July 15, 2008 | 1:03 pm

Lakers Farmar enters Mideast peace process

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Jordan Farmar, the Lakers back-up point guard and the NBA’s best Jewish player (the bar is admittedly low), will travel to Israel next month to run basketball clinics for Israeli and Palestinian kids. It appears the program, sponsored by the Peres Center for Peace, is designed to teach children to co-exist in the Holy Land while dominating each other on the basketball court.

After the clinic ends Aug. 11, Farmar plans to visit Haifa and Jerusalem as an emissary for Seeds of Peace and Players Peace International, which i don’t think Tommie Harris and his pig joke are members of.

“Basketball, and sports in general, have the ability to transcend conflict, and are a powerful tool to bring children of all backgrounds together,” Farmar said in a statement. “Bringing these children together while they are young and impressionable and helping them learn how to play and communicate with one another can build bridges of understanding for when they are older.”

July 14, 2008 | 10:09 pm

Meet my mustache

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“Isn’t my mustache awesome?” I ask my old roommate, Ed Rhee.

His face says it all: “It’s something, alright.”

Something it is—and it’s not pretty. But it’s for a good cause. In Movember, I mean November, a charity that my wife is doing PR for, will raise millions for prostate cancer. Their method or gimmick or shtick is to get men to grow a mo for the month. I wanted to shave my beard Sunday, so I decided I’d give it a dry run. The results are to the side; your comments go below.

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July 14, 2008 | 7:16 pm

Look at the size of that Jew!

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I thought Bugsy Siegel and Barney Ross and Kevin Youkilis were tough Jews. Short of Samson, I didn’t know yids came as big as Scot Mendelson.

I discovered Mendelson while eating lunch yesterday when a friend who I often workout with—I’m huge—pointed to an ad in the Jinky’s menu for F.I.T.; accompanying it was a photo of the massive Mendelson, who owns the gym and the world record for bench press.

“That guy’s got to be Jewish,” I said to my buddy, though I remained a bit incredulous because of the powerlifter’s sheer size.

In fact, Mendelson is the real Jewish hulk. The proof could be found in this three-year-old Jewish Journal article, excerpted after the jump:

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July 14, 2008 | 6:28 pm

Muslim advocates react to New Yorker’s Obama cover

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It didn’t take a genius to realize that Muslim Americans would be the folks most offended by the New Yorker’s cover this week, which depicts Barack Obama as a Muslim fundamentalists and his wife as an AK-47-toting revolutionary, bumping fists in the Oval Office as the American flag burns and Osama bin Laden’s portrait looks happily on from above the mantle.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council just issued a news release urging supporters to contact the New Yorker and register their disgust.

“One would think that a magazine as highly regarded as this one would not feed into the terrible rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in this country with its iconic cover. The problem with this kind of so-called “spoof”—which taps into deep and far-reaching racist imagery—is that a lot of people just won’t get the joke. Or won’t want to, and will use it deliberately for their own Islamophobic purposes.”

It’s important to note that this is not the beginning of a new cartoon war; that would be a ridiculous exaggeration. I agree with MPAC that the cover could be offensive to Muslims and also agree that New Yorker cartoons often contain obscure references. But I find it hard to believe that any high-minded magazine snob (like me) would miss the joke here.

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July 14, 2008 | 2:31 pm

Mormon missionary excommunicated for ‘risque’ calendar

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I wondered over the weekend why a 9-month-old post about the Sin City missionary who created the Mormon hunks calendar was suddenly popular again. The reason: Chad Hardy was back in the news after a council of elders for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated him.

“I felt like I spoke my truth,” the 31-year-old entertainment entrepreneur said. “Bottom-line, they still felt the calendar is inappropriate and not the image that the church wants to have.”

“Men on a Mission,” which has sold nearly 10,000 copies at $14.99 each, included pictures of 12 returned missionaries wearing black slacks, but not their trademark white shirts, in modest poses. The men also were photographed in traditional missionary garb and share their religious beliefs in biographical sketches.

Some of the 12 models have also been called to disciplinary meetings, but none were punished.

“I have no ill feelings toward any of those people,” Hardy said of the church council. “They did what they believed was right and I really do feel it was the best decision for both of us.”

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July 14, 2008 | 1:01 pm

Obama the Muslim, Michelle the revolutionary and bin Laden in the White House *

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Doesn’t the New Yorker, that bastion of conservatism, know that politicians are delicate flowers?

If you’ve seen this week’s cover, you know it’s a satirical piece—they often are when concerning politics—and it has the Barack Obama campaign team ticked. Pictured at left, it “depicts Obama in one-piece Muslim garb and headdress fist-bumping his booted, Afro-wearing wife Michelle in camo clothes with an AK-47 and ammo-belt slung over her shoulder beneath a portrait of Osama bin-Laden while the American flag burns in the fireplace—in the presidential Oval Office. It’s got everything incendiary except a vest bomb. Which is what should telegraph to most people that it’s way over-the-top and, therefore, satire.”

But, as the Top of the Ticket blog goes on to note, “politicians don’t like satire because it’s subject to differing interpretations.”

The cover quickly became fodder for political pundits and media talking heads. I think the cover is funny and its subject fair game, not to mention positively portrayed inside the magazine.

The joke says more about an American absurdity than Barack Obama. And the people most bothered by this joke probably don’t work for him, but are typical Muslim Americans.

(For those wondering why Obama is so sensitive about being portrayed as Muslim, here is a primer.)

*Updated: Opinion L.A. has a round-up of what some notable bloggers and New Yorker editor David Remnick are saying.

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July 14, 2008 | 12:41 pm

Connecting churches more difficult than dividing Palestine, pastor says

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“I would rather be dividing land in Palestine,” the Rev. Mark Brewer of Bel Air Presbyterian said Sunday night, “than getting churches to work together.”

Brewer is definitely a good Presbyterian, a philo-Semite struggling with the liberalization of his denomination. He’s also my pastor, and has been for the past eight years. And, on the above statement, I think he’s right. Look at how much trouble the Church of England is having. Now, compare that to how little Great Britain had to deal with when it washed its hands of Palestine (and Iraq and India) without actually helping reconcile new neighbors.

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July 14, 2008 | 1:11 am

‘Under God’ offers free sex

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

What are they actually doing over at On Faith?

First, co-editor Sally Quinn, who is not a Christian, took communion at Tim Russert’s funeral and then wrote about how moving an experience it was. Now David Waters, the guy who took over the Under God blog from Claire Hoffman, offers the headline “Win Free Sex” as a means to draw readers in. I’m sure it will work, but those readers likely won’t be repeat visitors.

And this is a leading religion site.

I realize that in condemning On Faith’s occasional cluelessness, I have invited criticism of my own hypocrisies, such as here and here and here. Let me know if you find more.)

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July 14, 2008 | 12:01 am

Bin Laden the Jew and ‘Protocols’ of al Qaeda

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It appears the Zionist global conspiracy, responsible for most of what’s wrong in this world, is more widespread than previously thought. Jews have such a stranglehold on world domination that they’ve recruited Osama bin Laden to do their bidding. In fact, the most-wanted terrorist in the world, who we’ve been so unable to locate, was a pretty easy get: According to the Pakistan Daily, bin Laden is the most crypto-crypto-Jew of all time and al Qaeda is a Jewish front.

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

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July 13, 2008 | 5:40 pm

Media bias and the future of Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

On this panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival about reporting on Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz discuss “Israel’s media, Olmert’s intentions, and the future state of Middle East diplomacy.”

The latter point was something Goldberg addressed at length in a May cover story, an article attacked by one of Israel’s leading columnists, Nahum Barnea, as overly critical and missing the point of Israeli life. Atlantic editor James Bennet, quite humorously because he is sitting next to Goldberg, asks Shavit, “Do you agree that Jeff doesn’t get it?”

He did not: “I think what probably troubled Nahum, troubles some Israelis, is the need, so to speak, to justify Israel’s existence. ... Israel is the most fascinating place I can think of. It is energetic; it is full of life; it is exciting. But it is always a place where you live dangerously. And in a place like that, you need faith, you need belief, you need ideas. The fact that many leading Israelis have stopped asking the questions is a problem. It doesn’t make us stronger. It makes us weaker.”

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July 12, 2008 | 8:46 pm

More moderate voices replace liberal academics

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

War protest at UCLA from 1972

My decision eight years ago to leave northern San Diego for UCLA was highly unusual. In my church youth group of about 50, only a few people in the previous decade had enrolled in a big, public, liberal, hedonistic university; most of my peers either took classes at the local junior college or moved to Nowheresville, Texas to attend Abilene Christian University. My parents’ friends were proud of me, yes, but I sensed that they sensed that I might never return, physically or religiously. They were likely right on the first count, but not the latter.

Despite unfounded fears of the secularizing university, worries my parents never shared, I found UCLA to be a fire that refined my mind and helped me to better formulate what I believed in and, when necessary, do what Fitzgerald said was the test of “real-intelligence.”

I had friends who complained of ultra-liberal professors teaching them to hate George Bush, Christianity and Israel. I never experienced this and often thought my friends were playing the victim card too often.

Last week, The New York Times affirmed my feelings that professors on once-liberal campuses have really become quite moderate.

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July 12, 2008 | 4:22 pm

Tony Snow was ready to die

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve had a hard time accepting any of the Bush administration’s religious overtures as sincere. But, on the passing of former Press Secretary Tony Snow, who died this morning of colon cancer, and at the tragic age of 53, it’s worth reflecting on some of the more meaningful words concerning Christianity to come from the White House in the past eight years. From an essay Snow wrote for Christianity Today after being diagnosed:

Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet; a loved one holds your hand at the side. “It’s cancer,” the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. “Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.” But another voice whispers: “You have been called.” Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter—and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our “normal time.”

There’s another kind of response, although usually short-lived—an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tinny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing though the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There’s nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue—for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

This is, quite obviously, not an easy perspective to have. Yes, atheists see this as a weak spot in the armor of the God-fearing. But it is not so much resignation as transcendence, closing moments of clarity for those who truly believe. Call it a crutch if you want; I’m glad God offers this support.

A little more from Snow after the jump:

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