January 30, 2009 | 2:59 pm

Iranian.com: Obama will take care of his Jewish ‘homies’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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If you can excuse the hilarious diction and syntax, this post from Iranian.com, which fed into my Google Reader under an RSS I have for “Jews and money,” is an entertaining read. It’s all about Jewish power and the way MOTs use all that money they make.

Read on if you are looking for a good laugh. Here’s what the Iranian.com writer said:

This poor guy Obama hasn’t been in the office for quite a week yet and know it all Iranians (I am at the top of this list by the way) are spewing theories on how he will now put Israel in its place and fix everything; because his middle name is Hussein.

I got news for you (likes of poster Jaleho); it cost close to $750 million to put Obama in the White House starting with the primaries and continuing on to his one on one with McCain.

According to available estimates (google this, its easy), 33-39% of this money came from Jews; either individual small contributors, or fund raisers in Hollywood and NYC.  There were so many $5,000 and $10,000 a plate fundraising events for Obama organized by Jews and Jewish organizations that make your heads spin.

Less than 7% at best and 2% by most estimates of contributions to Obama was from Muslims and Arabs.  Of course a lot of this was due to the fact that Obama probably did not want $ from this group for obvious reasons.

So, no matter what is Obama’s personal thoughts and feelings on the Arab-Israeli issue, he has to take care of the homies who helped put him in office; he has to be especially “kind” to them during his first term.

Have no misunderstandings; Obama will side with the Jews 9 times out of 10.  Not that the Jews are on the side of right, but because they know how to work within the system.

January 30, 2009 | 1:47 pm

NYT mea culpa on editorial about Israel’s war in Gaza

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From Portfolio’s Mixed Media blog:

The New York Times is often accused, by critics on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of serving as a credulous outlet for the other side’s propaganda. For once, the critics are exactly right.

Today’s Times op-ed page features this Editor’s Note:

An Op-Ed article on Jan. 8, on misperceptions of Gaza, included an unverified quotation. A former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, was quoted as saying in 2002 that “the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” This quotation, while cited widely, does not appear in the Israeli newspaper interview to which it is usually attributed. Its original source has not been found, and thus it should not have appeared in the article.

To say the quotation was “unverified” and “its original source has not been found” appears to be putting it mildly. According to (the strongly pro-Israel) Commentary, the incredibly inflammatory words attributed by Columbia professor Rashid Kalidi to Yaalon are actually a highly distorted version of remarks the former IDF chief made to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2002. Yaalon never said the Palestinians are or should consider themselves a “defeated people”; instead, he said Israel’s victory required “the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us.”

The provenance of the quote should have raised red flags: Commentary says it “has been cited ad nauseam by Arab news services, neo-Nazi websites and leftist bloggers, though only occasionally with reference to the venue of Yaalon’s alleged remark and never with a hyperlink to the actual article where it supposedly appeared.”

I tend to, though not always, give news outlets the benefit of the doubt, especially when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most news organizations aren’t nearly as anti-Israel as their critics claim. But this is a really boneheaded move, the kind I encourage interns at the UCLA Daily Bruin to really learn to avoid before moving on to a daily newspaper, let alone The Daily Newspaper.

Coincidentally, Ethan Bronner, an NYT reporter based in Jerusalem, had a thoughtful reporter’s notebook piece on the difficulty of writing about a conflict in which both sides are always accusing you of being a mouthpiece for the other. An excerpt:

No place, date or event in this conflicted land is spoken of in a common language. The barrier snaking across and inside the West Bank is a wall to Palestinians, a fence to Israelis. The holiest site in Jerusalem is the Temple Mount to Jews, the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims. The 1948 conflict that created Israel is one side’s War of Independence, the Catastrophe for the other.

After Israel’s three-week air, sea and land assault in Gaza, aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire, it is worth pausing to note how difficult it has been to narrate this war in a fashion others view as neutral, and to contemplate what that means for any attempt by the new Obama administration to try to end it.

It turns out that both narration and mediation require common ground. But trying to tell the story so that both sides can hear it in the same way feels more and more to me like a Greek tragedy in which I play the despised chorus. It feels like I am only fanning the flames, adding to the misunderstandings and mutual antagonism with every word I write because the fervent inner voice of each side is so loud that it drowns everything else out.

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January 29, 2009 | 3:46 pm

Bacon Explosion: ‘the treyfiest turducken you can imagine’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From New York Times slideshow

I mentioned yesterday on Twitter the Bacon Explosion, which, in the words of a Jewcy writer is “the treyfiest turducken you can imagine.”

And all Adam and Eve ate was an apple.

The incredibly non-kosher concoction is “two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce.” Bake or smoke, then enjoy and call an ambulance.

Dreamed up just before Christmas—definitely not Chanukah—the Bacon Explosion got a friendly write-up in the NYT yesterdayday. You’ve got to check out the preparation slideshow.

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January 28, 2009 | 11:18 pm

Grand jury investigating Cardinal Mahony

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

For years, many observers have marveled Cardinal Roger Mahony’s ability to allude much more than a blackened name and bit of battery from the clergy sex abuse scandal. But Teflon Rog may be no more. The LA Times is reporting that a federal grand jury is investigating Mahony’s handling of sexual abuse allegations. Here’s the story:

One federal law enforcement source said such a prosecution could be brought under a federal statute that makes it illegal to “scheme . . . to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”

In this case, the victims would be parishioners who relied on Mahony and other church leaders to keep their children safe from predatory priests, the source said. To convict on such a charge, prosecutors would have to prove that Mahony used the U.S. mail or some form of electronic communication in committing the alleged fraud, the source said.

O’Brien declined to comment, refusing to even confirm the existence of the investigation.

Mahony’s attorney, J. Michael Hennigan, confirmed that federal prosecutors have contacted the archdiocese and requested “information about a number of individual priests, at least two of whom are deceased.” He said he was also aware that some witnesses had testified before the panel.

But Hennigan said he has been informed that Mahony is not a target of the inquiry.

“We have been and will continue to be fully cooperative with the investigation,” Hennigan said.

(skip)

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said he had not heard about the investigation but welcomed the new scrutiny of Mahony.

“It is long, long overdue,” Clohessy said. “It is just crucial that the hierarchy face criminal charges, because almost every other conceivable means have been tried to bring reform.”

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January 28, 2009 | 4:53 pm

More on Holocaust 2.0

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Two rabbis from the Simon Wiesenthal Center have picked up on the anti-Semitic rhetoric—“Death to All Juice,” “Holocaust 2.0,” “back to the ovens”—from recent protests against Israel. Here’s a snippet:

Gone is the pretense of using the word “Zionist” in place of “Jew”.  Jews are now targeted as Jews. In Amsterdam, the streets near Anne Frank’s hiding place resounded with calls to”Gas the Jews”; from Madrid to Montreal, from London to Melbourne to Oklahoma City to Washington, DC, protesters proudly pump placards “Israelis are Nazis” and “Kill the Jews”.  Synagogues are torched in France.  Muslims walk into stores on Golders’ Green Road in London, announcing, “We will kill you.”  School principals in Denmark tell Jewish parents that their children are not welcome, because they will offend Muslims. German police removed an Israeli flag from the balcony of an apartment to appease anti-Israel protesters. Boycotts of Israeli and of Jewish businesses – are no longer the domain of the lunatic fringe. In Rome from whose streets their grandparents were hauled off to Auschwitz, Jews – not Israelis - are threatened with economic warfare.

January 27th marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the world’s largest Jewish cemetery. It is observed as the European Holocaust Memorial Day. Officials in Catalonia, Spain (a country in which more than 50% of secondary school students in a recent Spanish poll said they would not want to sit next to a Jewish classmate) canceled its participation this year because of Israel’s action in Gaza.

In Chicago, four synagogues were vandalized on the Sabbath by Hamas sympathizers. This, after a CAIR spokesman brushed aside complaints about antisemitic material, chiding Jewish leaders for caring less about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza than about words on “cardboard paper.” This was quite a dramatic departure from CAIR’s stance regarding the ink and paper of the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Here in Los Angeles, the deployment of antisemitism in service of Hamas got even less attention from MPAC.  Instead, Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs County, upbraided Mayor Villaraigosa and Sheriff Baca for their temerity in publicly defending Israel’s right to defend herself against terrorism. These veteran politicians do not understand the bigger picture, Mr. Al-Marayati insists, for such support he warns will enrage the greater Arab world.  Claiming to oppose extremism, he nonetheless offers an excuse for Hamas – and those who refuse to condemn as morally wrong the targeting civilians in rocket attacks, of using one’s own civilian population and infrastrucuture as human shields, of training children as suicide bombers. And as for missiles in mosques and booby-trapped Korans – well, no hestiation there either: “Militarism fuels extremism, and religion becomes a vehicle for resistance,” he writes.  He wrote nothing, however,  about Jew-hatred in the streets of Los Angeles.

He could have.  His counterparts in England did not shy away from the task.  There, a group of imams from every strain of Islamic thought, writers, and academics signed a letter expressing their grief over the deaths in Gaza, but at the same time condemning the rising wave of anti-Semitism: Protests against Israel should have nothing to do with violence against Jews, they wrote in a letter circulated to 1200 imams around the country.

Jews must not remain silent.

For the rest of their column, click here.

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January 28, 2009 | 2:02 pm

Palin starts SarahPAC

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Scary news yesterday from CT’s politics blog:

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has started a new political action commitee called SarahPAC to raise funds.

Sen. John McCain was recently asked whether he regretted picking Palin as his running mate, and he said, “I think the world of Sarah Palin.”

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January 28, 2009 | 1:38 am

The Muslim cold war and the prospects of peace

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m not sure how related the book pictured here is, but the Jerusalem Post has an interesting article breaking down the “Muslim cold war” gripping the Middle East and what it means for President Obama’s pursuit of peace. An excerpt:

Relations among the Muslim states of the Middle East have never been worse, not since the days when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser sent his agents to assassinate political figures in Jordan and conduct a war in Yemen against the Saudi-backed royalists.

A razor-sharp cold war separates the moderate Arab Sunni states, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and most of the Gulf states, from an Iranian-led axis that includes Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and, less importantly, Qatar.

The issues over which these two camps struggle are as clear as the divide between them. Meeting the Iranian threat is the most important of them. For the Gulf states, Iran’s success might threaten their survival. For Egypt, Iranian ascendancy would end its perennial claim to regional preeminence.

Moreover, Iranian nuclear capabilities would saddle the Egyptian state with the colossal costs of embarking on a nuclear weapons program at a time it desperately needs to continue allocating resources for social development. This ordering of priorities was the main reason Egypt opted out of its confrontation with Israel and signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state 30 years ago.

IRAN’S SUPPORT for Hamas in Gaza ranks probably second on the list of concerns for the moderate Arab Sunni states. Hamastan is anathema to this camp, for it sets a number of bad precedents. Gaza is the first area in the Arab world to be ruled by an organization that rose from the ground up, a fundamentalist movement that can claim a certain democratic legitimacy. Hamas is creating a revolutionary theocracy in the area under its control. It is the “deepest” Iranian bridgehead in the Arab world.

Moderate Arab states also oppose another Iranian bridgehead in Lebanon. Just as among the Palestinians these states clearly support Mahmoud Abbas, so they just as clearly support the Siniora government - a coalition of Christians and Sunnis under Saad Hariri (whose father was probably assassinated by the opposing axis) - against Hizbullah and its Iranian and Syrian allies. Thus, in both the Palestinian and Lebanese arenas, deadly local enmity is fed by the larger Muslim states’ cold war.

Less well-known but palpable nevertheless is the contest between the two camps over Iraq’s future. The moderate Sunni states are worried about a Shi’ite-led Iraq that would play a major role in cementing the Iranian-led Shi’ite-heterodox arc from the Iranian border to a Hizbullah-controlled Lebanon. Saudi Arabian support for Sunni parties in Iraq is well known, but Saudi Arabia probably supports armed Iraqi Sunni groups as well.

Obama will be most surprised to discover that objection to any substantial movement on a Palestinian state will come less from Israel, and more from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan - which fear that under the present circumstances Hamas would probably take over Judea and Samaria via an expanded Palestinian state. As far as they are concerned, Israel did not batter Hamas sufficiently to allay their suspicions. These states prefer “process” over meaningful movement regarding the Palestinian problem.

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January 27, 2009 | 8:33 pm

Ring my bell

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

And I thought Chris Chambers was a stud. Here Mason Crosby, the Packers place kicker, is letting folks know it’s almost 3. I thought at first that he was ringing a church bell, but after looking at the building I’m inclined to think he’s on government property.

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January 27, 2009 | 4:13 pm

John Updike dead at 76

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m on deadline right now and don’t have time to discuss how great an observer of American life John Updike was. His writing was never without religious themes and incredible genius. He’ll be missed:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir “Self-Consciousness” and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest,” and two National Book Awards.

Although himself deprived of a Nobel, he did bestow it upon one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanizing, egotistical Jewish novelist who collected the literature prize in 1999.

His settings ranged from the court of “Hamlet” to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by “penny-pinching parents,” united by “the patriotic cohesion of World War II” and blessed by a “disproportionate share of the world’s resources,” the postwar, suburban boom of “idealistic careers and early marriages.”

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation’s confusion over the civil rights and women’s movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.

That would be me.

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man’s interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it “to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.” Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector’s “chuckling whir” or look to the stars and observe that “the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.”

Updike was as prodigious and prolific as they come. He didn’t receive much praise for his most recent work. But I thoroughly enjoyed his 2006 short story for The New Yorker, “My Father’s Tears.”

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January 26, 2009 | 7:06 pm

Remembering a prophet of Jewish journalism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Fascinating story by the incomparable Samuel G. Freedman about the short-lived and long-defunct New Jewish Times. The editor was a young Yossi Klein Halevi and first cover was drawn by The Art Spiegelman; an associate editor was Israel Lemberg, senior producer of CNN’s Jerusalem bureau, and the office administrator was “Sex and the City” creator Candace Bushnell.

“With their very first issue, those opinionated slobs declared their independence from the norms of Jewish journalism, whether sober journals like Commentary and Dissent or the boosterish newspapers sponsored by local Jewish federations,” Freedman wrote. “The entire cover consisted of an illustration of a mushroom cloud with the deadpan headline asking, ‘Next Year in Jerusalem?’”

Freedman continues:

“We looked for dreams, lost and found, Jews with stories to tell,” Jonathan Mark, a former editor and now a columnist for The Jewish Week, put it in an online essay. “Into the pages of New Jewish Times came coverage of Jewish murder cases; accounts of homeless Chasids; Russian Jews who were beat up in Kiev; yeshiva dropouts; Satmar loan sharks; Yiddish characters who whiskey-spiked the coffee of pretty women in the Hungarian pastry shop.”

That kind of iconoclastic coverage never pushed the New Jewish Times’s circulation past several thousand, though it did earn a steady stream of bomb scares. On at least one occasion, the editors simply forgot to produce a new issue.

“Our sensibility was slightly insane,” Mr. Halevi recalled in a telephone interview from Jerusalem, “and that was its charm.”

Then eight months after it started, it ended. New Jewish Times published its last issue in April 1981, with its final page a Komar and Melamid graphic of the Manhattan skyline topped with Russian onion domes tinted Bolshevik red.

In its seeming failure, however, New Jewish Times had, in fact, anticipated a later generation of edgy and hip Jewish journalism. It was the wheel that magazines like Heeb and Zeek and Web sites like jewcy.com and jewlicious.com have reinvented in the 21st century.

“We didn’t know in the 1980s,” Mr. Mark said recently, “that someday you could’ve filled up Giants Stadium with an audience for this stuff.”

Of course, as Esther predicted, this story has been republished all over since Friday. But what’s even more interesting is that a search for “New Jewish Times” yields a 2004 interview Luke Ford, the consummate critic of Jewish journalism, conducted with Mark:

Ford: “Who funded New Jewish Times?”

Mark: “New Jewish Times was funded by a cousin of Yossi’s, and a scoundrel or two, for who else would publish us? Honestly, I forget their names of these assorted backers and they were forgettable to the process. We often went without pay, and Yossi, Izzy and I were actually shareholders in New Jewish Times, as well, so we stiffed ourselves to pay other writers and workers. We were like a garage band that made the music, pressed our own records, and did did our own distribution, or that’s how it seemed, at least, since we would oversee the whole process from writing to printing to the newsstand. This was in the days before computers, and the magnitude of what that added to the editorial and production process, and to our limited manpower, was too much for us to keep going. Then, one of our backers wanted us to do a mainstream cooking column, or something like that, to mainstrem us into a typical Jewish paper of that era, and we said the hell with it. If we were going to do that, something that was outside the reason we went into Jewish journalism, there was no point. Such are the liberties of youth. We could walk away. As Gertrude Stein might have said, if we were going to work for someone else, we could work for someone else.”

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January 26, 2009 | 4:13 pm

Enter the Daringly Awkward Sermon Contest

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Geez magazine, which has the motto “holy mischief in an age of fast faith,” has started the Daringly Awkward Sermon Contest. The details, via the Dallas Morning News religion blog, are confusing, but it appears you don’t actually need your own pulpit to enter this contest. Geez is offering its pulpit and $400 to the three sermons that make them squirm:

“The world needs bold voices of spiritual depth,” says Geez publisher Aiden Enns. “But maybe the message can have an element of holy mischief, a smirk instead of a furrowed brow, and, at the same time, more connection to the pressing issues of the day.”

The Daringly Awkward Sermon Contest invites entries that explore the aspects of social change that make us squirm, things like privilege, right-wing relatives, the drunk stranger in the back pew, guilt feelings, or litter in the poor part of town. Constructing a more fair and compassionate world involves awkward people, pauses and topics, and we want to find the wisdom in the awkwardness.

The Geez pulpit is set up and waiting for activists, anarchists, atheists and good old fashioned Christians to step up and confront or comfort, pontificate or confess, urge or encourage.

The top three sermons will receive $400 each. The winners plus a selection of other entries will be published in the Spring 2009 issue of Geez. Deadline for entries is February 28, 2009. Word limit is 800.

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January 26, 2009 | 1:18 pm

‘Let’s be frank ...’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

One of the more humorous parts of my job is reading some of the irate emails I get. Like one sent earlier this month after a visitor stumbled across an old post, “Bloomberg as Obama’s running mate?” The e-mail begins by quoting from the post:

“Let’s be frank, some fraction of Americans would vote against any black-Jewish ticket. In a close election, that could hurt.”

Here I am, an American searching for photos of Sderot rocket attacks to make a video to support Israel, and I find your blog.  I’m not assuming anything about Israelis, although they are in constant battle with people of a different religion.  Why do you assume things and call Americans racist and prejudice?  Why do you think you’re so superior to everyone else that you’re not racist or prejudice but so many Americans are?  Don’t you young presumptious f—-s that go around calling others racist realize you’re the bigots, that you’re stereotyping others and insulting them?

You and Obama—not even smart enough to recognize bigotry even when comes out of your own mouth.  You are the type of people that cause hatred around the world.  Stop bashing Americans and going along with this worldwide crap that Americans are racist, backward and anything else people want to assign to us.

As is often the case, this insightful reader makes a somewhat incomprehensible argument and, on top of that, misses a crucial detail: The line “let’s be frank” was not mine. It belonged to Josh Greenman of the New York Daily News editorial board, and I made that clear. I do, however, agree with his statement.

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