Camel Slaughter Back On
Sunday, December 31, 2006

Word out of India today that a court has changed its mind about a planned slaughter of camels this weekend for an Islamic festival.


The Madras High Court today vacated its order of December 28 preventing the slaughter of camels in Tamil Nadu during Eid-ul-Zuha, observing that there was no statutory bar on it.

Hearing a batch of petitions seeking the vacation of the order and implead petitions, including a review petition filed by the Tamil Nadu Advocates' Meelad Forum, a division bench comprising justices P Jyothimani and K Chandru said, "In the absence of any statutory bar, the court cannot continue the injunction."
In other Breaking Camel News, the Turkish Airline workers who sacrificed a camel at Istanbul airport to celebrate a job well done joined Vice President Cheney's shooting accident and the German who invented snug spray-on condoms as Reuters' top offbeat news stories of 2006.


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Saddam Sentinels
Friday, December 29, 2006


Ever since I wanted to walk the Bible I wanted to go to Iraq. So many of the seminal moments in the ancient world happened on the shores of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Creation. The Garden of Eden. The Tower of Babel. The birth of Abraham. I tried, and was thwarted, on my original journey, begun in 1998, that resulted in Walking the Bible. When I committed to do the follow-up, Where God Was Born, I knew I needed to go, as the central event in the second half of the Bible, the exile in Babylon, took place in Mesopotamia.

For years I watched Saddam. I read stories of journalists who had submitted themselves to one of his minders and traveled into the heart of his regime. One night, at a party in New York, I ran into Bob Simon, the CBS News correspondent who had been imprisoned during the first Gulf War. "I want to go to Iraq," I said. "I can help you," he said. "I've been back several times since." We agreed to have lunch the following week. Three days days later came 9-11, and I put my book aside to write Abraham.

The fall of Saddam in April 2003 seemed to present another opportunity to go to Iraq. As is painfully detailed in Where God Was Born, I said goodbye to my wife of six months and traveled to Baghdad in February 2004. The war was still waging, though few had the courage to call it a war then (the glow of "Mission Accomplished" still held the American media in sway). But Baghdad still showed the effects of the original shock and awe bombing. And as I drove around the city I didn't even notice, at first, the many pedestals that stood empty. They seemed part of the wreckage. Then I realized: These were the pedestals where statues of Saddam once stood, just like the one in Firdoos Square we all watched on television that morning. The statues were not bombed off; they were pulled off by Iraqis. The empty concrete pillars reminded me of the Sherman's Sentinels we saw growing up in Georgia left over from the Civil War, lone chimneys where once houses stood, burned down by Union soldiers during their march to the sea.

Saddam Sentinels.

Once, in Basra, I asked an Iraqi policeman if he would climb onto the pedestal and pose for a picture. He did, stuck out his arm as if to mock the heroic pose that Saddam took in all his statues. We all laughed. But after a minute, he climbed down. The wounds were still too fresh, the fear too recent. One of the saddest lessons of the painful years since that day was that it has become all the more apparent that one legacy of his tyranny is that the culture of revenge, darkness, inter-denominational rivalry, and brute force he helped cultivate has been nearly impossible to expunge. Saddam may be dead, but his rein of terror continues, at least for now.

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Jesus is Back, But Camel is Still Missing

Jesus is back, but the camel is still missing. That is the news out of Massachusetts today where folks at the Easthampton Congregational Church found a doll representing the baby Jesus, wrapped in a towel, who had been missing for two years, on their doorstep on Christmas morning. They replaced her in the Nativity Scene, which was even more depleted this year after a five-foot camel was found missing in the garage over the summer.

"It's huge. It takes two people to hold it," Ruth Matthews said.

"I can't see how anyone could steal the camel. You'd have to have a pick-up truck," her husband, Phillip Matthews said.

Committee members looked into purchasing a Fiberglas baby Jesus, but quickly discovered it would cost between $600 and $800. A camel would cost $1,700.

They ruled out a purchase.

An unstated reward has been offered for return of the camel.

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"Moses Was Once a Basket Case"

I'm often asked where the idea for Walking the Bible came from. Sometimes I joke: Living across the street from three churches in Nashville for two years. Here's why! The AP profiles Donald Seitz who spent three years driving 20,000 miles across 40 states to photograph 100 church signs for a new self-published book, which features other catchy lines like "Life is fragile. Handle with prayer" and "Don't Give Up. Moses Was Once A Basket Case."

Some of the highlights: "Feed your faith and your doubts will starve to death," from Church of Christ at Brookhill in Killen, Ala.; "Love God with all your heart, then do whatever you want," from Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City; and "Tithe if you love Jesus. Anyone can honk," from Southern Heights Baptist Church in Russellville, Ky.

The book is featured at www.thisisyoursign.com. (Hat tip: GalleyCat.)

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The Pope, Yiddish-Speaking Alaskans, and Tiger Down?

The Wall Street Journal (via the Post-Gazette) looks at the year ahead in sports, music, television, and film. Interesting nuggets for me: The Pope is publishing a book on Jesus around Easter, which should be a good way of guaging his popularity vis a vis JPII, who sold 500,000 copies of Crossing the Threshold of Hope in its first week; Norman Mailer has a new novel about Hitler; and Michael Chabon's new book is described as a "alternate-history thriller set amongst Yiddish-speaking Alaskans."

Their take on sports includes the following:

The World Series will come three days later this year, starting on a Tuesday. It is a change Fox, which broadcasts the games, sought so that games 6 and 7 wouldn't fall on low-rated weekend nights. Golf, meanwhile, is moving to a Nascar-inspired schedule that will culminate in a series of playoff tournaments designed to goose ratings.

One potential result: stiffer competition for Tiger Woods, who has come to dominate the world golf rankings and the race for the most earnings. The new system will reset the points awarded to the top players before the four final tournaments, eliminating the possibility of a runaway leader in the competition for a new $10 million purse.

As I'm married to a Tiger fanatic, I've followed this golf story somewhat closely, and I disagree with this take. Golf's problem is that it has four major tournaments, and the season is over in August, ceding the fall to other sports. Tiger is OFF TV entirely from mid-August until January, except when there is the Ryder Cup or Presidents' Cup, where he, um, underperforms, and that's only three days. Golf was looking for a way to continue its season into the fall, which this new system does, thereby guaranteeing Tiger more air time and much more money, both from the games (where it's not guaranteed) and from sponsors. I'm prepared to wager that he approved the new system anyway. This is a big win for him.

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Find a Dig

Herschel Shanks, the braintrust and editor behind Biblical Archaeology Review, once told me that the most popular issue of the popular magazine is the one every winter where they run lists of digs that volunteers can join. I've always loved this tidbit. In the old days (think the 1920's), digs were grand affairs, with archaeologists like Carter in the Valley of the Kings or Woolsey in Mesopotamia setting up camp, dining out on fine silver every night in the deserts, and locals running around for pennies a day. All this is harder now, so digs run on volunteers, who come to experience the romance of the past and survive on dreams that they might stumble into some fragment of the Bible.

The list should be coming out in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, BAR has a new website, Find a Dig, where you stoke your dreams online.

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More Breaking Camel News

Feiler Faster is your source for daily camel news. Today: My pals over at GOURMET have a new blog, full of food talk (like where to get the best pomegranate molasses), travel talk (like who's the hottest new chef in Milan), and a talk talk. My fab-o editor, Jane Lear, who is both big hearted and very sharp with words, has one of the first posts, about her recent trip to Petra. A friend was recently emailing me about what she and her boyfriend should do before going to Jordan. My advice: Read this! Her tone, and her info, are great (even if the photo of her on a camel is alarming).

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Reporter Who Broke Pearl Harbor Died -- On December 7
Thursday, December 28, 2006

One of the odder ironies of living in Japan for many years is that, with the dateline, December 7th has no resonance in that culture. It was December 8th in Japan when the attack on Pearl Harbor occcured. I was thinking of that when reading this story -- for some reason datelined to my hometown -- that the reporter who phoned in news of the attack died this year. On December 7th.

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BlackBerry Babies

I have been at parties were couples fought over whether one was permissable at the table (No!). I have been in arguments with my own wife over whether she's allowed to check hers while I'm driving and she's supposed to be navigating (No!). And I've stooped to using mine to steal five extra minutes of squirm-free time on a long plane ride (Yes!).

But I'm pleased to report, that despite exploding chattering among our 20-month-olds ("Dadddy read book 'We All Sing Same Voice'"), that unlike the trend reported in this WSJ piece, BlackBerry is not in the vocabularies of our girls.

Yet.

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"Piece of Mind"

Another talker surfaces. Sen. Specter tells an Israeli audience he wants to give Ahmadinejad a "piece of my mind:"

"I disagree with the policy of not dealing with Iran," he said.

"When he [Ahmadinejad] says he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, I'd like to tell him how unacceptable that is," Specter said, explaining what he would tell Ahmadinejad.

"When he says there was no Holocaust, I'd like to tell him about the Holocaust survivors I've talked to, and about how much evidence there is about the Holocaust. Yes I'd like to see the president of Iran, he could use some information," he said.

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Postcard from Morocco


I received the following email today from my brother, who had spoken to my parents during their holiday trip to Morocco:

Dad turned down an offer today. He said "no" when offered 3,000 camels ... for Mom!

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Carter Anti-Christian?

As I have written here in the past, I was fairly dismissive of the early attacks on Jimmy Carter for being "anti-Semitic," in no small part because I hate when that term is cavalierly thrown around. I hate it even more when that term is confused with being anti-Israeli. "Israel right or wrong" is an outdated philosophy and American Jews should get over it. Sometimes people criticize Israel for Israel's actions, not because they don't like Jews. Many times those people are Israelis. Or Jews themselves.

But now a more nuanced and, to my ear, more devastating critique of Carter is emerging that to me is much more interesting. The essence of the critique focuses not on Carter's attitude toward Judaism, but on his attitude toward Christianity. Carter breaks from four centuries of Christian Hebraism in America that links American support for Israel with America's mission to form a New Israel in North America, an idea that goes back to Plymouth Rock. No one has yet offered a compelling reason why he does this, but my guess is that it's related to his vocal break from the conservative wing of his own denomination in recent years. He seems to be reasserting the strict moral constructionism of the Bible to the current situation: Those chosen to live on the land of Israel must follow the dictates of God.

But not too much. As Michael Oren, author of the brilliant Six Days of War, one of the best books I've read about contemporary Israel, points out, Carter seems to want to have it both ways.

He complains about the fact that the kibbutz synagogue he enters is nearly empty on the Sabbath and that the Bibles presented to Israeli soldiers "was one of the few indications of a religious commitment that I observed during our visit." But he also reproves contemporary Israelis for allegedly mistreating the Samaritans--"the same complaint heard by Jesus almost two thousand years earlier"--and for pilfering water from the Jordan River, "where . . . Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist."

Disturbed by secular Laborites, he is further unnerved by religiously minded Israelis who seek to fulfill the biblical injunction to settle the entire Land of Israel. There are "two Israels," Mr. Carter concludes, one which embodies the "the ancient culture of the Jewish people, defined by the Hebrew Scriptures," and the other in "the occupied Palestinian territories," which refuses to "respect the basic human rights of the citizens."

Whether in its secular and/or observant manifestations, Israel clearly discomfits Mr. Carter, a man who, even as president, considered himself in "full-time Christian service." Yet, in revealing his unease with the idea of Jewish statehood, Mr. Carter sets himself apart from many U.S. presidents before and after him, as well as from nearly 400 years of American Christian thought.
The book jacket on the left is Oren's new book on the relationship between Israel and America.

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Posted by B Feiler at 10:21 AM 0 comments  

Quote of the Day

From an occasional series: Things I stumbled upon while doing research on my new book.

The question as to the use of the Bible in modern culture stands as a perplexing enigma troubling multitudes of minds. As modern man walks through the pages of this sacred book he is constantly hindered by numerous obstacles standing in his path. He comes to see that the science of the Bible is quite contrary to the science that he has learned in school. He is unable to find the sun standing still in his modern astronomy. His knowledge of biology will not permit him to conceive of saints long deceased arising from their graves. His knowledge of modern medicine causes him to look with disdain on the belief that epilepsy, deafness, blindness and insanity result from the visitation of demons.

Yet he finds each of these unscientific views in the Bible. Here is the practical difficulty that has confused the minds of many educated people in using the sacred Book. Some have tried to solve this problem by seeing the old Book, "as an inferior record produced by an inferior race." Others have attempted to solve this problem by avoiding many areas of the Scripture altogether. Still others have tried to solve the problem by discarding the entire Book. But these solutions are far to evanescent for the person who wishes to think wisely about religion. He comes to see that the influence of the Bible is so embedded in the fibre of Western Culture that to remove it would mean a removal of much of our intellectual heritage.
-- Martin Luther King, from an essay "How to Use the Bible in Modern Theological Construction," 1949

Read on to find out how he solves his dilemma.

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White Christmas
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Snow in Jerusalem today.



From AP/Haaretz.

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St. Paul's Tomb Found in Rome

As someone well-traveled in biblical archaeology, I am usually skeptical about claims of great, breakthrough "discoveries." "We've found the Flood!" "We've found David's sword!" "We've found Jesus' shroud!" History is littered with such false finds, and the tourist trinkets sold on their backs.


But a friend tipped me off this morning about the recent "discovery" of St. Paul's tomb in Rome. On the down side, the evidence only dates back to the 4th century C.E., to the Byzantine era when grand prounouncements about the location of biblical events was very much in vogue. It's the time period that produced the linkage with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Mt. Nebo, and the burning bush. But on the (mild) upside, as pointed out in this helpful blog entry, is the fact that the "actual" site is located in the same spot as traditional location.

Either way, sell long on St. Paul's Church outside of Rome. Trinket sales are likely to surge.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:46 AM 0 comments  

Take Back the Bible

I used to think of Dennis Prager as a thoughtful spokesperson on religious ideas in America. But all the bile he received last week for suggesting that swearing in on the Koran was anti-American must have gone to his head. Now he's after more publicity, with a new rant that says the Culture Wars come down to believing in the "divinity" of the Five Books.

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? ("Divinity" does not necessarily mean "literalism.")

I do not ask this about "the Bible" as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But "Bible-believing" Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

The piece ends: "This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about."

But liberals do not universally believe the Bible should be "dethroned." That task was already handled by the Founders. In fact, as I have tried to say as widely and as loudly as possible, the Bible is not filled with talking points of the Religious Right. Liberals can, should, and increasingly are using it to support their causes as well.

Take Back the Bible. Now.

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Casus Belli?
Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Lest you think I'm making it up, the drumbeat on the Right about launching a war against Iran is steadily beating onward. Here's a story on the mega-site Instapundit suggesting the recent arrest of Iranian operatives in Iraq is either a casus belli or something to be "swept under the rug," as opposed to something we've known all along and is hardly surprising given the fact that Iran and Iraq have been rivals and at war for much of the last several decades.

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:53 PM 0 comments  

Cradle of Civilization

One question has haunted my travels in the Middle East over the last decade, and all of my recent work, particularly Where God Was Born, which took me through Israel, Iraq, and Iran, visiting biblical sites. How can the Middle East, the rightly called Cradle of Civilization, the Birthplace of the Bible, now be home to such persistent violence? I'm asked about this a lot. One answer of mine is that violence is endemic to the Bible, so the conflict was there long before the patriarchs arrived, and has been there long after they left. It's not fair to blame religion, as has become popular in recent years, when religion hardly created the problem. Abraham, for one, was violent toward his own children. Moses was even hostile, at times, in his conduct toward God. Also, chaos exists in the Bible before order, as the opening sentence of Genesis suggests. Violence is there, order is artificially imposed. By God.

I was thinking of these issues while reading an interesting exchange on the website of Haaretz, the Israeli daily, between a prominent Arab and Israeli journalist. Here's an excerpt from the Arab journalist:

One must question whether the politics of despair are responsible for the kind of violence we have been witnessing in the last few years. Is the absence of hope for Palestinians a recipe for further violence against Israel and among Palestinians themselves? This is a question that needs to be answered if we are to understand what drives these extremist and fanatical groups to wreak havoc in the Middle East and beyond.

It is naive to think that religion is responsible for the violence in the Middle East, even if it is often used as a convenient excuse for achieving political goals. Violence is the product of weak and desperate people suffering unaddressed grievances, real and imagined. The failure of states in the region to provide peaceful means for political change through a democratic process has largely contributed to the growing phenomenon. Threats to regional and global security are the product of current realities in the Middle East that must change before we can hope that the cradle of civilization can once again become a beacon of light upon nations.

But how do we change these realities, dear Akiva?

Note that the person saying that religion is not the reason for the violence is the Arab writer. The exchange is quite revealing. I recommend it.

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:14 PM 0 comments  

Ramadan Moms

Fascinating squib in the Detroit Free Press about the rising clout of Muslim voters in the midterm elections this year. The key stat:

The [get-out-the-vote] effort was so organized that Muslim taxi drivers in northern Virginia took the day off to ferry Muslims to the polls, said Imam Mahdy Bray, a speaker at the [Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America] convention. Volunteers also made phone calls to Muslims in Virginia to urge them to vote, he said.

As a result, Democrat James Webb ousted incumbent Republican George Allen by about 9,000 votes in a race in which 50,000 Muslims went to the polls -- 47,000 of them voting for Webb, Bray said.

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"Everybody reads 'Southern Living'"
Monday, December 25, 2006

I have been fortunate enough to be profiled over the years in a number of newspapers and magazines. No publication worked harder, no reporter took his assignment more seriously, and no article took longer to get done -- and get right -- than one that appears in the December issue of Southern Living, written by Gary Ford, with photos by Blake Sims. I have a rule of thumb about media, which is that you don't have to guess what the reaction will be, you'll know. A few weeks after the article appeared, my father reported from Savannah, "I can tell you, 'Everybody reads Southern Living.'"

The article is not available online, so I've scanned it and posted it here. As a bonus, you can see our girlies, Eden and Tybee, circa nine months ago.

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:23 PM 0 comments  

Egypt Joins Ahmadine-bashing

The fallout from Iran's election blowout continues across the Middle East, with Egypt now joining the chorus slapping down President Ahmadinejad. In an unusual move, the foreign minister of Egypt tartly announced that Iran should not claim to be a nuclear power until it actually is a nuclear power. Key graf, from the AP:

Reacting to the United Nations Security Council resolution that imposed limited sanctions on Iran for its refusal to cease uranium enrichment, President Ahmadinejad told a gathering in Tehran on Sunday that, whether the world liked it or not, "Iran is a nuclear country."

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit disputed this on Monday, saying in a statement that "the possession by some countries of peaceful nuclear technology, or some of stages of the nuclear cycle, or carrying out some peaceful nuclear activities, does not mean by any means that it can call itself a nuclear state.""Nuclear states are only those that have military nuclear capabilities," Aboul Gheit added.

Wait, don't escalate.

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:35 PM 0 comments  

People of the Book

George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the recent controversy surrounding Congressman Virgil Goode's assertion that if tight immigration policies were not adopted, America would be overrun with Muslims. Graham's answer was a beauty:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me turn to a domestic issue, Senator Graham. A Republican congressman from Virginia this week, Virgil Goode of Virginia, raised a lot of controversy with a letter he wrote in response to the idea that the newly elected Democrat from Minnesota, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, was going to take the oath, the ceremonial oath, on the Koran. He wrote to his constituents saying -- "If American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

Now, Democrats have risen up and said that Republicans ought to denounce Congressman Goode. Do you find anything wrong with what he said, and will you denounce him?

GRAHAM: I don't think that's the appropriate line for a congressman to take when it comes time for another congressman to take the oath. Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? In our legal system, people can take the oath in a variety of ways. Religious diversity is a strength, not a weakness in this country. We need immigration reform, but not for the reasons that Mr. Goode cited. What would happen in this country if a Christian were elected in Lebanon and he had to swear allegiance to the Koran when it came time for them to take office? There would be an outcry in this country.

So I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I'm glad he's swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith. And what I would like America to do in 2007 is understand that the war on terror is about intolerance, that Syria is a dictatorship that has no interest in seeing a representative democracy in Iraq, that Iran, the president of Iran hosted a conference denying the Holocaust in December 2006, has avowed to destroy the state of Israel. We don't need to be talking to these people. We need to be standing up to their agendas and bringing them in line with the world, a world of tolerance. And Iran and Syria are not tolerant states, and the statements by Virgil Goode do not represent the best of who we are as a nation.

via TPM.

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:08 PM 0 comments  

A Hole in the Center of the World

I have believed for some time that many of the problems in the Middle East come from the weakness of many of the political leaders, and in times of weakness, leaders inflate the size of their enemies to buoy their strength at home. This applies to President Bush, to Prime Minister Olmert, to President Ahmadinejad, and to Hamas. News this week only reinforces my view. As predicted on this blog, elections in Iran last week highlighted the weakness of the president and how his outlandish rhetoric has strengthened the moribund reform movement of a few years ago. Despite this, the prime minister of Israel, weakened over his mishandling of the war in Lebanon last summer, has stepped up his rhetoric. This op-ed in Haaretz gets the situation about right. Among the four reasons Olmert is escalating his rhetoric about Iran:

3. To solve political problems. There is nothing like an external threat to calm the internal arena, and there is nobody like Olmert, an experienced politician, to use it. Expanding the coalition? Appoint hawk Avigdor Lieberman as minister of strategic threats. Paralyzing the opposition? Allow Benjamin Netanyahu to curse Ahmadinejad and call for his trial in The Hague - then he won't attack the government. Commissions of inquiry? Who has time to discuss the failures of Lebanon when the Iranian mushroom cloud threatens?

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:07 PM 0 comments  

Mary in Bethlehem Today?
Saturday, December 23, 2006

As I was saying. Here's the headline from today's Independent: 'What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?'

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The Typos of God
Friday, December 22, 2006

A May 2006 Gallup poll found that 28 percent of Americans believe the Bible represents the actual word of God, down from 40 percent in 1980. Such faith, as Ben Schott pointed out recently in the NYT (not online), represents additional pressure on typesetters. Some notable typos:

Camels Bible (1823) -- "And Rebekah arose, and her camels [damsels]."

Child Killing Bible (1795) -- "Let the children first be killed [filled]."

Wicked Bible (1631) -- ommitted "not" from the 7th Commandment making adultery permitted.

Sin Bible (1716) -- John 5:14 transposed an 'n' and 'o' so readers exhorted to "Go and sin on more."

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Posted by B Feiler at 5:19 PM 0 comments  

Any Dream Will Do

It's probably the best written story in the Bible, though not the best written show in Broadway history. Now, Andrew Lloyd Weber has announced a new reality show, "Any Dream Will do," on the BBC, designed to cast the next Joseph to star in a London revival of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." [At right the original Broadway poster.]

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Me on "Here and Now"
Thursday, December 21, 2006

I've gotten a number of emails from friends in New England who heard an interview I did with the NPR show "Here and Now," with the great Robin Young. They've posted the interview on their website and you can hear now at your computer. Thanks, WBUR.

Update: And to the reader who wanted to hear me on podcasts, "Here and Now" provides that service, too!

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Marley and You

The real Top Tens of 2006.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:02 PM 0 comments  

And Mel Gibson for Prime Minister

I spent a number of Christmases in Israel. The day is dissonant on a number of levels. For starters, it's not a holiday and business goes on as usual. Most Israelis, in fact, have no idea of the significance of December 25th. I'm always surprised how little they know about Christianity. Jews who grew up in America often take it for granted that everyone in the world knows about Christianity because it's so deeply ingrained in the calendar of the United States. But not so.

Bethlehem on Christmas Eve can be a special place. Different denominations have different services, in the church on Nativity Square, in the nearby caves, and elsewhere. For a number of years, the main square had a celebratory feel as a sort of Palestinian Independence Day, as December 25 is the day Israelis handed over day-to-day control of the city in the late 1990's.



But one feature of Bethlehem around this time of year is that it's swarming with American journalists who are asked by their imagination-free editors at home to write a story about the "town of Jesus' birth" for publication of Christmas day. Fair enough.

I was reminded of that trend this week with the news out of Poland that a few lawmakers have proposed making Jesus king of Poland. So silly that even the Catholic Church laughed at it. But it will have one sweeping impact, I predict: Journalists in Jerusalem will be making fewer treks to Bethlehem as a certain story out of Poland will be taking the place of the standard "Is-there- room-at-an-inn?" story out of Bethlehem this year.

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Posted by B Feiler at 3:05 PM 0 comments  

Pass the crumpets, Mohammad

Looking for more evidence of the rise of Muslim immigrants into Europe? Mohammed (and its alternative spelling Mohammad) have officially cracked the Top Ten of baby names in England, beating out George and Joseph. The British government released the statistics today, showing that 4,255 children were named after the prophet this year, beating out the number of Georges (3,386) or Josephs (3,755). The top three names were the biblically influenced Jack, Thomas, and Joshua.

Update: Mohammad does not make even the Top 100 of baby names in the U.S. And for the record, Jesus comes in at an anemic 73, behind three of the gospels, Matthew, John, and Luke.

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Posted by B Feiler at 11:30 AM 0 comments  

Carter's Real Motive?
Sunday, December 10, 2006

Jeffrey Goldberg finally changes the conversation about the Carter book, if not the tone. His scathing attack on Palestine suggests Carter's real motive is to distance American evangelicals from supporting Israel. Key graf:

Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities -- the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier."

There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis -- in their deviousness -- somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry.

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Posted by B Feiler at 2:17 PM 0 comments  

Ahmadinejad = Bush?

A radical, right-wing president abuses a weak mandate at home to venture too far afield in spreading his pugnacious international policies abroad and loses support of his own people in critical off-year elections. Not just Bush. Ahmadinejad, too! A fascinating report explains how the embattled Iranian leader is rapidly losing support at home -- first among the voters, second among the mullahs. Here's the key graf:

Ahmadinejad had hoped to win a majority of the local government authorities for two reasons. First, he counted on a low turnout that always favors the more radical Khomeinist candidates. Four years ago, Ahmadinejad won control of the Tehran Municipal Council, the largest local government in Iran, and became mayor of the capital, in an election that attracted only 15 percent of the qualified voters.

The second reason that Ahmadinejad had in mind was the possibility of forging a broad alliance of all radical revolutionary factions while the more conservative groups led by Rafsanjani and former Majlis Speaker Ayatollah Mahdi Karrubi appeared unable to unite.

With just days before polling, however, both of Ahmadinejad's calculations appear in doubt. The conservative and moderate groups have abandoned an earlier strategy to boycott the election and presented lists of candidates in more than half of the constituencies. The opposition groups acting outside the regime have also toned down their calls for boycott. Thus, the turnout may be higher than Ahmadinejad had hoped. A higher turnout could mean more middle class voters going to the polls to counterbalance the peasants and the urban poor who constitute the president's electoral base.

What to make of this news: "A setback for Ahmadinejad in the two elections next week may not necessarily signal a desire on the part of the ruling elite to step back from the brink of an open conflict with the US."

For us, the bottom line is clear: TALK TO IRAN. Isolate Achmadenijad. Step back from the brink. Long term trends in Iran remain in our favor.

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Posted by B Feiler at 10:20 AM 0 comments  

Me on Bob Edwards Show, Tuesday 12/12


I've just been told that The Bob Edwards show will air an interview with me, probably up to 30 minutes long, on Tuesday, December 12th at 8 am on XM Satellite Radio Channel 133. The show reairs on a frequent basis. The schedule is here.

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Posted by B Feiler at 10:10 AM 0 comments  

Kosher-gate
Friday, December 8, 2006

The Religious Right feels its beliefs have been ignored and demeaned by a major company and threatens a boycott unless its concerns are met. Sound familiar? In this case, the parties are the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel and the offending party is El Al, Israel's main airline. Haaretz has the details, especially a new wrinkle in which a mechanical failure on a takeoff from Ben Gurion airport was blamed on the wrath of God who was angry that El Al had desecrated the Sabbath.

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:33 PM 0 comments  

Carter Accused of Plagiarizing Maps

Yet another attack on Jimmy Carter's book, this time from former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, who accuses Carter of plagiarizing maps Ross created for his own book.

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Posted by B Feiler at 2:25 PM 0 comments  

More on Carter

A reader writes in response to my post on Jimmy Carter:

I agree that Carter’s biggest problem is his use of the word Apartheid. Among other things, it’s allowed him to be attacked from the left for diminishing the scope of what was Apartheid. But, while I haven’t read the book either I have followed the controversy and it seems he’s really riding the Israelis way too hard and overlooking the degree to which the Palestinians have contributed significantly to the current impass. Your comments that reaction has been “over the top” strike me as off target. For someone as prominent in int’l circles as Carter, and who is perceived to have standing in the Middle East, to have come down in such a one sided way is significant and warrants significant reaction. Among other things, the Carter Center has been active in trying to bring both sides to the table and I wouldn’t be surprised if they essentially get kicked out of the process now by the Israelis. That alone would be significant.
I think the point about the book affecting the Carter Center is interesting, and is an angle I hadn't thought of, though I do wonder exactly what the Carter Center has been doing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of late. And that gets to my larger point, which came up in the original brunch: I realize that Carter is a big name in the Middle East, and played a monumental role in Camp David. As Shimon Peres said on Charlie Rose the other night: No Jimmy Carter, no Camp David.

But is his book really going to play that big of a role in the Middle East peace process today? American Jews are acting like Carter is the only person saying these things. For starters, his position mirrors the position held by many on the Israeli left. Next, it mirrors the position held by most of Europe. Finally, and this may be even more important, the much bigger news coming out of the U.S. this week is the message of the Iraq-Study Group: Any kind of peace in the Middle East, including Iraq, depends on making progress between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In other words, ignoring the misdeeds of the Israelis by blaming stalled developments on the lack of Palestinian leadership is no longer going to work.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:51 AM 0 comments  

New Battles of Gettysburg
Thursday, December 7, 2006

It turns out Gettysburg is facing two other battles these days. The first is over a proposal to build a casino nearby that could bring the state up to $300 million annualy. Preservationists are crying foul and the regular NIMBY folks are claiming that the battlefield would be at risk. Here's a summary. A decision is expected later this month.

The other skirmish is over the old cyclorama building that is scheduled to be torn down when the Visitors' Center moves into new digs up the road in 2008. The current center and cyclorama building are on Cemetery Hill, centerpiece of the battle. In an odd alliance, historic preservationists are saying that the structure, built in 1958, is more historically valuable than the land on which it sits. Eh? They filed suit this week in Federal Court. Their case seems pretty lame.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:23 PM 0 comments  

Hallowed Ground




More on Gettysburg later, but I thought I would post a few images from dusk on a wintry afternoon. The first image is from the center (aka "the copse") of the Union line, where the North repelled Pickett's Charge. The second is a view of Little Round Top, one of the decisive battles of the war, first as it was this week, then as it was in July 1863.



This last image is of Father William Corby, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross who is best known for giving a general absolution to around 300 Northern troops on the second day of the battle and who later went on to serve twice as President of Notre Dame.

[Click on thumbnails to enlarge. The images on the left were taken by me; the images on the right are public domain images from the era.]

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Posted by B Feiler at 11:43 AM 0 comments  

"Apartheid" Separating Jews From Carter



A genial brunch on Sunday morning with staff and donors at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, where I was giving a speech, erupted in anger when the topic turned to Jimmy Carter's new book,