Monthly Archives: April 2016

Defender Wrong about ADL

Posted by on 2016-04-21 No comments

In Rafi Kanter’s recent letter he questions the truthfulness of my statements about the ADL. The suggestion of dishonesty require a response.

The ADL’s recent protestations that they never denied the Armenian genocide are much like Bill Clinton’s disavowals of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Yet strenuous denial does not equal the truth.

A July 2007 piece from Jewcy, an online Jewish magazine, explained how the ADL took on the job of being Israel’s mouthpiece: “Abdullah Gul needed a favor. […] The Turkish foreign minister was fighting a push in the U.S. House of Representatives to recognize the Turkish murder of over one million Armenians during World War I. […] Gul summoned representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and several other Jewish-American organizations to his room at the Willard Hotel in Washington. There he asked them, in essence, to perpetuate Turkey’s denial of genocide. Abraham Foxman’s ADL acquiesced…”

Plenty of Jews objected to the cowardice, if not hypocrisy. One of them was Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, a staunch Israel supporter who has given talks to the Jewish Federation at Rabbi Kanter’s very pulpit. On August 23, 2007 Jacoby wrote in the New York Times: “Particularly deplorable has been the longtime reluctance of some leading Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to call the first genocide of the 20th century by its proper name. When Andrew Tarsy, the New England director of the ADL, came out last week in support of a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, he was promptly fired by the national organization.”

On April 16, 2008 the Armenian Genocide Museum also blasted the ADL and on August 14, 2007 the Watertown, Massachusetts Town Council voted unanimously to rescind its affiliation with the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” campaign.

Only after widespread outrage at its cowardice reached a crescendo did the ADL change its tune.

In a June 2010 piece in Salon magazine Armenian writer Mark Arax expressed disappointment with the ADL best: “As victims of the Holocaust, Jews might be expected to stand beside the Armenians and their tragedy. […] This sudden embrace of the Armenian Genocide actually marks a shameless turnaround for the major American Jewish organizations. For decades, they have helped Turkey cover up its murderous past.”

My original point was that the ADL too often wades in on political issues as a proxy for Israel – even when it is contrary to American or Jewish values. The Liberty billboard incident was just the latest example.

No matter what the ADL says it now believes, what I wrote was absolutely correct.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 27, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20160427/opinion/160429527

Great Books and “Office Hours”

Posted by on 2016-04-16 No comments

Office Hours

April 16, 2016

After a performance of A.R. Gurney’s Office Hours, there was a discussion which ended up defending the preservation of a Eurocentric curriculum based on the Great Books. To which I may have said something like “Western Civilization is greatly overrated.” This no doubt annoyed one person enough to write me an email – to which I replied:

Dear —

I apologize to you, and to everyone else gathered, for my cranky response to your persistent efforts to defend Western Civilization from savages, enemies of enlightenment – or, frankly, anyone outside the Judeo-Christian realm. I especially must apologize to X. I did not intend to denigrate his characterization of the noble impulses of those who founded this nation. I meant only to observe that what they actually created turned out to be, unsurprisingly, not so noble given the models they chose.

Having begun my childhood in India right after independence, I had a front row seat to a side of Western colonialism we don’t see much, fundamentalist missionary Christianity, the subjugation of other people by militarism, eugenics, racism, and the unrestrained greed for other peoples’ resources. It was clear enough as a child that something was profoundly wrong with the Great White World, and it has become even clearer as an adult.

But all this, to paraphrase Kipling, was “justified” because “our” [Western] values were superior to theirs. All this, to paraphrase the Desert Storm general Jerry Boykin, was justified because our god was stronger than their god. All this, to paraphrase the American eugenists who preceded Hitler, was justified because we are genetically fitter than the savages.

Western Civilization is the White Man’s Burden. Some of you think of it lovingly as a curriculum. The rest of the world sees it as a sledgehammer.

Even though I grew up hearing (of the Chinese) that “life is cheap in the East,” it actually turns out that the reverse is true. “We” were the only ones to have ever dropped The Bomb on humans – but, no matter, they were just Asians. “We” in the West are not ashamed to kill – in vast numbers – for money, ideology, or simply because we just don’t like you. Total up all the victims of all our wars of choice combined – they far exceed the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. And just look at our Western legacy of slavery, racism, and exploitation of the poor. Boil down all the cultural relics we have stolen or embraced – and it is little more than justification for violence perpetrated by supermen.

These are our real values, not the glowing words on a page.

We may laugh at Nietzsche’s philosophy, which express our secret values most explicitly, but any objective evaluation of our “Western” curriculum must conclude that this is a warped, ideological education that leads, paradoxically, to violence and immorality – no less than ISIS’ twisted version of Islam.

It has always struck me as incredibly strange that a Western world that embraces such violence and hatred for the weak and the “other” would also embrace a religion of peace and egalitarianism. Even if the Romans had not killed Christ and blamed it on the Jews, I think they would have had to kill him some other way. You just can’t have a guy like that running around espousing kindness and care for the poor and the weak.

The truth that the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Belgian, and American missionaries who came hand-in-hand with their colonizing forces know is this: Christianity is for the defeated. Conquerors always come with Bible in one hand and sword in another. It is always all about power: morality has little to do with it.

Indeed, the pre-millennial post-apocalyptic Christ riding in on his horse with bloodied sword is more to the liking of many Christians today. And where did they learn this version of their religion? From university graduates of the 19th Century with their classical Eurocentric educations.

And this is why I say: Western Civilization is greatly overrated.

Of Censorship and Mirrors

Posted by on 2016-04-08 No comments

This morning’s Standard-Times contained an article about the removal of a billboard by Outdoor Media referencing the 1967 USS Liberty incident, in which an American ship was attacked by Israel and 34 U.S. sailors were killed. The Johnson administration immediately suppressed the story and it is still relatively unknown. The Standard-Times article quotes the New England Defamation League, which attacks the group that placed the ad (“If Americans Only Knew”) for alleged “antisemitism.” No other view was presented in the article.

Interested readers can find a curated version of the story at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident or at the group’s website http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ussliberty.html.

Without a doubt “If Americans Only Knew” is confrontational – as is PETA, who also unsuccessfully waded into local billboard marketing with disastrous results. But if you actually visit their website instead of merely taking the ADL’s word for it, it’s clear that their issues are with American foreign policy around Israel and Palestine. They leave generalizations about Jews to people like Donald Trump.

It is hardly surprising that the Defamation League would come down on the side of censorship. The ADL in recent years has expanded its definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel and it has become primarily a mouthpiece for the Israeli foreign ministry. In 2008, when it served Israel’s interests to be less hostile to Turkey, the ADL denied the Armenian genocide. Now, at a time that Jews are better-integrated into American society than ever before, the ADL has turned away from defending Jewish Americans to defending Israel’s militarism and occupation.

But the Israel-Palestine issue is not going away. More than ever, it is a valid foreign policy debate, just as American militarism is. Last year the [U.S.] Congressional Research Service reported that “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance…”

I can think of many better uses for that money – and it is certainly worth debating.

We can pretend all we want that Israel is a beleaguered little David fighting off Arab Goliaths day and night – or we can acknowledge that, like us, Israel has turned its back on its founders’ ideals and has become an ugly xenophobic nation – with an equally ugly dependency on militarism and an occupation habit. But it’s hard for Americans to criticize Zionism when we so enthusiastically embrace our own American Exceptionalism.

Still, if we are looking for an explanation for the unrelenting efforts to censor the debate on Israel and Palestine, we need only look in the mirror. This – as Walter Russell Mead wrote in “Foreign Affairs” many years ago – is the real reason we cannot bear criticism of Israel: they’re just too much like us.

Besides, who really wants to look in that mirror?

This was published in the Standard Times on April 13, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20160413/opinion/160419873

Consequence

Posted by on 2016-04-05 No comments

A review of “Consequence” by Eric Fair.

I began this book last night and finished it this morning. Although the first person, present tense is grating for the length of an entire book, and Fair still is not fully open with himself or his readers, it was an engrossing read. My three stars reflects an average of four stars for interest yet only two for candor.

What happens to a man who goes off to war? The book certainly answers this question: nightmares, guilt, alcoholism, sometimes death – either by war or the man’s own hand.

How does a man like this reconcile his own religion with what he is ordered to do? I don’t think we ever really get an answer. In his account, Fair’s family expect him to become a pastor like his grandfather, but he is drawn to a darker, physical side, first becoming a policeman, where he learns to deploy violence against people who are always (well, at least in theory) criminals. For the longest time Fair thinks religion will save him, and the book contains a strange account of his interrogation of salafis who tell him how much like them he really is – a thread that really leads nowhere. Aside from Fair’s restlessness and his perpetual life crises, readers never really learn why he avoids the ministry, why he stubbornly clung to Presbyterianism despite it changing in front of his eyes, why he really dropped out of theological school. It wasn’t that his writing was starting to take off; it was something else, unnamed, unexamined.

And why does a man go off to war – especially when many in his family have warned him against it? Fair again avoids fully answering the reader’s questions, but we sense a tremendous restlessness in him that leads him to ignore his father’s and grandmother’s counsel. Fair is obviously a person of well above-average intelligence, and he is given to instrospection and guilt, but he shies away from truly probing the demons that still stir within him.

The book begins with a quote from Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Maimonides was the Arab-Jewish Talmudist who, besides being the Sultan’s physician, wrote Guide for the Perplexed and had much to say on moral conduct. Maimonides counsels the guilty party to approach his victim “again and again until he his forgiven.” Islam requires precisely the same of a wrong-doer, while in Christianity a hall pass signed by Jesus suffices. Unfortunately, all of Fair’s – and Bush and Cheney’s, and Obama’s – victims are now either dead or lost to squalid prisons in places where Americans will fear to go for a long, long time. A dark truth never acknowledged in this book is that there never will be apologies – and there never will be forgiveness for these personal and national sins.

And so in the end Fair falls back on his Christianity – or perhaps just wishful thinking. In his aunt’s words, Eric Fair ends up forgiving himself: “I am just a human kid.”