April 10, 2008 | 3:09 pm

NBA player discusses growing up with polygamists

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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To this point, I haven’t posted about the raid of a polygamist community in Texas that delivered some 400 children into foster care. But this interview from CBS’ “Early Show” is a good entry point. (Blogger won’t let me embed the video, so click here.)

The subject is Cleveland Cavaliers center Lance Allred, who grew up in a polygamist community. It’s an odd rambling interview, and, when asked whether he ever saw signs of sexual abuse, Allred answers yes but then gives a strange qualification:

“You can get caught up in the black and white of it all. There are bad apples in every religion who exploit people.”

April 10, 2008 | 12:45 pm

‘Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

CHICAGO — It was a celebration of Palestinian culture—a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation—a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

Today, five years later, Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois who expresses a firmly pro-Israel view of Middle East politics, pleasing many of the Jewish leaders and advocates for Israel whom he is courting in his presidential campaign. The dinner conversations he had envisioned with his Palestinian American friend have ended. He and Khalidi have seen each other only fleetingly in recent years.

And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama’s speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi’s 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”

One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”

Obama adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground. But his presence at such events, as he worked to build a political base in Chicago, has led some Palestinian leaders to believe that he might deal differently with the Middle East than either of his opponents for the White House.

This is the top of a story that ran on the front page of today’s LA Times under the headline, “Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama.” With all the work Obama’s campaign has been doing trying to convince American Jews their guy’s a good friend of Israel, I can’t imagine they appreciate stories like this or that one that predicted Obama’s the Muslim favorite.

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April 10, 2008 | 12:41 pm

A spoof on small group study materials

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Anybody who has ever been in a Bible study with a DVD component featuring your very own pastor can relate with the comedy in this Small Group Short, starring, not coincidentally, two of the guys in my small group, and taking a few digs at our good-humored and often casually dressed pastor, Mark Brewer.

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April 10, 2008 | 12:52 am

Anti-Semitism interrupts black frat event?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Below is the choicest nugget of an e-mail from Daphna Ziman, a respected Jewish philanthropist and political contributor in Los Angles, that has spread like a viral video during the past few days. It accuses a black leader, the Rev. Eric Lee, president and CEO of Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s L.A. office, of espousing some virulent anti-Semitism at a ceremony Friday night that honored Ziman for her work with foster children.

Lee emphatically denies saying what follows, but, like those rumors about Barack Obama that spread around the Internet a few months ago, Ziman’s missive has taken on a life of its own.

He began his speech by thanking Jesus for Obama, who is going to be the leader of the world. He continued by referring to other leaders Like Dr. King,being that this was the moment of celebrating Dr. King’s spirit on the anniversary of his assasination, and Malcolm X.

It was right after the mention of Malcolm X that he looked right at me and started talking about the African American children who are suffering because of the JEWS that have featured them as rapists and murderers.

He spoke of a Jewish Rabbi, and then corrected himself to say “What other kind of Rabbis are there, but JEWS”. He told how this Rabbi came to him to say that he would like to bring the AA community and the Jewish community together. ” NO, NO, NO,!!!!” he shouted into the crowd, we are not going to come together. “The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us”

I received this Sunday morning and spent a good part of the past four days trying to figure out heads from tails. What I ended up with was a he-said, she-said atomic bomb of accusations.

Ziman left in tears during Lee’s speech. The guests who accompanied her, including two women who work for her and a friend, have corroborated her account.

“He said that the African-American community is not going to bridge any gaps because the Jewish community is responsible for the defamation of African Americans on the silver screen,” said Branka Gonzales, Children Uniting’s chief financial officer. “His feelings were that nothing is going to change until those things change, until the Jewish community stops its ways.”

“When the reverend got up, it almost felt like he was ... promoting Barack, and he said he is the only leader for where our country stands today,” said Chase Dreyfous, who is Episcopalian. “Then he went on a tangent to say the Jews are holding the African-American musicians captive, that they had portrayed their children as thieves and murderers. I don’t know if it was his intention or not, but for not being a Jewish person, I was extremely offended.”

Others in attendance - from a state assemblyman to a civil rights attorney to the event’s organizers, who invited Ziman - said they didn’t listen carefully enough to the speech to confirm or deny Ziman’s accusations.

“I vaguely remember hearing something about a conversation he had with a rabbi and dealing with the media,” said the evening’s emcee, Damon M. Brown, head of the Los Angeles alumni of Kappa Alpha Psi. “I don’t recall hearing anything that was offensive to me, and then again, I’m not Jewish so I don’t know if there are some sensitivities one would have.”

Curtis R. Silvers Jr., the head of the fraternity’s Western Province, which held the gala as part of its annual conference, also said he heard nothing offensive. He said there was no audio or video recording of the event and that, like Brown, he was preoccupied during Lee’s keynote and paid it only intermittent attention. Assemblyman Mike Davis, a Los Angeles Democrat who has been supported by Ziman and her husband, said the same.

“I speak for a living, and I learned a long time ago that when you speak about controversial issues you have to be really careful and sometimes, even the best of people, will make mistakes,” Davis said. “I can’t say I was tuned into what he was saying, but I do know people make errors.”

People are listening now.

The full text of the e-mail, and Lee’s characterization of what he said, can be found here.

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April 9, 2008 | 7:48 pm

Baby with two faces worshipped as Hindu diety

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Amazing story from the AP in Saini Sunpura, India, via CNN.com:

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali’s facial features are duplicated—she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

“My daughter is fine—like any other child,” said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

Lali has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.

“She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time,” Ali said.

Rural India is deeply superstitious and the little girl is being hailed as a return of the Hindu goddess of valor, Durga, a fiery deity traditionally depicted with three eyes and many arms.

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April 9, 2008 | 3:06 pm

Friedlander’s Pulitzer for Holocaust studies

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Saul FriedlÃ¥nder seems to sit down for a lot of Q&As, but, then again, he deserves the audience. A Holocaust historian at UCLA, Friedlander won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction Monday—I ordered the two-volume, 1,500-word series “Nazi Germany and the Jews” yesterday—and The Forward has this interview:

GS: Unlike a number of your colleagues in the field, you put great stock in survivor diaries. What do such sources offer, and what are their potential pitfalls?

SF: You don’t go to diaries for historical exactness. You go to them for the attitudes, the reactions, the fears, the hopes — the life of those that were targeted. If you leave that aside, you come to rely uniquely on German documents. You completely shunt aside the humanity of the Jewish communities that are the face of the story. I wouldn’t turn to the diaries to learn about German policies, but I need to read them to be informed of daily life in the ghettoes. Now, you may tell me that these sources are unreliable, but not more unreliable than Eichmann’s depositions in Jerusalem or the memoirs of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, which are used everywhere. One must, of course, consider Jewish diaries with extreme care and with a totally open critical mind, as one would any other source.

GS: In a review of “The Years of Extermination” that recently appeared in The Washington Post, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” wrote that your book “may prove to be the last major general history of the Holocaust produced by a leading scholar who lived under the Nazis.” This is, of course, interesting at the level of biography, but when it comes to the scholarship itself, is there a tangible difference between Holocaust historians who lived through the experience and those who did not?

SF: There shouldn’t be, but there is. The person who has lived through the events is familiar with nuances that cannot be gotten from administrative documents. The things that are between the lines are more vivid among those who remember. Now, it has been argued that the survivor-historian is more subjective and less scientific, but we are all subjective with regard to this period. So you say where it is you are coming from and do your best, if you are an honest person, to try to restrain your subjectivity. (skip)

GS: You take your book’s epigraph from the diary of one Stefan Ernest, a Jew hiding in “Aryan” Warsaw in 1943. “[People] will ask,” you quote him as saying, “is this the only truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth…. Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.” It seems here that you are trying to sound a note of humility. But am I wrong in sensing a hint of bravado here, too? Do you see yourself as wielding “the mightiest pen”?

SF: I don’t want to underestimate my work. It would, in a way, be grotesque to write and then say, “This is worthless.” But I meant the epigraph very simply and directly: Don’t let us have any illusions. We try, and we have to try, but this is not even a fragment of a fragment of the truth.

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April 9, 2008 | 12:47 pm

Goldberg: ‘Is Israel Finished?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This is the cover of the new issue of The Atlantic. The article by Jeffrey Goldberg, whose last cover was on the future fracturing of the Middle East and who wrote that great book “Prisoners,” is not yet online. I’m going to try to read it later today.

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April 8, 2008 | 7:20 pm

A baker’s dozen of anti-Semitism at UC Irvine

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Not pleased by the credence given to recent statement  by five Jewish student leaders that UC Irvine’s administration is not to blame for the campus’ anti-Semitic atmosphere,  the Red County blog took issue with a recent report in the OC Register (there was another last year) stating all is well—which we know that, at least when students are calling for the destruction of Israel, it is not. Here is the treatment Red County says a Jewish student could to face.

1. The desecration of Israeli flags with swastikas and blood stains.

2. Intimidation and abuse while practicing student journalism and protest during Muslim Student Union events. This has included the use photo capture of the faces of Jewish or pro-Israeli students for the use of future intimidation; pushing, shoving, and shouting in the faces of Jewish or pro-Israeli students; and assault with hurtful objects such as rocks by Muslim Student Union Members.

3. Muslim speakers who express their desire for Israel to be wiped off the map.

4. Muslim speakers who express their hatred towards Jews involved in politics.

5. Muslim speakers who blame Jews on undesirable social conditions.

6. Muslim speakers who tell Jews to get out of their ghettos.

7. Muslim speakers who boast that Jews are afraid to get on buses in Israel out of fear of the   “freedom fighters” who strap bombs to their bodies.

8. Muslim speakers who assert that “Jews are the new Nazis.”

9. Depictions of Jews with hooked noses in exhibits.

10. Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty meant to demonize Jews.

11. The intimidation of Jewish and pro-Israeli speakers by members of the Muslim Student Union.

12. Programs hosted by the Muslim Student Union titled: “Holocaust in the Holyland,” “Genocide in Gaza,” and “Israel: The 4th Reich.”

13. Posters on campus suggesting that Israeli soldiers target Arab children to shoot on sight.

To be sure, the students’ press release did not state anti-Semitism was a myth at UCI. What it said was, despite the visits by Amir Abdel Malik Ali and Mohammed Al-Asi, pro-Israel students feel safe and Jewish life is thriving. This was a point three of the signatories emphasized to me at the Hillel Summit in Washington that ended the day they issued the release—the same Hillel event at which UCI Chancellor Michael Drake was cornered by ZOA’s Mort Klein, whose question—roughly, “Why don’t you condemn the anti-Semitic speakers who come to your campus”—Drake is responding to below.

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April 8, 2008 | 7:13 pm

Charlton Heston denied entry to heaven

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Politico’s Wuerker on Charlton Heston at the pearly gates of heaven.

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April 8, 2008 | 5:38 pm

The twilight of daily journalism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

More from the Department of Dying Newspapers, I just got around to reading this article that appeared in the New Yorker two weeks ago, and I can’t think of a better set of Cliff’s Notes on what’s happening to my industry. Here’s a choice nugget near the top:

Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

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April 8, 2008 | 11:43 am

Obama blogger: ‘Zionism means ethnic cleansing’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The latest effort to hold Barack Obama responsible for what other people say is this story from IsraelNationalNews.com:

United States Presidential candidate Barak Obama is hosting leftist blogger Tony Wicher on his official website.  Wicher’s blog is promoted as “A forum for a new foreign policy based on peace, democracy, and human rights instead of hegemony and war, with particular attention to the Israel/Palestine conflict as the key to a new Middle East policy.”

Wicher repeatedly refers to Israel as an apartheid state, and in fact claims that Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Authority Arabs is “worse than apartheid.”  He also refers to the Likud party as “right-wing jingoists,” and insists that “Zionism means ethnic cleansing.”

Israel’s current government, Wicher says, “is faithfully carrying out the Zionist policy, by relentlessly persecuting the Arabs until they give up and go to Jordan or whatever.”  He dismisses any who call his claims of Israeli “apartheid” anti-Semitic as members of the “Zionist thought police.”

These words, however, were not uttered by Obama’s pastor (not that we know of). And Wicher does not appear to be a contributor to the official Obama blog. He’s a registered user of the social networking service at Obama ‘08, and that is where he promotes “Zionism without a Jewish state.”

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April 8, 2008 | 10:54 am

‘Fashion gets religion’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m running low on topics to blog about this morning, so how about this six-month old story from the New York Observer that has been sitting in my queue for, oh, a while?

Last week, roughly 80 fashion industry types gathered on the seventh floor of a midtown office building for their monthly dinner. Before digging in, they bowed their heads and closed their eyes.

“Father, we come to you right now, and we thank you for this wonderful time, this food that was wonderfully prepared,” said Seth Whalen, a model. “Bless the hands that have prepared it, and bless the food to our bodies, strengthen us and enrich us and allow your word to just speak to us tonight, in your most precious name Lord Jesus, Amen.”

From a small stage, Mr. Whalen—26, baby-faced with a goatee, his full hair pulled back under a ball cap—explained the purpose of the group to any newcomers. “We’re a bunch of people from New York City’s fashion industry, here to seek in our God, in this crazy, crazy industry. God in fashion is a paradox in itself. So that’s what we do, and that’s who we are.”

Mr. Whalen is a “core leader” of the group, which calls itself Paradox and is the New York hub of Models for Christ, founded in 1982 by Jeff Calenberg. Only a few months into his modeling career, adrift in the debauched world of Milan’s fashion world, Mr. Calenberg—blond, fair, piercing blue eyes—said he knew that the he would wind up in the Valley of Darkness without some Christian amigos to help keep him righteous. According to the Models for Christ materials, while in Milan, Mr. Calenberg “designed and distributed a small pamphlet that presented the prestige and struggles of the fashion industry and how Jesus Christ can provide true fulfillment. Since then, Models for Christ has grown and expanded from models to photographers, agents, fashion designers …”

Mr. Calenberg said the group started with about five members and now includes more than 1,000, with regular meetings in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. He intimated that a number of famous people have come to the meetings; model and actress Rene Russo was the only one he felt comfortable revealing. About five years ago, the New York group renamed itself Paradox to appeal to a broader audience. Models for Christ has spawned other groups such as Haven, a group for Christian actors founded by Arrested Development sitcom star Tony Hale.

Tony Hale!

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