January 23, 2008 | 12:22 pm

Film would make Muhammad cartoon controversy look like ‘a picnic’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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From the world of faith, AKA FaithWorld:

Concern is mounting in the Netherlands as the country prepares for a film about the Koran by a far-right populist known for his hostility to Islam. It reached the point last Friday that Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende publicly appealed for restraint. A former Malaysian ambassador in The Hague has said the reaction could make the 2006 Danish cartoon controversy look like “a picnic.”

Geert Wilders, who wants to ban the Koran as a “fascist” book and has warned of a “tsunami of Islamisation” in the Netherlands, has proceeded with the film despite warnings from the Dutch justice and foreign ministers. (We blogged on this last November when the warnings came). It’s not clear when it will be broadcast, but it is expected soon. Wilders has denied reports that it will be shown on Friday Jan. 25. There is already a spoof on YouTube.

We all remember what happened when Theo van Gogh made a film critical of Islam, (he was killed), and when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (other people were killed). I don’t think any ill befell Bill Keller.

But this brouhaha, which embodies a cultural clash in Europe, is certainly worth watching.

January 23, 2008 | 10:18 am

The anti-abortion generation

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Stephanie Simon at the LA Times is always worth reading. And her article yesterday about the anti-abortion generation was no exception.

Looking specifically at teens, a Gallup survey in 2003 found that 72% called abortion morally wrong, and 32% believed it should be illegal in all circumstances. Among adults surveyed that year, only 17% backed a total ban.

These statistics should not obscure the fact—made clear in poll after poll over decades—that a substantial majority of Americans want abortion to remain legal in at least some circumstances. And millions of young people continue to choose abortion when faced with unplanned pregnancy; every year, 600,000 women under age 25 abort.

But among those fighting to criminalize the procedure, the young—trained in antiabortion summer camps and political internships—are increasingly out front.

“You look at pictures of marches [over the years] and the crowds just keep getting younger and younger and younger,” said Derrick Jones, an advisor to National Teens for Life.

In Colorado, a teenager last year decided the state constitution should define a fertilized egg as a person. Kristi Burton, now 20, won a court fight about her proposed amendment and leads the campaign to put it on the ballot this fall.

In California, a 17-year-old girl last week filed a lawsuit in federal court for the right to start a “pro-life club” at her San Jose-area high school. A Virginia teen recently took similar legal action, and her school promptly dropped its objection to the club.

Here in greater Philadelphia, the antiabortion group Generation Life enlists teens to hand out literature on beaches and guides them through role-playing to hone their powers of persuasion.

At a recent workshop, Claire Levis, 17, played the part of an abortion-rights supporter. “My friend got raped and you want her to have the baby? How can you ask a 15-year-old to go through a pregnancy? That’s nine months of ridicule and pain,” she shouted.

Liz Coyle, 16, responded: “It’s not the baby’s fault. He’s never done anything wrong.”

Liz then added: “There are plenty of teachers willing to home-school your friend if she doesn’t want to go to class when she’s pregnant. Or she could go to school, and stand up for herself.”

The dozen teens watching burst into applause.

“I feel like we’re all survivors of abortion,” Claire said.

Last week, Simon reported that abortions were down 25 percent from their peak.

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January 22, 2008 | 11:27 pm

LA Archdiocese sells headquarters

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

We knew this day was coming, and sadly, here it is.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has sold its 12-story administrative headquarters building to help pay last year’s $660 million settlement with people alleging sex abuse by clergy, a spokesman said Tuesday.

The Archdiocesan Catholic Center was sold to Jamison Properties of Los Angeles for $31 million, archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg said.

Staffers who oversee the archdiocese’s cemeteries will move to office space on the grounds of a cemetery, Tamberg said. Others will consolidate in four of the building’s floors that church officials will lease from the new owner, Tamberg said.

Tamberg did not know what would be on the building’s other eight floors.

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January 22, 2008 | 5:40 pm

Huckabee’s southern sympathies

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ‘em what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.

Mike Huckabee, who’s been saying a lot of controversial things lately, said that to a South Carolina crowd last week, and the flag he was alluding to was the stars and bars rebel flag of the Confederacy. In an article on Slate, Christopher Hitchens ponders why the media hasn’t much mentioned the racist root of Huckabee’s statement.

But when real political racism rears its head, our easily upset media fall oddly silent. Can you guess why? Of course you can. Gov. Huckabee is the self-anointed candidate of the simple and traditional Christian folk who hate smart-ass, educated, big-city types, and if you dare to attack him for his vulgarity and stupidity and bigotry, he will accuse you of prejudice in return. What he hopes is that his neo-Confederate sickness will become subsumed into easy chatter about his recipes for fried squirrel and his other folksy populist themes. (By the way, you owe it to yourselves to watch the exciting revelations about his squirrel-grilling past; and do examine his family Christmas card while you’re at it.) But this drivel, it turns out, is all a slick cover for racist incitement, and it ought not to be given a free pass.

After paying tribute to MLK Monday, it seemed all was quickly forgiven when Huckabee was endorsed by three dozen African Americans, most connected to conservative religious groups.

In other Huck news, one of my colleagues at the CT Liveblog has a post today explaining what the man from Hope not named Bill Clinton means when he calls himself a “cosmopolitan evangelical.” (I didn’t realize Arkansas had such a big-city mentality.)

Huckabee, though quite comfortable with speaking publicly about his personal relationship with Christ, his conservative views on religious hot-button issues like gay marriage and abortion, and even God’s providential role in his Iowa win, nonetheless differs from many conservative evangelicals before him, especially those in the Religious Right.

“I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody,” Huckabee often says, and when once asked whether the Christian life was the best way of life, he answered, “Well it is for me…” but that he didn’t want to come off as “judgmental, caustic or pushy.” As David Brooks of The New York Times recently noted, “Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.” In other words, you won’t hear Huckabee talking about his push to “take back America” anytime soon.

Frankly, I’ll be surprised if he survives Super Duper Tuesday, which is two weeks away. Then again, this presidential campaign has been nothing if not full of surprises.

(Photo: El Nuko)

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January 22, 2008 | 5:25 pm

‘Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of “All the President’s Men” and “The Powers That Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree—we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express.

What the hell happened?

Those words, the beginning of a powerful op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post about the state of American journalism, caused much soul-searching for me yesterday. I don’t remember these better days, and I know that if journalists are great at one thing, it is seeing the negative in any situation. But I also know that such nostalgia is not just bitter and certainly not sweet, and it’s sad to wonder what the future holds for news ink journos.

The column is written by David Simon, executive producer of “The Wire,” and it only gets more depressing from that point, particularly when he talks about the thinning of his former employer, The Baltimore Sun, and compares the attempt to repackage newspapers more efficiently and engagingly to the Chevy Vega.

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January 22, 2008 | 10:32 am

Snapshot of a parted Red Sea

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Clearly those biblical archaeologists were wrong. Google Earth seems to offer pretty definitive proof that Moses not only led the Israelites out of Egypt but that he parted the Red Sea in the process. (Also pictured, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark and a sparsely attended Crucifixion of Jesus.)

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January 22, 2008 | 9:59 am

Islam, Indy and Da Vinci

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A real whopper from GetReligion:

Every now and then, I read a really interesting story and I think to myself, “You know, the minute someone covers that story in the New York Times or it shows up on National Public Radio, then all heckfire is going to break loose.”

That’s what I thought when people started sending me links to the following Asia Times essay by the famous reporter known simply as Spengler. The headline provides only a hint of the content: “Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code.”

Thanks to a reader, here is the link to the Wall Street Journal article that sparked the Spengler piece. And here is some of Spengler’s take on this mysterious stash of Koran manuscripts that may actually exist in Europe:

  The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. “I hate those guys!” as Indiana Jones said.

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God’s self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, “The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.” The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals.

There are, in fact, “variant copies” of the text of the Koran, evidence that the text evolved over time. If this story is accurate then what the press is sitting on is a bombshell, a giant chance that modern methods of “textual criticism” may be applied to the holy book of Islam (echoing several generations of similiar work on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament).

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January 21, 2008 | 11:14 am

The search for biblical history

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I read “Walking the Bible” on my flight to and from Israel last summer and thoroughly enjoyed it, and on my short blogroll I link to David Plotz’ Blogging the Bible. Last week, I found on Slate that Plotz has returned with “Digging the Bible.”

So, it’s not exactly the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, it’s not exactly much of anything—just a dirty shard of pottery the size of my big toe. But I found it. I had been scraping the floor of this Israeli cave when I spotted its sharp edge. I fished the piece out of the dirt and pushed on it, as instructed, to see if it crumbled. If it did, it was probably just the local limestone, which is as soft as a bar of soap. But my piece firmly resisted, so I brushed off the dirt until I could see smooth pottery, one side black, the other brick red. I’m the raider of the lost pot.

I hand it to my digging partner Ian Stern, the archaeologist in charge of this site. He glances at it and says, “Cooking pot. See the black part? That’s where it carbonized. Probably 2,200 years old, time of the Maccabees”—the Jewish heroes of the Hanukkah story. He tosses my shard into a plastic collection bucket. “That’s why this place is so great. It has instant gratification. There’s a biblical connection. There’s a Hanukkah connection. It takes it out of the realm of the abstract and makes it tangible. You can come here and dig up pottery from the time of Judah Maccabee. He fought a battle near here. Now, I’m not saying he ate out of that pot, but you see and hold this pottery, and he is not a fairytale figure anymore. He is real.”

I’ve spent much of the last year blogging the Bible for Slate, writing about reading the Good Book for the first time. Now I’ve come to Israel to see the Bible, to dig it. I’ve read the stories. Now I want to see where they happened and to learn if they happened—to experience the Bible through archaeology, history, politics, and faith.

This is a similar premise to “Walking the Bible,” which contains quite a few passages where Bruce Feiler is wrestling with the lack of historical evidence for major events like the Flood and the Exodus or whether Moses really existed:

The unusual circumstances of this story—the fact that Moses gets his name from an Egyptian and is raised in the pharaonic court, the fact that he claims not to speak well—have led many to speculate that Moses wasn’t an Israelite at all. Sigmund Freud, in his influential book “Moses and Monotheism,” says that Moses was an Egyptian who learned monotheism from Akhenaten and was inspired to lead a revolt of foreign slaves out of a desire to overthrow his symbolic father. Freud says Moses gave the slaves the idea that they were a chosen people, which in turn led to anti-Semitism. “It was one man, the man Moses who created the Jews. To him his people owes its tenacity in supporting life; to him, however, it also owes much of the hostility which it has met and is meeting still.

Leaving aside Freud’s psychological interpretation, many scholars agree with his underlying thesis, that Moses might have been an Egyptian.

First off, lots of scholars have lots of contradictory theories. This is the academic process. But after reading this, I jumped onto my computer and ordered Jonathan Kirsch’s book, “Moses: A Life,” which I anticipate will add to the discussion (though in half a year I have yet to crack).

The passage reminded me of Rabbi David Wolpe’s famous Passover sermon a few years ago, when he let members of Sinai Temple know that most scholars don’t believe the Exodus actually occurred. The declaration dropped on LA Jewry like an A-bomb (little hyperbole intended), thanks to the LA Times, which played the story as a Column One:

Wolpe’s startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understanding of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided. After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua’s fabled military campaigns never occurred—archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible.

Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan—modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel—whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt—explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges.

“Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we’ve broken the news very gently,” said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America’s preeminent archeologists. Dever’s view is emblematic of a fundamental shift in archeology. Three decades ago as a Christian seminary student, he wrote a paper defending the Exodus and got an A, but “no one would do that today,” he says.

The Jewish Journal followed the next week with a cover package dedicated to Exodus-doubting fallout, including conservative columnist Dennis Prager arguing that no Exodus = no Judaism, just as Christians would say that without the resurrection, Christianity is dead. But if Christianity is built upon the Torah, upon the stories of Jewish history, does it also need a literal, factual, historical Exodus?

And if we the faithful are willing to dismiss some historical findings, what is the value of biblical archeology?

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January 20, 2008 | 2:41 pm

Hamas fires rockets; Gaza City goes dark

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Gaza City was plunged into darkness Sunday after Israel blocked the shipment of fuel that powers its only electrical plant in retaliation for persistent rocket attacks by Gaza militants.

The power cut sent already beleaguered Gazans to stock up on food and batteries in anticipation of dark, cold days ahead. Gaza officials warned the move would cause a health catastrophe while a U.N. agency and human rights groups condemned Israel.

“We have the choice to either cut electricity on babies in the maternity ward or heart surgery patients or stop operating rooms,” Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said.

Israel justified the cutoff because of continuous rocket attacks by Gaza militants. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Meckel said the Gaza Strip continues to receive 70 percent of its electricity supply directly from Israel, which would not be affected, and another 5 percent from Egypt.

The blackout “is a Hamas ploy to pretend there is some kind of crisis to attract international sympathy,” he told The Associated Press.

To read the rest of the story, click here. And for more about those rocket attacks and the havoc they reek on life in the Western Negev, read my report from Sderot and also this and this and this.

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January 18, 2008 | 7:59 pm

‘I am Jewish’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In his criticism of Arun Gandhi’s comments that Jews and Israel are to blame for a “culture of violence,” Judea Pearl mentioned some of the last words of his son, Daniel, who was beheaded by Islamic radicals six years ago. Last February, Daniel’s parents talked about what it meant for Daniel to be a Jew in this video, which opens with his voice.

Daniel Pearl’s most memorable words, “I am Jewish,” gave life to a book by that name that carries reflections of some of the world’s most recognizable Jews.

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January 18, 2008 | 5:11 pm

Jews with swords: ‘Gentleman of the Road’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Let’s face it: we Jews were never really the sword-carrying type. And that’s a good thing because you know what they say about those who live by the sword.

But, it’s amusing to read about Jews with swords in Michael Chabon’s latest novel, “Gentlemen of the Road.”

Originally published earlier this year in serial installments in the New York Times Magazine, the book follows the exploits of a pair of 10th century Jews — Amram and Zelikman — who pursue adventure throughout the Caucasus Mountains. They fight with swords and battle-axes, swindle tavern dwellers, perform daring acts of thievery and ultimately help raise a rebel army to overthrow the man who usurped the throne of the Khazar Empire from its rightful owner.

That’s a lot to get through in 196 pages but with Chabon’s fine storytelling abilities, our heroes make it from beginning to end without leaving the reader feeling rushed.

That’s from Jewish Literary Review. Such fond phrases come as no surprise. Chabon is, quite simply, a master. I finished last week “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” which reminded me poignantly of his ability with a pen. (Coupled with “swords,” mentioning “pen” reminds me of a couple of Sean Connery SNL sketches.)

As for Jews with swords, sometimes they’ve wielded them well. Other times not so much.

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January 18, 2008 | 1:51 pm

Gandhi’s grandson resigns after accusing Jews of ‘culture of violence’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In a recent commentary for the blog On Faith, Arun Gandhi, a grandson of the great pacifist, accused Jews of using the Holocaust to promote of “culture of violence”:

“The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews,” Gandhi wrote. “The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger. The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak.”

Outcry regarding Gandhi’s comment led to his resignation yesterday from the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester and an apology from the On Faith editors. I’ve got a short story up about it, with lots of links, at JewishJournal.com. The protest wasn’t led, but was certainly helped, by Judea Pearl.

Pearl, an op-ed columnist for The Jewish Journal whose son was killed by Islamic extremists at least in part because he was Jewish, directed his protest to Donald Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Co., the text of which is reprinted on the blog.

“In his final moments,” Pearl wrote, “Danny told his captors on camera: ‘My father is Jewish, My mother is Jewish, I am Jewish,’ and, as President Bush said in the White House last month: ‘These words have become a source of inspiration to Americans of all faiths.’

“My son Daniel died mighty proud of his Jewish identity. He, like the millions of decent and peace-seeking Israelis, and Americans who proudly carry on their Jewish heritage, did not see his identity as ‘dependent on violence’ as the title of Gandhi’s article implies.

“Mr. Graham, the article your editors have allowed to be posted is a painful insult to everything Daniel stood for, to everything America stands for, and to every decent person inspired by Daniel’s words.

“Too many people were killed, abused or dispossessed in the past century by words of irresponsible authors, often disguised as scholars or humanitarians, who pointed fingers at, and blamed one segment of society for the ills and maladies in the world.

“Arun Gandhi did just that.”

Sometimes, I think statements get blown out of proportion as being anti-Semitic. There was a great case of that in Thousand Oaks last summer. But it seemed to me from reading Gandhi’s three-paragraph commentary, and his subsequent “apology,” that he holds deeply negative views about Jews and Israel.

I’m from the school of thought that says criticism is OK. Even if it’s not entirely constructive. But broad-brushing an entire people with stereotypes, that’s not so useful.

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