October 24, 2007 | 6:35 pm

Muslim metalheads rock out in Egypt

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Follow me on

A shorty from GOOD:

In Egypt, you’re much more likely to hear the call to prayer than a face-melting guitar solo, so Dutch photographer Aukje Dekker was surprised to find a thriving underground heavy- and death-metal scene. Fascinated, she documented it in a series of photos.

“In the West, heavy metal is generally associated with low lifes and trailer trash,” says Dekker, “but the situation in Egypt is completely reversed. These kids are the children of diplomats and other well-off Egyptians who get to travel abroad or who own a satellite television, which is how they got be exposed to heavy metal.”

A 1997 government crackdown on “Satanic music” led to dozens of arrests and the banning of concerts, but the scene is enjoying something of a comeback. “There is still a general consensus that heavy metal is a Satanic expression,” says Dekker, “so when these kids walk down the street with their long black hair and matching T-shirts, they are often called names, but that doesn’t stop them from pursuing their musical passion.”

October 24, 2007 | 10:27 am

Luke Ford looking for ‘real job’ *

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Luke Ford is leaving the world of porn—again. He’s sold LukeIsBack.com and is looking for his first “real job” in a decade:

It’s not because my conscience is so delicate I don’t want to take money from immoral advertisers. I’m just tired of fighting my religious friends on this.

He did this once before when he sold LukeFord.com at his rabbi’s instructions. Maybe this time it will stick.

I saw this item yesterday but just had a chance to post about it. LAObserved has a link this morning to a story in XBiz, where Luke says:

I feel like my life is stuck in a rut and I need to shake things up and go in a new direction. I’m 41. Never been married. I am unlikely to marry a nice Jewish girl while I’m stuck in this porn rut.

* Updated: Luke reports that he’s back at LukeIsBack.com.

Now I understand how Belladonna felt when faced with her desire to retire from this tawdry life. However, I cannot leave my flock. A good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep. I can see that my moral wisdom is still needed.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 24, 2007 | 1:26 am

America is her God

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“I sometimes hear Osama Bin Laden walking behind me in my bedroom and I wonder why he doesn’t shoot me; but most of the time, I am at peace about my decision to speak out.”

Those are the words of Wafa Sultan, the Syrian-American who has spent the past two years criticizing the radical roots of Islam and spoke Monday night at Sinai Temple in Westwood. The Calendar Girls have the story.

Listening to her polemic, one wonders what quality enabled Sultan to escape her religious prison and how she mustered the courage to denounce Islamic terror. Though she credits her husband, whose encounter with a Christian man expanded his theological purview, she is sustained by her belief in God and in American democracy: “America is my God; Americans take it for granted because they do not know the difference,” but Sultan does. She concluded, “I was born in hell and now I’m in paradise.”

I can appreciate the fact that moving from Syria to the United States was like leaving hell for heaven. But Sultan has some misplaced spirituality if she is worshiping Uncle Sam. Here is Sultan’s famous rant on Al Jazeera in early 2006.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 24, 2007 | 1:01 am

A neocon scion set to takeover Commentary

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

To some within the neoconservative movement, the announcement of John Podhoretz as the next editor of Commentary magazine—the same job his father, Norman, held for 35 years—is the best of all possible choices. It is a model of what Adam Bellow (son of the Nobel-winning novelist Saul) called the “new nepotism,” combining the “privileges of birth with the iron rule of merit.”

But to others the decision reeks of the “old nepotism,” in which the only credential that matters is the identity of your father—in Mr. Bellow’s cosmology, less like the Roosevelts than like Tori Spelling getting an acting job because her father was Aaron Spelling.

“I think some people are pretty shocked,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, whose book “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons” is coming out in January. John Podhoretz, movie critic for The Weekly Standard magazine and a political columnist for The New York Post, “isn’t seen as a heavyweight intellectual,” said Mr. Heilbrunn, who has discussed the appointment with several neoconservatives. Rather, “he is seen as being a beneficiary of his parents’ fame in the George W. Bush mold.”

That is the beginning of a piece in today’s NY Times. Commentary was once one of the most influential journals in the country and remains an important voice for American Jews and Israel.

The Bintel Blog had links last week to a few revealing stories of JPod, as the younger Podhoretz is known. This one by—guess who?—Hanna Rosin is quite revealing.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 23, 2007 | 9:09 pm

Quote for the ages

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

  “Abraham is our forefather. We’re first cousins. How we got to hate each other is beyond me.”

From a Muslim immigrant from the West Bank who waived a $250,000 fee to help build a synagogue in Arkanasas.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 23, 2007 | 7:09 pm

Social networking for social conservatives

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This is pretty genius. Unfortunately for some of my readers, there is no way to sign-up on Right-Wing Facebook. On the site, you can click around to read the different “profiles” of our Republican ‘08 hopefuls and people like Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer.

Courtesy of Matthew Yglesias

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 23, 2007 | 4:45 pm

The deadliest books ever published

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A Croatian Web site offers its list of books that have “changed the world and because of which the bloodiest wars were waged.” The Bible comes in second, right behind Mein Kampf and just ahead of the Communist Manifesto. Here’s the analysis:

The book that founded three great world religions and on which, whether they would like to admit so or not, all societies of the West were founded. The book took milleniums to write.  It originates from ancient Jewish texts that, at least as far as Christians are concerned, make up the foundation of the Old Testament. The book speaks of the salvation of the Jewish people and their arrival to the Promised Land, while the New Testament speaks about Jesus and his sacrifice for the sins of the world. Despite its relatively benign content, the text became one of the chief incentives for some of the biggest massacres mankind has seen.

Controversial idea: Jesus is not a common prophet, but the son of God.

Death toll: If we stick only to the Crusades which lasted a good 200 years, the death toll according to some estimates, is a respectable five million.

Not quite accurate because the “Bible” is not the same book for Muslims and Christians and Jews. But it’s hard to argue that belief in a monotheistic God that began with Abraham has caused a lot of bloodshed.

The Communist Manifesto also seems to be given a free pass in the political killings of Joseph Stalin, whose victims range from 3 million to 60 million. I also wonder if “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Luther’s “On the Jew and Their Lies” deserve a place for influencing Hitler.

(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 23, 2007 | 4:43 pm

‘The fire is one percent contained’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Wow, that’s comforting. For those wondering, my parents’ house is still standing and, unless the winds shift, should survive.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 22, 2007 | 3:16 pm

It’s meant to burn

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I wish it weren’t true, but this region we live in is meant to burn every now and then. And when we fight fires, we only add fuel to future flames.

Two of my former colleagues did a brilliant job detailing these “Unnatural Disasters” in a series for The Sun the summer after the devastating 2003 wildfires. And, coincidentally, Dave Gardetta has a piece in this month’s Los Angeles magazine, which came in the mail Friday, about how fires really are the biggest threat to the city.

The men and women whose job it is to fight Southern California wildfire perish by all possible means and in every circumstance imaginable. In the Angeles National Forest, a helicopter flying at night lands in darkness atop a second chopper already parked on the helibase. Two airmen die. In the same forest, a fire chief and his crew are surprised by advancing flames. The crew flee in one direction; the chief escapes in another, until—worried of his men’s fate—he returns through fire in search of them and is killed. Above the northern San Fernando Valley, 12 firefighters are caught in a wind shift along a steep ravine that swirls superheated gases over them, raising the tiny canyon’s temperature to 2,500 degrees. A fire engine driver racing to a call flies over a San Bernardino rail crossing and is smashed to death by an oncoming train. Beside Bryant Canyon, high in the Angeles Crest, a burning rat runs at two men in heavy brush, surrounding them in fire . On a San Diego blaze a firefighter pauses to talk with a passing bulldozer operator. His trousers become entangled in the machine’s moving tracks, and he is pulled under and crushed. While fighting a blaze in Orange County, a fireman drops dead of pneumonia.

Wildfire in the Golden State, and especially in Southern California—the nation’s maximum fire-prone landscape—is the most dynamic, violent natural event that people engage with. In sheer energy and unpredictability, a hurricane is as close as you can come to the riotous mien of a Los Angeles chaparral fire. We do not attack hurricanes, or earthquakes, or tornadoes. We do attack, however, what is essentially photosynthesis thrown into reverse, as foliage instantaneously releases stored solar energy in the form of hot gases—what we see as flames.

The 19 largest and most costly fires in 100 years have ignited within the last quarter century. Yet wildfire for Angelenos has typically remained an occurrence that happens “out there” —in the unseen San Jacinto wilderness, somewhere above lonely Morongo Valley, on a distant Los Padres plateau. Stories of firefighter deaths and injuries, or images of entire forest communities left in ashes, with lives ruined and fortunes lost, are annually beamed into the living rooms of Hancock Park, Alhambra, and Encino, like scenes out of Iraq. Usually, the smoke cannot even be spied from backyard porches. The misery on household TV screens might as well be happening in another country.

With the history of fires in Bel Air and Malibu, I’m not sure I agree with that. But fire certainly feels like an imminent threat for Angelenos now.

(Photo: Brett K. Snow)

1 Comments — Leave your comment

October 22, 2007 | 1:47 pm

Blaming Jews for killing Jesus

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

IN CIVILIZED circles it is considered boorish to speak of Jews as Christ-killers, or to use language evoking the venomous old teaching that Jews are forever cursed for the death of Jesus. Those circles apparently don’t include the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an anti-Israel “peace” organization based in Jerusalem, or its founder, the Anglican cleric Naim Ateek.

Sabeel and Ateek are highly regarded on the hard-line Christian left, and regularly organize American conferences at which Israel is extravagantly denounced by numerous critics. So far this year, such conferences have been held in Cleveland, Berkeley, Calif., and Birmingham, Ala.; another begins Friday at Boston’s Old South Church.

Just as critics of the United States are not necessarily anti-American bigots, critics of Israel are not necessarily biased against Jews. But Sabeel and Ateek’s denunciations of Israel have included imagery explicitly linking the modern Jewish state to the terrible charge of deicide that for centuries fueled so much anti-Jewish hatred and bloodshed.

“It seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him,” Ateek has written, envisioning “hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge Golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.”

In a sermon titled “The Massacre of the Innocents” Ateek similarly condemned the “modern-day Herods” in Israel - a reference to the evil king who the New Testament says slaughtered the babies of Bethlehem in an attempt to murder the newborn Jesus. In another sermon, Ateek portrays Israelis as having “shut off the Palestinians in a tomb . . . similar to the stone placed on the entrance of Jesus’ tomb.”

Read the rest of that piece from the Boston Globe here. As a Christian, I’m going to try to settle bad theology once and for all: Jews didn’t kill Jesus—humanity did.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

October 22, 2007 | 10:10 am

Southland fires rage; my parents evacuated

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I was woken up this morning by a call from my editor wondering if my family was being affected by the fires in San Diego County. They were fine when I spoke with my mom yesterday, but I just got off the phone with her, and my dad, sister and she were all on the road, in separate cars packed to the nines, heading for my grandfather’s house on the coast.

I remember this happening four years ago, when all of Southern California was burning. But my childhood home was never really threatened then. It certainly is now, so I pray and wait  for updates.

POWAY—- Many held out as long as they dared, but as the clock passed 8 p.m. Sunday, the numbers of fire refugees began to increase rapidly at an evacuation center set up in the gymnasium at Poway High School.

The families didn’t stay long.

As the evening wore on, authorities said they were forced to move the evacuees to a hastily set-up center at Miramar High School because of poor air quality created by smoke and ash.

                                                       

            Before the move, however, a Red Cross representative said there were about 40 evacuated Ramona residents already registered, with more arriving steadily to wait out the wind-driven Witch Creek fire that was bearing down on their homes.

Charles Davis and his teenage daughter, Lorissa, arrived at about 7:45 p.m. after leaving their home in the hills north of Ramona at about 7 p.m.

“The velocity of the wind up there in the canyons and hills is just unbelievable. They came and told us we had to evacuate, so we put the dogs in the car and we left,” Davis said.

He said he cleared brush as far away from his home as possible, but nervously added that, because half of his 4.7 acres is on land considered environmentally sensitive, he was not able to cut as big a buffer zone as he would have liked.

“In some places it’s 40 or 50 feet from the house,” he said. “We did everything we could to prepare. It’s in God’s hands now.”

1 Comments — Leave your comment

October 22, 2007 | 1:07 am

Who will love the dead?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

East Los Angeles is at least two freeway interchanges and several generations removed from today’s L.A. Jewry. But there the community’s early history rests eternally, amid well-worn bungalows, rusted chain-link fences and canopy-free, sun-bleached streets.

Head north on Downey Street across Interstate 5, and you’ll immediately be greeted by the tattered and peeling black-and-white sign of Beth Israel Cemetery, where hundreds of Jews have been buried during the past century and continue to be. Half a block north is Agudath Achim Cemetery, which similarly is operated by Chevra Kadisha Mortuary. Neither is regal or elaborate, mostly concrete crypts stacked side-by-side, only loose dirt for landscaping.

But between the two cemeteries is a more forgotten home. The wrought-iron gate, pinned shut with two Master locks, simply says “Mt Z.” Inside is Mount Zion Cemetery, rows upon rows of headstones baring menorahs and the Star of David, Feldmans and Ungers and Goldbergs and Rosens and Nefts and Pearlmans and Schwartzes and Raskins and Segelmans. Some of the crypts are tagged with graffiti, others simply cracked. It’s not maintained by a mortuary but by The Federation or, in essence, the whole Jewish community. It looks peaceful now, but throughout the years, the graveyard hasn’t always fared well.

“Jewish law commands that people honor the deceased,” a 1995 New York Times story began, “but the weeds thriving at Mount Zion Cemetery appear to have deeper roots than the local Jewish community, which long ago moved out of the neighborhood and stopped tending the graves.”

This section is toward the end of an article I have in this week’s Jewish Journal about the challenges fundraisers face in the new world of Jewish philanthropy. I thought this was a poignant example because there is nothing sexy about supporting the long-since dead—it’s not like providing aid in Darfur—but somebody has to do it.

The 2,000-word article ran as a sidebar to my profile of new Jewish Federation chairman Stanley P. Gold. (Sheesh, when I was at dailies, rare was the occasion when a front-page story waxed for 2,000 words, let alone a sidebar.) Let me know what you think.

1 Comments — Leave your comment