April 24, 2009 | 4:50 pm

Muslim apostates and capital punishment

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Remember last year when an op-ed in The New York Times claimed Barack Obama would be killed by Muslim fundamentalists because he was an apostate? The argument was far from valid, but it raised an interesting question about just what the appropriate punishment is for apostasy. Care to guess?

Harvard’s Muslim chaplain recently outlined the answer in an e-mail to a student. And now the chaplain is at the center of something ugly. Here’s the story from The Forward:

Taha Abdul-Basser, stated that most traditional authorities on Islamic law agree that in countries under Muslim governance, the proper punishment for apostasy — that is, rejection of Islam by a former Muslim — is death. The e-mail was subsequently published online, and although Abdul-Basser has distanced himself personally from that position, the remarks have stirred a flurry of controversy and debate.

Abdul-Basser’s e-mail was circulated through an e-mail list and subsequently posted April 3 on the blog Talk Islam, from which it was picked up by several other blogs. On April 14, The Harvard Crimson, a student-run daily, published an article about the controversy. One week later, on April 21, it remained the paper’s most viewed, most commented-upon article online.

The issue being debated is anything but academic: Apostasy is outlawed in a number of Muslim countries, including Afghanistan, Malaysia, Iran and Algeria. In 2006, an Afghan named Abdul Rahman faced trial, with a potential sentence of death, for converting to Christianity, before being granted asylum in Italy. The issue has attracted a great deal of attention from such international human rights groups as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

In his original e-mail, Abdul-Basser appeared to put himself at odds with the international human rights community, which includes a number of luminaries who teach at Harvard. After a lengthy discussion of the positions of various Muslim authorities, he concluded by writing that “there is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment), and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”

In a subsequent statement sent to the Forward, however, Abdul-Basser said that he was simply explaining to a student the traditional position of Islamic legal scholars, not advocating their viewpoint.

Read more from The Forward here and from the Harvard Crimson here.

April 24, 2009 | 2:08 pm

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Al Jazeera TV

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last week, Al Jazeera did a feature report on the rockstar rabbi Shmuley Boteach. No, that’s not a typo.

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April 24, 2009 | 10:16 am

American Jewish GDP is $9.7 billion

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

No one would argue that Jewish life in America is cheap. Hebrew school, synagogue dues, summer camp, bar and bat mitzahs, kosher food, the occasional trip to Israel—it all adds up. And then, of course, there is the expectation of tzedakah. But just how much money do American Jews pump into their communal organizations, from those providing vocational training to Jewish education to pro-Israel advocacy?

Try $9.7 billion.

That is the number that Mark Pearlman, who runs the JInsider website, is calling the Jewish GDP, which, according to the World Bank, would place the American Jewish communal output above Armenia, the Congo and Cambodia and below Equatorial Guinea, Georgia and Nepal. Not exactly titans of industry, but considering the fact that this is only a fraction of American Jewish production, it’s pretty impressive.

Pearlman has put his Jewish GDP Study online, and Gary Rosenblatt made it the subject of his column for The Jewish Week. An excerpt:

Pearlman used publicly available filings, primarily via the Web sites GuideStar and Charity Navigator, from more than 400 Jewish non-profit organizations, and focused on all financial data. The revenue data for each organization was then “compiled and categorized according to systematic service groupings” like education, communal life, etc.

The results, he readily admits, are incomplete, in large part because religious organizations are exempt from filing tax reports available to the public. But what he has found makes for some fascinating study and discussion points in our community — for instance, that the Jewish GDP is $9.7 billion, with most funds going to social welfare (25 percent), followed by education (20 percent).

Twelve percent of services provided go for communal life, with 3 percent for advocacy, 1 percent for the arts, and less than 1 percent for Arab-Israel relations.

More than 25 percent of all funds come through the Jewish federation system, and 33 percent of all revenue is concentrated among the top 10 nonprofits, including UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Hadassah, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Yeshiva University, FEGS Health and Human Service System, Jewish Geriatric Center.

Perhaps most surprising is that no Jewish organization has undertaken this kind of data gathering, which could create a clear and standardized annual snapshot of how many — and how — Jewish nonprofit dollars are generated in this country.

Read the rest of Rosenblatt’s column here. One phenomenon apparent in Pearlman’s study, which Jonathan Sarna previously addressed, is that too many Jewish organizations do the same thing.

“Each category has hundreds of organizations doing similar things,” Shalom Elcott, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, told Rosenblatt. “In this economy, there is no way we can maintain that kind of duplication.”

It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

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April 23, 2009 | 6:15 pm

Chabad center raided in Bolivia

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s not Venezuela or, thank God, India in November, but is there cause for concern in Bolivia? JTA reports:

Bolivian police raided a Chabad center in northeastern Bolivia and arrested a Jewish emissary.

Police showed up Wednesday at the center in Rurrenabaque in what the local Chabad director, Rabbi Aharon Freiman, called an act of intimidation and provocation.

The reason for the raid was not clear. Users of the Chabad center have been at odds with the proprietor of a local restaurant and neighbors, some of whom have complained of noise, but Freiman told JTA he could not rule out the possibility of nationalist motives.

“They want us to leave this place. Why? I don’t know,” Freiman said in a telephone interview from Bolivia. “It could be because of the conflict with the restaurant. It could be for nationalist reasons.”

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April 23, 2009 | 4:27 pm

Hitler ... he’s huge in India

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Speaking of Nazis, Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is getting new life in India, where business students are turning to it as an essential self-help guide.

What!?!

The Telegraph reports:

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.

“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.

Jaico Publishing House, one of the publishers in India, said it reprints a new edition of the book at least twice a year to meet growing demand.

“We were the first company to publish the book in India and there are now six other Indian publishers of the book, although we were first to take a chance on it,” said Jaico’s chief editor, R H Sharma, who dismissed any moral issues in publishing Mein Kampf.

“The initial print run of 2,000 copies in 2003 sold out immediately and we knew we had a best-seller on our hands. Since then the numbers have increased every year to around 15,000 copies until last year when we sold 10,000 copies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops,” he added.

Best seller ... that’s an interesting choice of words. I can only guess that “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success” is not doing as well in India.

As far as the wisdom of “Mein Kampf,” Management Today, via the Huffington Post, reasons that it isn’t exactly “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”:

Even if you can stomach the vitriol, paranoia, militarism and crude racism, the book is so long and tedious that even Hitler’s ally Mussolini didn’t manage to plough his way through it, once apparently dismissing it as ‘a boring tome that I never been able to read’ (Churchill concurred, calling it ‘turgid, verbose [and] shapeless’). So its credentials as a management text seem rather dubious.

Wait, so just blaming the Jews isn’t the way to get ahead in the working world? I have so much to learn.

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April 23, 2009 | 3:34 pm

Clinton grilled for praising Planned Parenthood founder

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Sanger

Margaret Sanger was a controversial figure in women’s liberation, an activist for birth control who later founded Planned Parenthood. And yesterday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got grilled by two Republican members of Congress for praising Sanger.

“Sanger,” Reps. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said, “was an unapologetic eugenicist and racist who said ‘the most merciful thing a family does for one of its infant members is to kill it.’ And said on another occasion, ‘eugenics is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.’”

Emily Belz at World magazine writes:

Clinton didn’t respond to the Sanger quotes at first, but later in the hearing when questioned again on the matter, she said in all humans (she used Thomas Jefferson’s slave holding as an example) “there are things we admire and there are things we deplore.”

Deplorable, indeed. Now, politicians can get worked up over just about anything. But eugenics is about as ugly a world as Nazi. And for good reason.

(Hat tip: Christianity Today Politics Blog)

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April 23, 2009 | 3:03 pm

Kyle’s Jewish ‘disability’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Kyle dropped a bombshell last night when he admitted that he couldn’t be a pirate because he was Jewish and, well, “Jews can’t be pirates.” Of course, it was just a trick to get Cartman to disappear forever in pursuit of his own swashbuckling adventure on the high seas. And it made for a very, very funny episode.

More importantly, Jews have done plenty of plundering—no, not just with the recent economic collapse—and have sailed the seas as pirates.

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April 23, 2009 | 4:42 am

Jimmy Kimmel talks with a ‘Jewish Jets player’ about scheduling conflict

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Shmuley Jackson is upset with the NFL for scheduling two of his Jets’ home games during the High Holidays. Seriously, I haven’t heard this much Yiddish in two years at The Jewish Journal.

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April 22, 2009 | 7:15 pm

Holocaust museum opens in Palestinian village

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yad Vashem's Hall of Names

That a Holocaust museum was opening in a Palestinian village seems like big enough news. Especially if it’s a genuine museum that sincerely addresses the atrocities of Nazi Germany and isn’t simply some front for revisionists. But if the museum was affiliated with Yad Vashem, now that would be huge.

And that’s exactly what JTA reported yesterday. Only, it wasn’t true. “Yad Vashem has no connection to the Na’alin museum,” JTA reported in an editor’s note that just went over the wire. The corrected brief follows:

JERUSALEM (JTA)—A museum devoted to the Holocaust was dedicated in a Palestinian village.

The museum opened Tuesday, Holocaust Memorial Day, in Na’alin, which is better known for weekly protests of Israel’s security fence that divides the village in two.

It is located in an apartment near where an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was killed last year during a fence protest, Ynet reported. The museum features pictures and educational material in Arabic.

“If leaders on both sides know and remember what Hitler did, maybe we’ll have peace,” Ibrahim Amira, a Na’alin resident and a leader of the anti-fence protests, told Ynet.

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April 22, 2009 | 4:49 pm

Pope accepts keffiyeh from Palestinian Catholics

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Remember the controversy that erupted when Rachael Ray wore a keffiyah in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial? Well, let’s just hope the pope doesn’t don this gift from Palestinian worshippers.

Haaretz reports:

Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday met in the Vatican on Wednesday with a group of Palestinian Catholics, who presented him with traditional Palestinian scarf as a gift.

The 27 faithful from a Bethlehem parish were among thousands attending the pope’s weekly Wednesday audience in St. Peter’s Square.

At the end of the service, two youths from the group were brought to the pope and draped the checkered black-and-white scarf on his shoulders. Benedict chatted briefly with them while wearing the scarf, which an aide later removed.

Bethlehem is one of the stops on the May 8-15 Holy Land pilgrimage that will take Benedict to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. In Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, he will celebrate Mass and visit a Palestinian refugee camp.

Meanwhile Israeli Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov declared on Wednesday that he would urge the pope to avoid meeting with Sakhnin Mayor Mazen Ghnaim during his visit, due to Ghnaim’s “support for terror.”

Read the rest here. It must be awkward getting gifts as a dignitary. or simply being Rachael Ray.

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April 22, 2009 | 3:58 pm

Planet Earth: ‘I’m with stupid’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I drive a Honda Civic, never leave the lights on and use natural air conditioning (sweating out the warm days and then flushing in cool air at night). Earth Day bores me. I doubt it inspires many others, especially those needing it, to think and live in a more eco-friendly manner.

I don’t have it all figured out, but Daryl Cagle‘s cartoon is spot on.

As they say, once this planet is gone, it’s gone for good. And yet many people are too busy picking their noses to pay attention to what is going on around them.

The religious components to this are numerous. Quite simply: We are stewards of what God has given. In this vein, Rabbi David Saperstein, the head of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center and the newly crowned most-influential rabbi, released this statement:

“As Jews, we are deeply committed to stewardship as a moral principle; we are commanded in the Book of Genesis “to till and to tend” our Earth and are called throughout our text to care for our Earth and all its inhabitants. We in the Reform Movement have made great strides toward living out this value in the last year, launching our online Greening Reform Judaism resource in February and strengthening our advocacy work on the state, local, and national levels.

“Our commitment is reflected in a resolution, adopted this morning by the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, that expresses our belief as people of faith that it is unacceptable to remain wedded to polluting sources of energy that threaten our environment, our economy, and our health.”

One country that could really get this message—besides the obvious: China, India, the United States—is Israel, where the Jordan has become so polluted that Christians no longer get baptized in its water and the Yarkon River is so parasitic it kills. Mark Gold, president of L.A.-based Heal the Bay, gives the Jewish state some advice after visiting for the first time.

Money quote: “Success won’t come easily, but nothing ever does in Israel.”

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April 22, 2009 | 2:13 pm

Former Catholic priest accuses another of abusing him as teen

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Saw this story yesterday but didn’t have a chance to blog it, and I’m running into a meeting now. So here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times:

A former Roman Catholic priest accused another former priest Monday of sexually abusing him in the rectory of a La Habra church when he was a teenager.

In a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana, Ben Rodriguez, 45, said he was molested numerous times between the ages of 15 and 18 in the priest’s church apartment. On some occasions, the priest gave him muscle relaxants and sleeping pills before abusing him, Rodriguez alleged.

The lawsuit did not name the accused priest, but Rodriguez identified him as Gordon Pillon in interviews and at a news conference Monday outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. Rodriguez handed out copies of a photograph of himself and Pillon, taken at the younger man’s confirmation nearly three decades ago.

Rodriguez alleged that Pillon, then an assistant pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in La Habra and Rodriguez’s spiritual advisor, took advantage of him while his parents were divorcing and that Pillon eventually persuaded him to sever his ties to his family and enter the seminary. Several years later, the two worked together at churches in Illinois, where Rodriguez was an assistant pastor to Pillon.

Rodriguez was a priest in the Diocese of Peoria for 16 years. In 2006, he decided to tell diocesan officials about the alleged abuse after another young man there said Pillon had made sexual advances toward him, Rodriguez said in an interview.

“Gordon wasn’t just a priest, he was like a cult figure,” Rodriguez said. “He didn’t have a conscience.”

Read the rest here.

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