February 5, 2008 | 2:40 pm

Catholics against war to deliver ashes to Bush

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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This is the kind of stunt designed simply to drum up media hits, and I’ll oblige. An e-mail from Catholics for an End to the War in Iraq just arrived in my inbox stating that the group will mark tomorrow, which is Ash Wednesday, by delivering ashes to the White House.

The use of ashes at the White House is a sign of atonement for President Bush’s war in Iraq, his continued support of torture and for his squandering of our nation’s moral leadership in the world.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a time when Catholics pray for forgiveness in preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Catholics believe that Jesus’ death was an act of atonement for personal and social sins.

Fr. Joe Nangle OFM, a Catholic priest serving at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Arlington, will be present to bless the ashes.  “The use of ashes is an ancient and sacred sign that we are ultimately accountable to a higher power.  If anyone needs this pastoral advice, it is President Bush.,” said Fr. Nangle.

February 5, 2008 | 12:23 pm

She loves Huckabee

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From the Department of Uncomfortably Hilarious Satire:

Previously in God Blog videos:

The Chronic(whats?)cles of Narnia

A Love Song for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Borats Anonymous

Obama Girl’s Coulter Crush

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February 5, 2008 | 9:55 am

‘Has Iran won?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

That’s a scary question being asked by the cover of this week’s Economist: “Has Iran won?”

Won what? you might ask, that is, if the cover didn’t have a big radioactive Acme bomb in the place of the “o” in “won.”

WHO would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies? But Iran is doing just that. And it is doing so largely because of an extraordinary own goal by America’s spies, the team behind the duff intelligence that brought you the Iraq war.

It doesn’t take a fevered brain to assume that if Iran’s ayatollahs get their hands on the bomb, the world could be in for some nasty surprises. Iran’s claim that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful is widely disbelieved. That is why Russia and China joined America, Britain, France and Germany at the UN Security Council to try to stop Iran enriching uranium. Until two months ago they seemed ready to support a third and tougher sanctions resolution against Iran. But then America’s spies spoke out, and since then five painstaking years of diplomacy have abruptly unravelled (see article).

The intelligence debacle over Iraq has made spies anxious about how their findings are used. That may be why they and the White House felt it right to admit, in a National Intelligence Estimate in December, that they now think Iran halted clandestine work on nuclear warheads five years ago. As it happens, this belief is not yet shared by Israel or some of America’s European allies, who see the same data. But no matter: the headline was enough to pull the rug from under the diplomacy. In Berlin last month, the Russians and Chinese made it clear that if there is a third resolution, it will be a mild slap on the wrist, not another turn of the economic screw.

The important, often over-looked, element of the NIE was not that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program but that it ever had one to begin with. The report also did not say Iran had stopped its nuclear-enrichment program. That effort, which Iran’s dictator purports to be a peaceful endeavor for alternative energy, is alive and well.

My colleague, Karmel Melamed, has some disturbing photos on his blog of gay teens being hanged and women being stoned. This is justice?

Seymour Hersh, who has a new article about the Israeli attack on Syria, wrote a number of stories in the past two years that looked at the Bush administration’s plans to bomb Iran, but in October reported that the administration had shifted targets there.

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February 4, 2008 | 11:53 pm

What did Israel really bomb in Syria?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The answer to many of the questions associated with Israel’s summer air raid of a Syrian military facility remain unknown but to a few high-level Israeli and likely American officials, according to Seymour Hersh, who was on “Talk of the Nation” tonight discussing the “act of war,” which he wrote about for this week’s New Yorker.

At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”

It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”

However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”

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February 4, 2008 | 5:09 pm

‘The Path to the Final Solution’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m not one who sees anti-Semitism around every corner or believes that all major media is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. But The Jawa Report posted a powerful audio slideshow, “The Path to the Final Solution,” to YouTube today that focuses on the rise of anti-Semitism around the world, and left me feeling more than a little queasy.

The video makes little effort to distinguish between peaceful Muslims and jihadi fanatics. And some of the facts can be argued and disputed, like when the narrator refers to all of the Muslim world as the Arab world and includes Turks and Persians and Southeast Asians. But what can’t be ignored is the sheer vitriol exhibited in the photos, mostly of neo-Nazis and Muslim groups bent on the destruction of Israel, and cartoons portraying Jews to be a dirty and filthy and cunning people.

The video moves too quickly to fully ingest the offensiveness of many of the images, so you’ll want to keep your cursor over the pause button. You’ll certainly recognize some of the pictures, like those of Jimmy Carter and Mel Gibson. Others are more obscure, like the swastikas sprayed onto a bathroom stall at UCLA and the cartoon of Hitler smirking in bed with an emaciated and mortified Anne Frank, saying, “Write this one in your diary Anne!” All are appalling.

Here is part of The Jawa Report‘s post explaining the video:

As a member of the Global Zionist Conspiracy™ (although somewhat behind in my union dues), I was already aware that Jew hatred had been with us for some time, and that it still lingered in the shadows. What I was unprepared for was it’s seemingly sudden reemergence into the light, and welcome acceptance into mainstream political and social discourse.

During the intervening months, this new awareness caused me some consternation… and I found myself going in search of this filth.

You’d be amazed how easily one can locate vast resources of images, quotes and comments, videos, blogs and a variety of other propaganda blaming the Jews for everything up to, and including, the attacks of 9/11, AIDS, every global economic tremor and even weather patterns in the Middle East!

You’d be amazed, that is, if you had not already encountered this in your travels - and if you’ve been on the Internet for more than 15 minutes, you have.

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February 4, 2008 | 12:27 pm

MySpace removes atheists, makes way for God

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It isn’t easy being godless online.

For the third time in three years, what may be the largest group of organized atheists in the world is struggling to stay on MySpace, said a Cleveland State University assistant professor who founded the site for nonbelievers.

MySpace deleted the 35,000-member “Atheist and Agnostic Group” on Jan. 1, a little more than a month after hackers broke in and renamed the group’s site “Jesus Is Love,” Bryan Pesta said Wednesday.

MySpace has ignored repeated requests to restore the group’s site, including an online petition with more than 500 signatures, said Pesta, who was the group’s moderator.
“These actions send a clear message to the 30 million godless people in America that we are not welcome on MySpace,” Pesta said.

A MySpace spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.

That’s from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In other MySpace news, I recently created a (still primitive) page for The God Blog. God fearing and godless welcome. Come friend me.

(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

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February 4, 2008 | 11:24 am

Non-Christians bothered by campaign Godtalk

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve mentioned that Muslims felt left out of the campaign Godtalk, Jews were uncomfortable with Mike Huckabee’s fundamentalism and atheists just want to be heard. Reuters joined the discussion with this story yesterday:

Estimates of the numbers of non-Christians in America vary. Some put the percentage of atheists, agnostics or “unaffiliated” at between 15 and 18 percent of the population of 300 million.

Jews, Muslims, Hindus and people of other religions make up fewer than 10 percent of the population.

Standing in a Hindu temple in a Dallas suburb before statues of his religion’s deities, Tejas Karve says he understands why the candidates stress their commitment to Christianity. But it does leave him with a sense of exclusion.

“I think it’s geared more towards Christians because that’s the majority. It’s incomprehensible for them (Americans) to have a candidate who’s not Christian,” the 26-year-old pilot, who immigrated from India eight years ago, told Reuters.

“I do believe they leave (non-Christians) out to a point.”

Political professions of faith leave some unmoved.

“Why is that relevant? Who cares? The great issue is where do we stand on Medicare and Social Security and immigration ... Why inject religiosity into that?” asked Paul Kurtz, chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism.

“Are we (secular humanists and atheists) marginalized? No. Are we turned off? Yes!”

Atheists and agnostics have long been targets of the religious right who see moral decay in secularization.

Some critics say those without a religion were singled out in the speech by Romney in which he sought to ease concerns among Republican evangelicals about his Mormon faith.

He said “freedom requires religion”—implying that it could not exist without it—and criticized those who “seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God ... It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”

A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 63 percent of those polled said they would be “less likely” to support a presidential candidate who did not believe in God.

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February 4, 2008 | 10:14 am

German students handed Holocaust comic

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

German students will soon be given a Holocaust textbook published in a most unusual format—that of a comic book.

The comic books trace the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany’s descent into barbarism through the eyes of a Jewish family.

In full-colour panels, the family members use the internet to trace their lost relatives, victims of the Holocaust. Pictorial flashbacks graphically show Hitler and his henchmen as well as the horrors of his war and the gas chambers.

The Search, as the comic book is entitled, is the first attempt to use a graphic novel as an aid in teaching history in Germany. The comics are being tested in public schools in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia for the spring 2008 semester.

Pupils in years Seven through Ten will be given the graphic novel as teaching aids, and it was unveiled on the 75th anniversary of Hitler becoming chancellor on January 31, 1933.

Recent surveys show that Germans under age 20 have an appalling lack of knowledge about 20th Century history.

While all of them know and recognise Hitler, only one in three was aware of what the word “Holocaust” means.

And fewer than one in ten could identify Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels or other Nazi henchmen.

Terms such as the Sudeten Crisis or the Siege of Stalingrad were unknown to all but a handful of pupils.

Almost none could give the date of the start of World War II, and fewer than 20 per cent could name the four Allied Powers which occupied post-war Germany.

So most educators have welcomed the move.

“We are very excited about this,” one school administrator told RTL Television. “There is an appalling ignorance among teenagers about anything prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.”

I hope the Escapist makes an appearance.

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February 3, 2008 | 3:37 pm

‘Olmert’s fatal flaw is arrogance’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The good news about Ehud Olmert is that he is not a willful murderer of Israeli soldiers. The bad news is that he is the most inept and arrogant Israeli prime minister in the country’s history.

That’s the opening salvo of a scathing short report by Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic. It comes in the wake of Olmert being spared by the Winograd Commission. It’s amazing that despite his failures, and the willing self-deceit I witnessed last summer, Olmert remains in office.

Until Olmert’s election, every Israeli prime minister could lay claim to the Zionist ethos of heroism. Israel’s leaders were divided into two groups: the European-born founders like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin who embodied self-sacrifice, and the native-born sabras like Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak who boasted first-rate military careers. Even Benjamin Netanyahu, the only one of the sabra prime ministers who didn’t rise to the top of the security establishment, was an officer in Israel’s most elite commando unit; his brother, Yoni, the fallen hero of the Entebbe rescue mission in 1976, added an heroic aura to the Netanyahu family.

Olmert, neither founder nor hero, is the first professional politician to serve as prime minister. Yet, in resisting calls for his resignation, he is insisting on being absolved of the standards for personal accountability in war to which other prime ministers were held. Golda Meir and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan, were forced from office by an outraged public because of failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, while Menachem Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, were compelled to resign because of failure in the first Lebanon War in 1982. Olmert, though, sees himself as immune from such archaic values as personal responsibility. Even before the release of the final version of the Winograd report, Olmert had announced that he wouldn’t resign no matter what the commission concluded.

Olmert’s fatal flaw, and the source of his failure in Lebanon, is arrogance.

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February 2, 2008 | 3:49 am

Countering anti-Israeli bias

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Look at LA getting the nod in Haaretz:

What began six months ago as a brazen attempt to counter a perceived anti-Israel slant in the Dutch media has evolved into a network monitoring the media in eight countries across the world. The idea is simple: Beat press bias at its own game by advertising only bad news about one place.

Over the past months, seven activists from Israel and elsewhere have been exposing online readers to scandalous yet accurate reports from media in Britain (violent drunk teens), France (high homeless mortality), Norway (serial child molesters), Finland (sexual harassment in parliament), Sweden (soaring suicide rates), The Netherlands (menacing Muslim unrest), Mexico (rampaging flood victims) and Los Angeles (drive-by killings).

The seven bad-news activists visit one another’s online blogs and have incorporated links referring the dozens of surfers who visit their pages every day to sister-sites. Though they all act out of a desire to counter what they see as media bias against Israel, they operate independently and have little communication with one another. Some of them rely on friends to send them interesting bits of bad news.

“This project demonstrates how media coverage can degrade any country’s image by using selective news without context,” explains media analyst Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld from Jerusalem. His seminar last summer, entitled “Bad News about the Netherlands,” became the kernel of his blog.

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February 1, 2008 | 3:33 pm

A New York Jew who does heart Huckabee

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My earlier post about why Mike Huckabee will bomb in big cities has aroused quite a bit of commenting at the CT Liveblog, one of which directed me to an interesting post from the New York Times’ City Room blog. It’s about Alice Lemos, a Jew from Queens who is campaigning to be a Huckabee delegate.

“I’m pro-life and I’m socially conservative,” said Ms. Lemos, a 53-year-old legal secretary at a firm in Manhattan and a frequent contributor to a Web site called “Jews for Life.”

“The fact of the matter is that I don’t like establishment Republicans in New York — I don’t like the track record of Joe Bruno or George Pataki,” she said, referring to the State Senate majority leader and the former governor. “Also, I think Rudy Giuliani did nothing to really build up the party at the grass-roots level. I believe in grass-roots politics.”

Regarding Huckabee, she said:

“He reminds me a lot of Ronald Reagan,” Ms. Lemos said. “He is positive and upbeat and comes from a humble background. I hope that I can help others get to know him.”

I guess Siena College missed her in its random survey.

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February 1, 2008 | 12:03 pm

A shiksa’s quest to destory the Jewish community

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Under his ominous moniker, Abitbol runs jewlicious.com. He lives in Israel and occasionally New York City, and has been known to enjoy a good shiksa here and there. Still, he was skeptical about assisting me in the noble and generations-old gentile pursuit of trying to land a Jewish husband. Good Jew that he is, Abitbol is concerned about the marriage crisis sweeping the nation, especially in New York City, and especially among Jews.

The first time I met Christ Killer, he said, “You look like you should be wearing furry heels, eating bonbons with two little dogs. In bed.” In other words, Christ Killer, whose given name is David Abitbol, correctly identified me a shiksa: a Jesus-loving, non-Jewish woman whose Miller-Monroe fantasy currently poses the greatest threat to the chosen people.

“The community is all up in arms about it,” he told me over hummus on St. Mark’s. “Jews aren’t getting married, or they’re waiting until much later to get married. The majority of Jews under 40 have never been married, which is a new trend. When you talk to men and women in New York, they say that it’s hard to find an appropriate Jewish mate. It’s bad for the continuity of the Jewish community, because if people are not getting married and creating family units, the Jewish population will shrink. That threatens the continued viability of the community. You’re already coming into a field that’s got a lot of competition.”

The marriage market is tough enough, but a shiksa looking for a Jewish husband is up against an entire culture rooting for her failure. Trimming the intermarriage rate is paramount to a number of associated Jewish federations that collect charitable donations and redistribute them as needed to Jews and non-Jews alike. Without a steady, generational replenishing of the culture, there would be no one for the federations to collect from. “What they’re doing now is spending a lot of money on Jewish singles programs,” Abitbol said. They will do anything in the world to get Jewish singles together and married.”

Unfortunately, no such programs exist to help Jews marry shiksas, save for good old-fashioned female ingenuity—and, of course, the sage advice of Jewish friends and associates.

This tongue-in-cheek indulgence is from Radar. Ann Coulter should try a similar strategy. The story of the shrinking American Jewish community is an old one. It’s most attributable to intermarriage, which Marc Gellman rehashes in Newsweek.

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

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