Taliban etal. are taking note.
mm
Monday, June 22, 2009
IRAN AND ITS WOMEN: a new film.
A Revolution Named Zahra:
by Kathleen Parker .
In some parts of the world, a woman can be destroyed at a man's whim without consequence.
There's a "new" old name suddenly in circulation that is both filled with ancient history and ripe with a revolutionary spirit for today's game-changing events.
Zahra.
Well known to Muslims, Fatima az-Zahra was one of four daughters of the prophet Muhammad. Today, Zahra is also the name of two important, outspoken women of Iran.
One is Zahra Rahnavard, the courageous and charismatic wife of the allegedly defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. The other is Zahra Khanum, the equally courageous and charismatic woman portrayed in a new movie, "The Stoning of Soraya M.," about the death of an Iranian woman on trumped-up charges of adultery.
Begging forgiveness for this confederacy of cliches, but we seem to have a perfect storm of tipping points.
Beneath the surface of news blasts covering Iran's tainted elections, riots, protester deaths and government crackdowns, a subtext of women's rights is emerging. It is a subtext only to the extent that women's oppression isn't often acknowledged directly -- not even by the leader of the free world. But human rights are at the core of what is occurring now.
A government that oppresses its people can only sustain itself with violence, as the world is witnessing yet again as thousands take to Iran's streets. And, in Iran as elsewhere in the Muslim world, violence against women -- as well as against homosexuals and others considered inferior according to the mullahs' masculinist standards -- isn't only permitted but justified with religious doctrine.
Mousavi challenged these notions -- and the government, apparently, saw fit that he lose. Even in the midst of so much heat, Mousavi's wife, Zahra, on Monday urged students at a Tehran University protest to hold fast in their resistance. Climb to the rooftops, she said, and shout, "God is great!"
Zahra R., who holds a PhD in political science and was an adviser to former president Mohammad Khatami, also has been vocal in urging reforms that would eliminate "morality police" as well as end discrimination against women.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that monument to self-confident masculinity, reportedly was so undone by Zahra's power on the campaign trail that he questioned whether her doctorate was legitimate.
Americans will begin getting a glimpse of the other Zahra as soon as "The Stoning" opens in select cities. Based on a true story, the movie is adapted from French Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam's 1994 novel of the same name.
In the film, produced by Stephen McEveety ("Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ"), the journalist-author is stranded in a small village when his car breaks down. Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo) dodges the threatening stares of her fellow villagers and persuades the reporter to come to her house and record her story. Evil has visited her village, she tells him, and she wants the world to know.
Briefly, Zahra's niece Soraya, mother of four, had been accused of adultery by her abusive, unfaithful husband. The truth was that he wanted a divorce so he could marry another. When Soraya refused, he and the village mullah conspired to accuse her of adultery.
As the title suggests, Soraya was convicted and condemned to death by stoning.
I saw a rough cut of this film several months ago. Since that time, I've been unable to shake the story or images that I suspect will haunt me forever. Be forewarned: It is brutal. McEveety and director Cyrus Nowrasteh felt that the stoning scene needed to be accurately portrayed or the film would be an insult to Soraya's suffering.
It will be hard for many to get through to the end, but staying with the movie brings a reward. Despite the brutality, the film is also beautiful and true. It reminds us that a woman in some parts of the world can be destroyed at a man's whim without consequence. The beauty is that truth will out.
"The Stoning," which will be in most theaters June 26, was intentionally timed for release after Iran's elections. Dennis Rice, charged with promoting the movie, figured the election would help create interest, but he didn't anticipate the serendipitous intersection of the two Zahras. "Irony?" he asks. "I think not."
In Arabic, Zahra means "The Shining One."
In English, we'd call that a beacon.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.
See this article online:
http://www.aish.com/societyWork/arts/A_Revolution_Named_Zahra.asp
by Kathleen Parker .
In some parts of the world, a woman can be destroyed at a man's whim without consequence.
There's a "new" old name suddenly in circulation that is both filled with ancient history and ripe with a revolutionary spirit for today's game-changing events.
Zahra.
Well known to Muslims, Fatima az-Zahra was one of four daughters of the prophet Muhammad. Today, Zahra is also the name of two important, outspoken women of Iran.
One is Zahra Rahnavard, the courageous and charismatic wife of the allegedly defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. The other is Zahra Khanum, the equally courageous and charismatic woman portrayed in a new movie, "The Stoning of Soraya M.," about the death of an Iranian woman on trumped-up charges of adultery.
Begging forgiveness for this confederacy of cliches, but we seem to have a perfect storm of tipping points.
Beneath the surface of news blasts covering Iran's tainted elections, riots, protester deaths and government crackdowns, a subtext of women's rights is emerging. It is a subtext only to the extent that women's oppression isn't often acknowledged directly -- not even by the leader of the free world. But human rights are at the core of what is occurring now.
A government that oppresses its people can only sustain itself with violence, as the world is witnessing yet again as thousands take to Iran's streets. And, in Iran as elsewhere in the Muslim world, violence against women -- as well as against homosexuals and others considered inferior according to the mullahs' masculinist standards -- isn't only permitted but justified with religious doctrine.
Mousavi challenged these notions -- and the government, apparently, saw fit that he lose. Even in the midst of so much heat, Mousavi's wife, Zahra, on Monday urged students at a Tehran University protest to hold fast in their resistance. Climb to the rooftops, she said, and shout, "God is great!"
Zahra R., who holds a PhD in political science and was an adviser to former president Mohammad Khatami, also has been vocal in urging reforms that would eliminate "morality police" as well as end discrimination against women.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that monument to self-confident masculinity, reportedly was so undone by Zahra's power on the campaign trail that he questioned whether her doctorate was legitimate.
Americans will begin getting a glimpse of the other Zahra as soon as "The Stoning" opens in select cities. Based on a true story, the movie is adapted from French Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam's 1994 novel of the same name.
In the film, produced by Stephen McEveety ("Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ"), the journalist-author is stranded in a small village when his car breaks down. Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo) dodges the threatening stares of her fellow villagers and persuades the reporter to come to her house and record her story. Evil has visited her village, she tells him, and she wants the world to know.
Briefly, Zahra's niece Soraya, mother of four, had been accused of adultery by her abusive, unfaithful husband. The truth was that he wanted a divorce so he could marry another. When Soraya refused, he and the village mullah conspired to accuse her of adultery.
As the title suggests, Soraya was convicted and condemned to death by stoning.
I saw a rough cut of this film several months ago. Since that time, I've been unable to shake the story or images that I suspect will haunt me forever. Be forewarned: It is brutal. McEveety and director Cyrus Nowrasteh felt that the stoning scene needed to be accurately portrayed or the film would be an insult to Soraya's suffering.
It will be hard for many to get through to the end, but staying with the movie brings a reward. Despite the brutality, the film is also beautiful and true. It reminds us that a woman in some parts of the world can be destroyed at a man's whim without consequence. The beauty is that truth will out.
"The Stoning," which will be in most theaters June 26, was intentionally timed for release after Iran's elections. Dennis Rice, charged with promoting the movie, figured the election would help create interest, but he didn't anticipate the serendipitous intersection of the two Zahras. "Irony?" he asks. "I think not."
In Arabic, Zahra means "The Shining One."
In English, we'd call that a beacon.
-------------------------------------------------------------
This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.
See this article online:
http://www.aish.com/societyWork/arts/A_Revolution_Named_Zahra.asp
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Israel, Obama and American Jewry. (Shmuel Boteach)
INTRODUCTION: It was obvious that as soon as President Barak Hussein Obama would be elected, he was going to set himself up as a 'friend' of the Islamic world. To prove it, he has to prove that he is pressurizing Israel somehow. Stopping building in the Settlement communities, seemed to be the easiest way to do that probably. Rabbi Boteach argues that the Jewish community in the USA is too ready to support Obama in this. (MM)
The coming storm: Obama and American Jewry
Jun. 15, 2009
Shmuley Boteach ,
THE JERUSALEM POST
There's a storm coming. It will pit a well-organized community of substantial resources but also substantial insecurity - particularly when it comes to charges of dual loyalty - against a popular president of considerable eloquence but misguided policies that identify Israeli settlements as the main obstacle to Middle East peace. The inevitable clash will separate sunshine Jewish patriots who back Israel when convenient against those who stand with Israel even when it means losing their invitation to the White House Hanukka party.
The bogus issue of settlements is already being swallowed whole by many well-meaning Jews. Last week Dan Fleshler, a leader of Americans for Peace Now, wrote in the New Jersey Jewish Standard that Obama has no choice but to pressure Israel because "it is fruitless for a well-armed, occupying power to negotiate the terms of a viable settlement with an almost defenseless occupied people unless a third party mediates and presses both sides."
In reading Fleshler one wonders whether he has been himself occupied with building a settlement on the moon with no knowledge of events on Earth. Is he seriously suggesting that the thousands of Katyusha rockets and nonstop suicide bombers that have killed more than a thousand Israelis (the equivalent of 30,000 dead Americans) have come from a "defenseless" foe? Would Fleshler likewise argue that the US ought to have pressure from, say, Russia or China to make peace with the terrorists in Afghanistan, seeing that America now represents a "well-armed, occupying power" against the comparatively defenseless Taliban? Or is it only Israel that is forbidden from defending itself.
Sorry Mr. Fleshler, but Jewish values do not dictate that the only moral Jew is a dead one who refuses to fight in the face of a 60-year terror onslaught.
Any return to the 1967 borders, which is what Obama's attack on the settlements represents, is simply suicide for Israel. The borders are utterly indefensible. The Arabs know it, which is why they press for it. Had Israel not dismantled its settlements in Gush Katif, Gaza would not have become a terrorist state ruled by Hamas, an organization that kills even more Palestinians than it does Israelis.
BUT MISGUIDED Jewish apologists aside, are the rest of us prepared to speak up against the policies of the administration? By this I do not mean the drunken racist rants of the American Jewish hooligans who got attention disgracing themselves on YouTube last week; their bigoted drivel against our democratically elected president represents an abomination to Judaism. I have already written several columns lamenting how a small minority of the large and praiseworthy contingent of Jewish youth who go to Israel from the US after high school ostensibly to study in yeshivot end up instead hanging out on Rehov Ben Yehuda making asses of themselves. That they have no proper supervision and that they are allowed to go through their year in a drunken stupor is an outrage that must be finally addressed by the institutions which host them.
Rather, I mean courageous and intelligent criticism that accepts the president's praiseworthy efforts in making peace but decries his soft posture on tyranny when he bows to an Arab potentate who oppresses women and warmly embraces the dictator of Venezuela.
Asher Lopatin was one of the first students I met at Oxford and the university's first Orthodox Rhodes scholar. Today he is the successful rabbi of one of Chicago's most youthful congregations. He is also Rahm Emanuel's rabbi. But that did not stop him from criticizing the White House chief of staff in Newsweek for his unfair pressure on Israel. Lopatin could easily have basked in the aura of being rabbi to one of the most influential men in the world. Instead, he spoke truth to power.
In promoting the new translation of his Hebrew prayer book, British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks constantly reminds us that he studies Bible with the prime minister of the United Kingdom. That's nice. But a few years ago Sacks spoke out publicly against Israel, telling London's Guardian newspaper, "There are things that happen on a daily basis which make me feel very uncomfortable as a Jew."
Sacks is a brilliant man but with a long history of pandering to whatever audience he happens to be addressing. He would do well to remember the admonishment of Mordechai to Esther on the responsibility of being close to political power: "If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place."
But while Europe and the UK are significant, the main battle lines will be here in the US and now is the time for American Jewry to organize. From schools to universities to synagogues and JCCs, we must make it clear that when 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama and filled his campaign coffers with cash it was not in the expectation of biased policies against Israel. We're upset, disappointed and we won't take it. We'll march in the streets, write op-eds and blogs, and publish ads making it clear that America should be standing with the Middle East's only democracy and America's most reliable ally.
As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, our president undermines his moral authority when he pledges that henceforth America will "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," but then only applies that pledge to Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, but not to Israel.
Last year, right after Obama captured the democratic nomination, I received a phone call from his campaign asking if I would serve as one of the national chairs of "Rabbis for Obama." It was a tempting offer. I was moved by the candidate's remarkable personal story, his iron discipline, his soaring oratory and, most of all, the fact that his victory would be the culmination of my hero Martin Luther King's dream of a man being judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. In the end I declined because I feared that Obama would draw a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians and pressure the former to appease the latter. But even I never suspected that it would happen so quickly and so lopsidedly.
The writer is the founder of This World: The Values Network. His upcoming book is The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371106463&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull[ Back to the Article ]
Copyright 1995- 2009 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
The coming storm: Obama and American Jewry
Jun. 15, 2009
Shmuley Boteach ,
THE JERUSALEM POST
There's a storm coming. It will pit a well-organized community of substantial resources but also substantial insecurity - particularly when it comes to charges of dual loyalty - against a popular president of considerable eloquence but misguided policies that identify Israeli settlements as the main obstacle to Middle East peace. The inevitable clash will separate sunshine Jewish patriots who back Israel when convenient against those who stand with Israel even when it means losing their invitation to the White House Hanukka party.
The bogus issue of settlements is already being swallowed whole by many well-meaning Jews. Last week Dan Fleshler, a leader of Americans for Peace Now, wrote in the New Jersey Jewish Standard that Obama has no choice but to pressure Israel because "it is fruitless for a well-armed, occupying power to negotiate the terms of a viable settlement with an almost defenseless occupied people unless a third party mediates and presses both sides."
In reading Fleshler one wonders whether he has been himself occupied with building a settlement on the moon with no knowledge of events on Earth. Is he seriously suggesting that the thousands of Katyusha rockets and nonstop suicide bombers that have killed more than a thousand Israelis (the equivalent of 30,000 dead Americans) have come from a "defenseless" foe? Would Fleshler likewise argue that the US ought to have pressure from, say, Russia or China to make peace with the terrorists in Afghanistan, seeing that America now represents a "well-armed, occupying power" against the comparatively defenseless Taliban? Or is it only Israel that is forbidden from defending itself.
Sorry Mr. Fleshler, but Jewish values do not dictate that the only moral Jew is a dead one who refuses to fight in the face of a 60-year terror onslaught.
Any return to the 1967 borders, which is what Obama's attack on the settlements represents, is simply suicide for Israel. The borders are utterly indefensible. The Arabs know it, which is why they press for it. Had Israel not dismantled its settlements in Gush Katif, Gaza would not have become a terrorist state ruled by Hamas, an organization that kills even more Palestinians than it does Israelis.
BUT MISGUIDED Jewish apologists aside, are the rest of us prepared to speak up against the policies of the administration? By this I do not mean the drunken racist rants of the American Jewish hooligans who got attention disgracing themselves on YouTube last week; their bigoted drivel against our democratically elected president represents an abomination to Judaism. I have already written several columns lamenting how a small minority of the large and praiseworthy contingent of Jewish youth who go to Israel from the US after high school ostensibly to study in yeshivot end up instead hanging out on Rehov Ben Yehuda making asses of themselves. That they have no proper supervision and that they are allowed to go through their year in a drunken stupor is an outrage that must be finally addressed by the institutions which host them.
Rather, I mean courageous and intelligent criticism that accepts the president's praiseworthy efforts in making peace but decries his soft posture on tyranny when he bows to an Arab potentate who oppresses women and warmly embraces the dictator of Venezuela.
Asher Lopatin was one of the first students I met at Oxford and the university's first Orthodox Rhodes scholar. Today he is the successful rabbi of one of Chicago's most youthful congregations. He is also Rahm Emanuel's rabbi. But that did not stop him from criticizing the White House chief of staff in Newsweek for his unfair pressure on Israel. Lopatin could easily have basked in the aura of being rabbi to one of the most influential men in the world. Instead, he spoke truth to power.
In promoting the new translation of his Hebrew prayer book, British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks constantly reminds us that he studies Bible with the prime minister of the United Kingdom. That's nice. But a few years ago Sacks spoke out publicly against Israel, telling London's Guardian newspaper, "There are things that happen on a daily basis which make me feel very uncomfortable as a Jew."
Sacks is a brilliant man but with a long history of pandering to whatever audience he happens to be addressing. He would do well to remember the admonishment of Mordechai to Esther on the responsibility of being close to political power: "If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place."
But while Europe and the UK are significant, the main battle lines will be here in the US and now is the time for American Jewry to organize. From schools to universities to synagogues and JCCs, we must make it clear that when 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama and filled his campaign coffers with cash it was not in the expectation of biased policies against Israel. We're upset, disappointed and we won't take it. We'll march in the streets, write op-eds and blogs, and publish ads making it clear that America should be standing with the Middle East's only democracy and America's most reliable ally.
As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, our president undermines his moral authority when he pledges that henceforth America will "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," but then only applies that pledge to Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, but not to Israel.
Last year, right after Obama captured the democratic nomination, I received a phone call from his campaign asking if I would serve as one of the national chairs of "Rabbis for Obama." It was a tempting offer. I was moved by the candidate's remarkable personal story, his iron discipline, his soaring oratory and, most of all, the fact that his victory would be the culmination of my hero Martin Luther King's dream of a man being judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. In the end I declined because I feared that Obama would draw a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians and pressure the former to appease the latter. But even I never suspected that it would happen so quickly and so lopsidedly.
The writer is the founder of This World: The Values Network. His upcoming book is The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371106463&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull[ Back to the Article ]
Copyright 1995- 2009 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Therapists to the Jews: psychologising the Jewish question!
His analysis of Rose, Churchill and Lerman is correct, but I see it as a common fallacy among many of the Jewish Left,- they cannot imagine Jews sticking up for themselves. It is they who suffer from psychological guilt traumas. The modern Zionists have shed their feelings of inferiority, thanks to the brave Israelis who have known nothing but war and terror. Imagine,- they didn't give up and run away, but fought and fight back. The racists cannot take it, so they in turn have to accuse the Jews of racism against,- whom? Palestinians,- they are hardly the Left's favorite allies, but they'll do as long as they are anti-Jews. Only those Jews who feel guilty take it out on their own. See article
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=6090&ICJS=139&article=1939.
But blaming it on some psychological pay-back is ludicrous!MM
Therapists to the Jews
by Shalom Lappin
Wednesday May 20, 2009
Psychologising the Jewish question
In the past few years an interesting mode of discourse has gained currency among some critics of Israel. It consists in characterizing most Israelis, and the Jews who are concerned about Israel's continued existence, as suffering from a deep collective psycho-pathology that conditions them to commit or to endorse systematic brutalization of the Palestinians. It takes Israel and its supporters to be acting out the effects of a long term historical trauma that reached its climax in the Holocaust. They are deflecting the intense anger, helplessness and shame accumulated over centuries of persecution in Europe on to innocent Arab victims in Israel/Palestine. These victims are surrogates for the real but no longer accessible oppressors of the Jews. The analogy driving this discourse is that of the abused child who grows into an abusive adult, imposing his childhood experiences of violence on members of his family and his adult environment.
Three clear examples of this psychologized view of the Israel-Palestine conflict are Jacqueline Rose's book The Question of Zion(Princeton University Press, 2005), Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, recently staged at the Royal Court Theatre, and Anthony Lerman's article 'Must Jews always see themselves as victims' (The Independent, March 7, 2009). Rose argues that Zionism, and the country that it created, derive from the the same psychological disorder that generated the false messianism of Shabbtai Zvi and his followers. She regards it as a form of mass hysteria generated by the inability of Jews to respond rationally to prolonged suffering. Churchill adapts this diagnosis of Zionism to Israel's recent offensive in Gaza. She portrays Jewish children as obsessively raised with the collective memory of historical trauma as the pervasive background against which Israeli acts of murder and expulsion are justified or denied. Lerman invokes the work of Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar Tal to claim that the inability of Israelis and Jews to deal adequately with the experience of the Holocaust has given rise to a persecution complex that is responsible for Israel's perverse behaviour towards the Palestinians, as well as the willingness of Jews abroad to support this behaviour.
There are at least five features of the psychologizing discourse worth noting. First, it provides an ostensibly scientific basis for attributing negative properties to an ethnic group. Inter alia, most (but not all) Israelis, and many of their Diaspora Jewish supporters suffer from a blood lust. They are insensitive to the suffering of innocent Palestinians. They are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own people. They engage in illicit lobbying and hysterical political campaigning to promote a narrow and destructive group agenda. They refuse to acknowledge the normal constraints of universal human rights and morality. These are, of course, versions of longstanding anti-Jewish bigotries that infect European and Middle Eastern history. They are, however, rendered opaque and acceptable through translation into the psychological symptoms of a disturbed group. The painstaking clinical studies required to support serious psychological diagnoses are singularly absent from the psychologizing discourse. It is, in fact, a vintage case of pseudo-science in the service of prejudice. It does, however, serve an important political and cultural role. It renders acceptable attitudes and assumptions that would be inadmissible if expressed in traditional terms.
Second, the practitioners of psychologizing discourse do not, in general, present themselves as adversaries of Israel and the Jews. On the contrary, they are therapists moved by the highest motives of public responsibility. They seek to cure the patients of their collective disease by getting them to see the full extent of their malady and to recognize its roots in a historically disordered collective spirit. They do not see Israel and the Jews as evil, but as deeply pathological and in need of proper care. That they may, in many cases, prescribe a therapy that requires the patients (in the case of Israel) to cede their own collective existence is not an expression of hostility. It is a desire to free the patients from the agony that they are inflicting upon themselves and the rest of the world.
Third, this discourse is a particularly effective method for shutting down serious political discussion and controlling reaction. If members of the deranged group dissent from this account, their comments are summarily dismissed as the delusional resistance of patients to the benign efforts of the therapist to treat their illness. Moreover, events like Israel's operation in Gaza are not construed as the destructive and misguided actions of an unpleasant government, phenomena common enough in other parts of the world. They are taken to be direct expressions of a perverse national psychology working itself out with the grim inexorability of a medical condition. They require not the sort of criticism appropriate for normal people and countries, but a complete quarantine of the patients for their own good, as well as that of everyone else. Jews and Israelis do not act from the same motives that determine the behaviour, good or bad, of balanced people. Their conduct is the result of a diseased nature that requires radical revision to restore them to health.
Fourth, the psychologizing discourse contrasts with 'root cause' explanations applied to terrorist violence and extremism from oppressed groups.
These explanations use past persecution to exculpate the agents of violence from responsibility for their choices. The actions that they commit are ultimately reduced to the oppression that they or their people have experienced. The therapists to the Jews do not treat Jewish suffering as a basis for mitigating Jewish or Israeli misbehaviour. Instead, it is used to highlight the depth of the pathology that generates it, and to focus on the need for drastic corrective measures, where these frequently require that Israel be politically eliminated as the best way of eradicating the disease.
Finally, the use of the psychologizing discourse for the Israel-Palestine conflict is sui generis. If anyone were to construe other conflicts in analogous terms, they would be quickly dismissed as racists or neo-colonialists. Imagine, for example, how progressive opinion would receive the suggestion that Africans were disposed to mass murder and civil war because they had been traumatized by centuries of colonial rule and so had internalized the treatment and mores to which Europeans had subjected them. Similarly, it seems unlikely that any attempt to analyze the contemporary Muslim world as suffering from a collective psychosis brought on by the trauma of European violence over the centuries will meet with much enthusiasm among people who regard themselves as politically enlightened. But it is precisely the fashionably 'progressive' who accept as the height of wisdom the psychologizing discourse about Jews and Israel.
Using group psychological profiling to attribute to Jews an unnatural and diseased nature is not new. In 1901 Otto Weininger published Sex and Character in Vienna (an anonymous English translation appeared in 1906, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York). In this book, Weininger contrasts masculine and feminine character types. He identifies men with reason, virtue, heroism, ego, cultural creativity (genius) and social order. The female is weak, dependent, cowardly, amoral, lacking in ego, driven by sexual passion, incapable of genuine creativity, and subversive of order. Weininger cites a variety of biological and medical 'facts' to argue for his description of male and female typologies. He then distinguishes between 'Aryan' and Jewish characters, claiming that the Aryans instantiate male properties, while the Jews are largely feminine in nature.
Weininger wrote in turn of the century Vienna, when pseudo-scientific theories of race and sex were invoked to support racist anthropological views and misogynist attitudes towards women. These cultural themes defined the context in which Weininger formulated his ideas. They also provided the basis for Nazi policies in the following decades. However, it is important to distinguish carefully between some of these themes and Weininger's enterprise. While there are clear racist elements in his book, he is careful to insist that he is not characterizing Jews as a racial entity, but as an idealized psychological type, instantiated to a greater or lesser degree by actual Jews. He also clearly states that he opposes any attempt to persecute or disenfranchise Jews. He holds out the prospect of escape from their respective natures to both individual women and Jews. For women this requires adopting male values and forms of behaviour. Jews can redeem themselves from their type by converting to Christianity and embracing Aryan culture. Weininger himself had adopted Lutheranism. He identified with Protestantism, rather than Catholicism, because of a strong admiration for Kant and the reliance on individual conscience in achieving moral responsibility.
It is tempting to dismiss Weininger as a crackpot (Freud, who met him briefly, described him as 'highly gifted but sexually deranged'). He committed suicide at the age of 23, two years after the publication of Sex and Character, and became a romantic cult figure. In fact, his book had a significant impact on intellectual life in Vienna and abroad. Prominent cultural figures hailed it as a work of genius. So, for example, Karl Kraus, the noted Viennese satirist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the influential Austrian philosopher, expressed great admiration for Weininger's work. Like him, they were both converted Jews. Weininger's view of Jews resonated widely through Austrian literary society.
Weininger was an early therapist to the Jews. There are, however, fundamental differences between his project and that of the latter-day therapists: he regarded Jews and Judaism as a disease to be escaped; they, in general, do not, although they frequently slide into such a view of Israel. Some even present themselves as the guardians of 'true' Jewish values in the face of Zionist corruption. The traits that Weininger stigmatizes in his caricature of a Jewish cultural type are largely disjoint from those that the contemporary therapists select for opprobrium. Weininger states that the origins of the Jewish type are a mystery to him. By contrast the contemporary therapists explain negative collective Jewish features as the result of group trauma.
But important analogies do exist between Weininger's writings on Jews and the psychologizing discourse that has emerged in recent years. In both cases traditional anti-Jewish prejudices are effectively legitimized through a pseudo-scientific exercise in collective psychological portraiture. Weininger and the latter-day therapists both offer an exit from group stigma through recognition of the pathology that provokes it, and the adoption of an alternative set of cultural commitments. For the Jews among the therapists, this is a route out of quarantine into the mainstream of civilized opinion. No wonder, then, that it should prove to be attractive in the face of a hostile social environment.
Most therapists to the Jews would probably recoil at the suggestion that they share a common set of concerns with Weininger. They are undoubtedly sincere in their professed intention to be helpful and constructive. It is unfortunate that they have apparently failed to examine the defining assumptions of their enterprise. Should they do so, they may well be surprised to discover the deeply racist nature of some of these assumptions.
(Shalom Lappin, King's College, London)
__._,_.___
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=6090&ICJS=139&article=1939.
But blaming it on some psychological pay-back is ludicrous!MM
Therapists to the Jews
by Shalom Lappin
Wednesday May 20, 2009
Psychologising the Jewish question
In the past few years an interesting mode of discourse has gained currency among some critics of Israel. It consists in characterizing most Israelis, and the Jews who are concerned about Israel's continued existence, as suffering from a deep collective psycho-pathology that conditions them to commit or to endorse systematic brutalization of the Palestinians. It takes Israel and its supporters to be acting out the effects of a long term historical trauma that reached its climax in the Holocaust. They are deflecting the intense anger, helplessness and shame accumulated over centuries of persecution in Europe on to innocent Arab victims in Israel/Palestine. These victims are surrogates for the real but no longer accessible oppressors of the Jews. The analogy driving this discourse is that of the abused child who grows into an abusive adult, imposing his childhood experiences of violence on members of his family and his adult environment.
Three clear examples of this psychologized view of the Israel-Palestine conflict are Jacqueline Rose's book The Question of Zion(Princeton University Press, 2005), Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, recently staged at the Royal Court Theatre, and Anthony Lerman's article 'Must Jews always see themselves as victims' (The Independent, March 7, 2009). Rose argues that Zionism, and the country that it created, derive from the the same psychological disorder that generated the false messianism of Shabbtai Zvi and his followers. She regards it as a form of mass hysteria generated by the inability of Jews to respond rationally to prolonged suffering. Churchill adapts this diagnosis of Zionism to Israel's recent offensive in Gaza. She portrays Jewish children as obsessively raised with the collective memory of historical trauma as the pervasive background against which Israeli acts of murder and expulsion are justified or denied. Lerman invokes the work of Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar Tal to claim that the inability of Israelis and Jews to deal adequately with the experience of the Holocaust has given rise to a persecution complex that is responsible for Israel's perverse behaviour towards the Palestinians, as well as the willingness of Jews abroad to support this behaviour.
There are at least five features of the psychologizing discourse worth noting. First, it provides an ostensibly scientific basis for attributing negative properties to an ethnic group. Inter alia, most (but not all) Israelis, and many of their Diaspora Jewish supporters suffer from a blood lust. They are insensitive to the suffering of innocent Palestinians. They are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own people. They engage in illicit lobbying and hysterical political campaigning to promote a narrow and destructive group agenda. They refuse to acknowledge the normal constraints of universal human rights and morality. These are, of course, versions of longstanding anti-Jewish bigotries that infect European and Middle Eastern history. They are, however, rendered opaque and acceptable through translation into the psychological symptoms of a disturbed group. The painstaking clinical studies required to support serious psychological diagnoses are singularly absent from the psychologizing discourse. It is, in fact, a vintage case of pseudo-science in the service of prejudice. It does, however, serve an important political and cultural role. It renders acceptable attitudes and assumptions that would be inadmissible if expressed in traditional terms.
Second, the practitioners of psychologizing discourse do not, in general, present themselves as adversaries of Israel and the Jews. On the contrary, they are therapists moved by the highest motives of public responsibility. They seek to cure the patients of their collective disease by getting them to see the full extent of their malady and to recognize its roots in a historically disordered collective spirit. They do not see Israel and the Jews as evil, but as deeply pathological and in need of proper care. That they may, in many cases, prescribe a therapy that requires the patients (in the case of Israel) to cede their own collective existence is not an expression of hostility. It is a desire to free the patients from the agony that they are inflicting upon themselves and the rest of the world.
Third, this discourse is a particularly effective method for shutting down serious political discussion and controlling reaction. If members of the deranged group dissent from this account, their comments are summarily dismissed as the delusional resistance of patients to the benign efforts of the therapist to treat their illness. Moreover, events like Israel's operation in Gaza are not construed as the destructive and misguided actions of an unpleasant government, phenomena common enough in other parts of the world. They are taken to be direct expressions of a perverse national psychology working itself out with the grim inexorability of a medical condition. They require not the sort of criticism appropriate for normal people and countries, but a complete quarantine of the patients for their own good, as well as that of everyone else. Jews and Israelis do not act from the same motives that determine the behaviour, good or bad, of balanced people. Their conduct is the result of a diseased nature that requires radical revision to restore them to health.
Fourth, the psychologizing discourse contrasts with 'root cause' explanations applied to terrorist violence and extremism from oppressed groups.
These explanations use past persecution to exculpate the agents of violence from responsibility for their choices. The actions that they commit are ultimately reduced to the oppression that they or their people have experienced. The therapists to the Jews do not treat Jewish suffering as a basis for mitigating Jewish or Israeli misbehaviour. Instead, it is used to highlight the depth of the pathology that generates it, and to focus on the need for drastic corrective measures, where these frequently require that Israel be politically eliminated as the best way of eradicating the disease.
Finally, the use of the psychologizing discourse for the Israel-Palestine conflict is sui generis. If anyone were to construe other conflicts in analogous terms, they would be quickly dismissed as racists or neo-colonialists. Imagine, for example, how progressive opinion would receive the suggestion that Africans were disposed to mass murder and civil war because they had been traumatized by centuries of colonial rule and so had internalized the treatment and mores to which Europeans had subjected them. Similarly, it seems unlikely that any attempt to analyze the contemporary Muslim world as suffering from a collective psychosis brought on by the trauma of European violence over the centuries will meet with much enthusiasm among people who regard themselves as politically enlightened. But it is precisely the fashionably 'progressive' who accept as the height of wisdom the psychologizing discourse about Jews and Israel.
Using group psychological profiling to attribute to Jews an unnatural and diseased nature is not new. In 1901 Otto Weininger published Sex and Character in Vienna (an anonymous English translation appeared in 1906, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York). In this book, Weininger contrasts masculine and feminine character types. He identifies men with reason, virtue, heroism, ego, cultural creativity (genius) and social order. The female is weak, dependent, cowardly, amoral, lacking in ego, driven by sexual passion, incapable of genuine creativity, and subversive of order. Weininger cites a variety of biological and medical 'facts' to argue for his description of male and female typologies. He then distinguishes between 'Aryan' and Jewish characters, claiming that the Aryans instantiate male properties, while the Jews are largely feminine in nature.
Weininger wrote in turn of the century Vienna, when pseudo-scientific theories of race and sex were invoked to support racist anthropological views and misogynist attitudes towards women. These cultural themes defined the context in which Weininger formulated his ideas. They also provided the basis for Nazi policies in the following decades. However, it is important to distinguish carefully between some of these themes and Weininger's enterprise. While there are clear racist elements in his book, he is careful to insist that he is not characterizing Jews as a racial entity, but as an idealized psychological type, instantiated to a greater or lesser degree by actual Jews. He also clearly states that he opposes any attempt to persecute or disenfranchise Jews. He holds out the prospect of escape from their respective natures to both individual women and Jews. For women this requires adopting male values and forms of behaviour. Jews can redeem themselves from their type by converting to Christianity and embracing Aryan culture. Weininger himself had adopted Lutheranism. He identified with Protestantism, rather than Catholicism, because of a strong admiration for Kant and the reliance on individual conscience in achieving moral responsibility.
It is tempting to dismiss Weininger as a crackpot (Freud, who met him briefly, described him as 'highly gifted but sexually deranged'). He committed suicide at the age of 23, two years after the publication of Sex and Character, and became a romantic cult figure. In fact, his book had a significant impact on intellectual life in Vienna and abroad. Prominent cultural figures hailed it as a work of genius. So, for example, Karl Kraus, the noted Viennese satirist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the influential Austrian philosopher, expressed great admiration for Weininger's work. Like him, they were both converted Jews. Weininger's view of Jews resonated widely through Austrian literary society.
Weininger was an early therapist to the Jews. There are, however, fundamental differences between his project and that of the latter-day therapists: he regarded Jews and Judaism as a disease to be escaped; they, in general, do not, although they frequently slide into such a view of Israel. Some even present themselves as the guardians of 'true' Jewish values in the face of Zionist corruption. The traits that Weininger stigmatizes in his caricature of a Jewish cultural type are largely disjoint from those that the contemporary therapists select for opprobrium. Weininger states that the origins of the Jewish type are a mystery to him. By contrast the contemporary therapists explain negative collective Jewish features as the result of group trauma.
But important analogies do exist between Weininger's writings on Jews and the psychologizing discourse that has emerged in recent years. In both cases traditional anti-Jewish prejudices are effectively legitimized through a pseudo-scientific exercise in collective psychological portraiture. Weininger and the latter-day therapists both offer an exit from group stigma through recognition of the pathology that provokes it, and the adoption of an alternative set of cultural commitments. For the Jews among the therapists, this is a route out of quarantine into the mainstream of civilized opinion. No wonder, then, that it should prove to be attractive in the face of a hostile social environment.
Most therapists to the Jews would probably recoil at the suggestion that they share a common set of concerns with Weininger. They are undoubtedly sincere in their professed intention to be helpful and constructive. It is unfortunate that they have apparently failed to examine the defining assumptions of their enterprise. Should they do so, they may well be surprised to discover the deeply racist nature of some of these assumptions.
(Shalom Lappin, King's College, London)
__._,_.___
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
THE POPE IN THE ME: the limits of interfaith (Jerusalem Post).
"The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition"
Limits of interfaith
May. 12, 2009
THE JERUSALEM POST
Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.
Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.
At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.
It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."
At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.
Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."
We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.
Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.
And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.
WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.
Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.
The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.
The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.
Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.
Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.
Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
L ETTER TO THE EDITOR IN THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS. (6th MARCH 2009)
(MM)
Rabbi David Stav is quoted (AJN 27/2) as saying that Israel is divided in the middle between (Orthodox) religion and secular Israel. Unfortunately, the problems Israelis face in areas of personal status dealing with conversion, marriage, divorce, birth and death are due to the "politics of religion", not just religion.
Given the pluralist (religious) Judaism enjoyed by Jews all over the world, except in Israel, it is obvious that it is politics that is at the root of all the problems which Israelis face also internally. While Ben Gurion who gave over those rights exclusively to the Orthodox Rabbinate to rule over, did not know any other way of keeping Israel Jewish, it is totally different in this day and age.
I believe the majority of Western Jews today who are Zionist, practice their Judaism in an inclusive, modern, Progressive tradition. To whom was Rabbi Stav addressing himself when he said he would like Jewish people outside Israel to help ? "I think it is one of [the diaspora's] duties to take part in this dialogue" i.e. between secular and religious Jews. How can they when their leaders hardly communicate with each other in the diaspora, let alone with Israelis?
If Progressive Judaism's credentials would be recognised by the Israeli State, the push for the separation between religion and State on issues of personal status would be virtually eliminated. There would be no need for even totally Jewish couples to travel abroad to get married, given the difficult issues of divorce and agunot which are imposed on all non-Orthodox Israeli Jewish women and the difficulties currently imposed by the Rabbinate on conversions would certainly be eased for those who prefer to be non-Orthodox.
Will this make the State less Jewish? Hardly. It will make it a more harmonious, inclusive, tolerant and pluralist Jewish society in law as well as in fact. It will also prove far more inviting to Diaspora's modern Jews.
(MM,- March 2009)
Limits of interfaith
May. 12, 2009
THE JERUSALEM POST
Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.
Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.
At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.
It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."
At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.
Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."
We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.
Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.
And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.
WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.
Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.
The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.
The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.
Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.
Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.
Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
L ETTER TO THE EDITOR IN THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS. (6th MARCH 2009)
(MM)
Rabbi David Stav is quoted (AJN 27/2) as saying that Israel is divided in the middle between (Orthodox) religion and secular Israel. Unfortunately, the problems Israelis face in areas of personal status dealing with conversion, marriage, divorce, birth and death are due to the "politics of religion", not just religion.
Given the pluralist (religious) Judaism enjoyed by Jews all over the world, except in Israel, it is obvious that it is politics that is at the root of all the problems which Israelis face also internally. While Ben Gurion who gave over those rights exclusively to the Orthodox Rabbinate to rule over, did not know any other way of keeping Israel Jewish, it is totally different in this day and age.
I believe the majority of Western Jews today who are Zionist, practice their Judaism in an inclusive, modern, Progressive tradition. To whom was Rabbi Stav addressing himself when he said he would like Jewish people outside Israel to help ? "I think it is one of [the diaspora's] duties to take part in this dialogue" i.e. between secular and religious Jews. How can they when their leaders hardly communicate with each other in the diaspora, let alone with Israelis?
If Progressive Judaism's credentials would be recognised by the Israeli State, the push for the separation between religion and State on issues of personal status would be virtually eliminated. There would be no need for even totally Jewish couples to travel abroad to get married, given the difficult issues of divorce and agunot which are imposed on all non-Orthodox Israeli Jewish women and the difficulties currently imposed by the Rabbinate on conversions would certainly be eased for those who prefer to be non-Orthodox.
Will this make the State less Jewish? Hardly. It will make it a more harmonious, inclusive, tolerant and pluralist Jewish society in law as well as in fact. It will also prove far more inviting to Diaspora's modern Jews.
(MM,- March 2009)
Monday, May 04, 2009
VALE Dick Pratt
When a person is a 'mensch'(a real humamn being in Yiddish) and befriends all,- from the smallest employee to the big and powerful, they stand by you in times of trouble as well as in the good times.
At least one hopes so.
Justice Marcus Einfeld was not so lucky.He may have done a lot of good for the Aboriginal community and perhaps others, but as an individual he was unfortunately not well liked.
Personally, I am happy to see that all the powerful elite stood by Richard at the end. However, the radio and Letters pages in The Age and elsewhere, keep harping about how much money he skimped off everyone in this cartel business.
Well, as a former very small businesswoman I can assure you that this business of "fair competition" is the worst myth perpetrated by the ACCC and everyone who believes them.
Why couldn't we in our retail shop be supplied by wholesalers at the prices the supermarkets were being supplied? We had to buy drinks like Coke, etc. from the supermarkets and sell them dearer of course, if we wanted to make a few cents on them. Then, when we bought a new product to try out, - next thing we knew, the supermarkets, or a bigger customer up the street would put pressure on the supplier not to supply it to us at all!
The big boys always win out over the small ones,- so who is kidding whom?
Consumers might have paid a few cents more per item for the packaging,- which then Visy recycled for everyone to save contaminating the earth with discarded waste.
The public company Amcor dobbed-in the individual businessman, Richard Pratt, - he who tried to give them each a chance not to drive one into the ground because he might be smaller and unable to survive the bigger one's competitive advantage. Big deal!
I am glad that all the VIPs whom Richard befriended and all those whom he helped, understood this very well,- it is only the small-minded who insist that he didn't deserve the adulation he actually received. They will disappear into insignificance, but Richard Pratt's contribution to society will remain into the future.
One just needs to read the hundreds of tributes from his employees to understand what kind of man he must have been. I know individuals whom he helped anonymously.
http://www.richardpratttribute.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At least one hopes so.
Justice Marcus Einfeld was not so lucky.He may have done a lot of good for the Aboriginal community and perhaps others, but as an individual he was unfortunately not well liked.
Personally, I am happy to see that all the powerful elite stood by Richard at the end. However, the radio and Letters pages in The Age and elsewhere, keep harping about how much money he skimped off everyone in this cartel business.
Well, as a former very small businesswoman I can assure you that this business of "fair competition" is the worst myth perpetrated by the ACCC and everyone who believes them.
Why couldn't we in our retail shop be supplied by wholesalers at the prices the supermarkets were being supplied? We had to buy drinks like Coke, etc. from the supermarkets and sell them dearer of course, if we wanted to make a few cents on them. Then, when we bought a new product to try out, - next thing we knew, the supermarkets, or a bigger customer up the street would put pressure on the supplier not to supply it to us at all!
The big boys always win out over the small ones,- so who is kidding whom?
Consumers might have paid a few cents more per item for the packaging,- which then Visy recycled for everyone to save contaminating the earth with discarded waste.
The public company Amcor dobbed-in the individual businessman, Richard Pratt, - he who tried to give them each a chance not to drive one into the ground because he might be smaller and unable to survive the bigger one's competitive advantage. Big deal!
I am glad that all the VIPs whom Richard befriended and all those whom he helped, understood this very well,- it is only the small-minded who insist that he didn't deserve the adulation he actually received. They will disappear into insignificance, but Richard Pratt's contribution to society will remain into the future.
One just needs to read the hundreds of tributes from his employees to understand what kind of man he must have been. I know individuals whom he helped anonymously.
http://www.richardpratttribute.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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