The NYT announced tonight that a young Arab reporter on its staff was killed, and likely murdered. This would be the second-such murder on its staff since the war began. As someone who traveled in Iraq a few years ago with the most extraordinary help from local Iraqi journalists, this story made me sick to my stomach. The paper is running testimonials on its site.
Khalid W. Hassan, 23, an interpreter and reporter in the Baghdad bureau of The New York Times, was shot and killed today, the bureau chief, John F. Burns, reported. He was the second Iraqi employee of the Times to be killed during the current conflict.
Mr. Hassan was shot in the Saidiya district of south central Baghdad while driving to work under circumstances that remain unclear, Mr. Burns said. He had called the bureau earlier and said his normal route to the office had been blocked by a security checkpoint.
“I’m trying to find another way,” he told the bureau staff.
About a half an hour later he called his mother, with whom he lived, telling her, “I’ve been shot.”
His family later called the bureau to report that he had been killed.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, issued this statement: “Khalid was part of a large, sometimes unsung, community of Iraqi news-gatherers, translators and support staff, who take enormous risks every day to help us comprehend their country’s struggle and torment.
“Without them, Americans’ understanding of what is happening on the ground in Iraq would be much, much poorer. To The Times, Khalid was family, and his death is heartbreaking.”
Mr. Hassan was one of the longest-serving local members of the bureau, having joined in the fall of 2003. He was of Palestinian descent; his family had fled to Iraq after the conflict with Israel in 1948. He lived with his mother and four sisters, all under the age of 18.
Over 100 journalists, most of them Iraqis, have been killed since the 2003 invasion, the Committee to Protect Journalists has reported. The total prior to Mr. Hassan’s death was 109, including 87 Iraqi citizens and two Americans, according to the group’s Web site.
Reads to me like more propagandistic hype. The battle over the Temple Mount has been going on for decades, with Right Wing Jews as guilty as Right Wing Muslims. How about a little perspective! I have an entire chapter about this in WHERE GOD WAS BORN, but here's the latest chapter designed to rile naive Jews around the world.
Hamas's attempts to take over control of the Temple Mount as well as spread its ideology and recruit new members in Jerusalem have been foiled by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), a senior security official announced Monday.
According to officials, Hamas has invested millions of shekels in recent years in Jerusalem charities and religious institutions, as well as in construction on the Temple Mount, in an effort to recruit Israeli Arab residents of Jerusalem into its ranks, thus bolstering its presence in the capital.
The official said that Hamas has recently enlarged a library and several prayer halls in Solomon's Stables and also built a public bathroom facility.
"Their goal is to gain full control over the Temple Mount," a high-ranking security officer said Monday, adding that Hamas also tried to infiltrate members into the Temple Mount as maintenance staff, in addition to its religious leaders who preach, give tours, and teach Koran classes there.
The official said Hamas had taken advantage of the Jordanian Wakf, which is responsible for the holy site. The Wakf has been suffering from financial constraints since 2000, when the Temple Mount mosques were closed to visitors.
The Israeli government has dropped rape charges against President Moshe Katsav in exchange for his agreement to step down and to plead guilty to lesser charges, the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, announced Thursday.
Mr. Katsav, 61, will receive a suspended sentence and will pay a total of $11,695 in compensation to two of the women who accused him, Mr. Mazuz said. One of them had worked for Mr. Katsav when he was tourism minister in the late 1990s; the other worked in his office in 2003 and 2004. Mr. Katsav will plead guilty to committing indecent acts without consent, sexual harassment of the two women and harassing a witness.
He is expected to resign on Friday. His seven-year term as president, a largely ceremonial post, was to end in July. Shimon Peres is expected to take office as president on July 15.
First the CIA releases all its dirty laundry. Now the dirt is flying on either side of the Sinai.
An Egyptian billionaire financier who feared for his life after being accused of being a Mossad spy was found dead outside his Mayfair flat yesterday in suspicious circumstances.
Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the late President Gamel Abdel Nasser, was found beneath his fourth-floor flat in Carlton House Terrace.
Police were treating his death as suspicious. Friends of Mr Marwan, a former shareholder in Chelsea Football Club, said that he had feared assassination after being named three years ago as an agent during the Yom Kippur war.
Rumours of his death circulated in London’s Arab community last night. Some believe that he may have taken his life after a serious illness was diagnosed.
Mr Marwan’s death will send shockwaves across the Middle East and among some of Britain’s wealthiest people. His associates included Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer, Ken Bates, the football club chairman, the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the late Tiny Rowland.
If found to be murder, his death will carry echoes of last year’s assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent.
More than 200 Jewish families of Afghan descent live in the New York City borough of Queens -- the largest group of Afghan Jews outside of Israel. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, there is officially only one Jew left, Zebolan Simanto, a 45-year old caretaker of a synagogue in Kabul.
The focal point for Afghan Jews in New York is the congregation Anshei Shalom, which is also a spiritual home to Jews from Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
Binyamin Pinchasi, a jeweler by trade, was born and raised in Israel. He has never been to Afghanistan, but both of his parents grew up in Kabul. They still have fond memories of growing up in the Afghan capital more than 50 years ago.
"We never had persecution in Afghanistan. And the government was very helpful to us."
Pinchasi, who appears to be in his early 30s and speaks a little Dari -- which along with Pashto is one of Afghanistan's two main languages -- says he feels a spiritual connection to the country, though only a faint one.
"Some connection yes, a little bit," he said. "I think if we go to visit there, we're going to feel some more."
Like most congregants at Anshei Shalom, Pinchasi helps support Simanto, the last Jew in Kabul. This year -- like every year -- they sent Simanto a package for Passover on April 1 that was nearly 27 kilograms of grape juice, matzo and oil -- all kosher -- that cost $650 to ship to Kabul.
Ignoring them didn't work. That leaves three choices: Keep ignoring them and trying to starve them from funds; invade again; talk to them. The first option will not work because the cry of humanitarian abuse will rise up, as it already has. The second will not work because, well, it didn't work for two decades. The third choice is the only viable option. Tricky, and maybe not with big, glitzy White House visits, but it's the only realistic way forward. Jimmy Carter is right on this one, if not for the reasons he states. Here's Dennis Ross.
Well, it is a fundamental challenge for Israel, because Israel is now going to face a situation where, on the one hand, it sees a potential Palestinian partner in the West Bank that it would like to deal with, and it sees a clear Palestinian adversary that it does not want to deal with, and it doesn't know what the future identity of the Palestinians is going to be because there's an ongoing struggle.
So it has to make a decision of how it's going to deal with each of them. And yet, at the same time, when it takes a look at Gaza, it certainly doesn't want rockets coming out of Gaza reaching more and more of Israel. It doesn't want to have to go into Gaza, because there's no easy or clear military answer if it does.
So even if it prefers to deal with AbuMazen, it also has to face the reality that there could be a value from Israel's standpoint to reach some kind of modusvivendi with Hamas within Gaza. Certainly it has leverage, because it controls the access of electricity and water into Gaza. It has the military option that it really doesn't want to exercise.
Hamas, for its own part, has to be in a position where it now has to govern. It can't blame it on anybody else. If, in fact, they want to behave irresponsibly, they're going to find it's very difficult to get help from the outside. If they want the Israelis to make life easier for them, they're going to have to find a way to respond to them.
And Dan Levy:
It, of course, is not realistic. And in the very, very early days, we already see the need to avoid a humanitarian crisis. And I think so the heads will prevail, and at the working levels there will be arrangements made in Gaza between Israel and the new Hamas reality there.
In a way, the fundamental paradigm hasn't shifted. And we heard this today from the Israeli prime minister. It's still about a two-state solution. And it was encouraging to hear that, one, we're still talking about a two-state solution, not three states, not no states with two governments.
The question that Prime Minister Olmert will face, as Dennis suggested, is, what do you do with the Hamas reality? Now, President Bush today seemed to be suggesting you just have to push back against that, it's an ideological struggle.
But I think Olmert may want to take a leaf out of President Bush's book in Iraq, at least in the following respect: America in Iraq is talking to anyone who might be an ally in pushing back against al-Qaida. And I think Hamas may play a similar role to some of the Sunni forces that America is now dealing with in Iraq, and I hope that Olmert and the people around Olmert begin to consider that option.
Don't look now, but the smart money seems to be agreeing with Jimmy Carter. Dennis Ross and a former Israeli diplomat said as much last night on The News Hour.
The United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas, or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict between the rival movements, former US President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.
Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was addressing a conference of Irish human rights officials, said the Bush administration's refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was "criminal."
Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas fighters routed Fatah in their violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week. The split prompted Abbas to dissolve the power-sharing government with his rivals in Hamas and set up a Fatah-led administration to govern the West Bank.
Carter said the American-Israeli-European consensus to reopen direct aid to the new government in the West Bank, but to deny the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, represented an "effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples."
Except when nobody cares. Prime Minister Dershowitz again dredges up his old non-debate with Jimmy Carter as if anybody cares or feels this matter hasn't been discussed in public enough.
When former President Jimmy Carter spoke at Brandeis University in January, he complained that “this is the first time I’ve ever been called a liar…”. Well, he’d better get used to it, because I can now prove that he is a liar.
Last week, in a speech at George Washington University, he categorically denied that he had received any invitation to debate me about his book. He said that he had—these are his quoted words—“never received any invitation to debate, contrary to what a Harvard professor has said.”[1] Well, one of us is lying, and it’s not me. My best witness is none other than Jimmy Carter himself.
The Lede on how Israel is trying to attract young men: Forget the bombs, we've got bikinis!
During the conflict with Lebanon last year, Israeli tourism industry didn’t disappear; it just went south, away from the fighting. Now, with a new set of life-or-death concerns emerging, the nation’s tourism industry again soldiers on.
This time, with bikini babes. Hold on - It’s actually perfectly logical:
Problem: “Israel’s image among men aged 18-38 is lacking,” an Israeli official noticed, according to Israeli Insider.
Soon, a deal was sealed between the rulers of the Holy Land and the “girls, sex, sports” glossy. Maxim pledged to publish a piece about visiting Israel, and its photographers would shoot some of the local models for a spread in the July issue.
(Israeli Insider said two lobby groups — American-Israel Friendship League and Israel21c — played a crucial role by offering to pay for what must be their first bikini model photo shoot.)
Complaints flowed from Israel’s religious right as soon as the deal emerged, and the nation’s tourism minister wants no part of it.
But two female lawmakers in Israel’s parliament didn’t make a huge splash until today’s papers, the morning of a Maxim/Israeli consulate soiree in Manhattan. Neither was moved by the party’s patriotic theme, “Women of the Israeli Defence Forces.”
One of the models disagreed, saying her pose was "an act of Zionism."
From Ethan Bonner's thoughtful review of Tom Segev's book on the Six Day War. I loved his book One Palestine, Complete.
Tom Segev, an Israeli columnist and historian, sums up the meaning for Israel of the 1967 war with two jokes. The first, heard in the months before the war, when Israelis feared a second Holocaust at the hands of their Arab neighbors, is of a sign hanging near the boarding gate at the national airport, asking the last one out of the country to turn off the lights. The second, told after the six days in which Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and quadrupled the territory under its control, involves two officers talking about how to spend their day. “ ‘Let’s conquer Cairo,’ one proposes. The other replies, ‘But what will we do after lunch?’ ”
The Israelis quickly named the June 1967 event the Six-Day War to echo biblical creation. Like many historical watersheds, its origins and consequences have been intensely analyzed and debated, especially in recent weeks as its 40th anniversary was marked. Mr. Segev illuminates his two jokes with more than 600 pages of social history. His argument, in the end, is this: Anxiety, much of it Holocaust related, was so overpowering that Israel went to war against saber-rattling Egypt and Syria when diplomacy might have sufficed, and the rout of its neighbors caused such irrational exultation in Israel that it foolishly became an occupier, a role that continues to drag it and the region down.
The NYT provides a helpful primer on the differences between Gaza and the West Bank and why the dispute is likely limited to Gaza. I rarely use the phrase "must read," but this article is superb.
A look at the history of these territories, how they developed differently over time, and what their populations still share, shows why they are at odds now but also why it might be too early to write off the possibility that this breach can be bridged.
They have always had distinct traits, culturally and geographically — the West Bank supporting a landlocked urban and agricultural society, Gaza facing the sea.
Those differences increased after the creation of Israel in 1948, when Gaza fell under the administration of Egypt and the West Bank was annexed by Jordan.
Egypt treated Gaza as a Palestinian enclave and encouraged a strong sense of Palestinian identity. Many Gazans who studied in Egypt during those years were influenced, in turn, by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to establish Islamic theocracies across the Arab world.
Back in Gaza, some of those men founded Hamas in 1987.
Jordan, on the other hand, suppressed Palestinian nationalism in favor of Jordanian identity and Palestinians in the West Bank were more influenced by the secular societies of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where many went to study. Others traveled even further abroad, bringing back a liberal view of the world.
By the time the two territories came under Israeli occupation together after the 1967 war, they were very different places. Their separate legal and educational systems weren’t consolidated until after the Palestinian Authority was established in the mid-1990s.
And then this:
Gaza, which has suffered the most economically in the past few years, has become increasingly conservative and increasingly religious, largely due to the growing influence of Hamas.
Women in Gaza are more likely to be wear full Islamic dress and much less likely to work outside the home than their counterparts in the West Bank. Even in Gaza’s large garment factories, the vast majority of the workers sitting behind the sewing machines are men.
Gaza’s cultural life tends to center on the local mosque, and its small anemic economy consists almost entirely of small-scale businesses and jobs provided by the Palestinian Authority.
The West Bank, meanwhile, has a far richer economic life that includes industry, farming and a service sector. Its cities even have a few cinemas, art exhibitions, decent restaurants and a few night clubs.
The Palestinians, of course. But hardly theirs alone. As Nahum Barnea, Israel's finest journalist, put it today in Yediot Achronoth, "The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding for the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured to hold democratic elections and brought Hamas to power with their own hands…. Since the elections, Israel, like the US, declared over and over that "Abu Mazen must be strengthened," but in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abu Mazen into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street."
The failures to which Barnea refers didn't start with the Palestinian elections either, not by a long shot. Back when Hamas was just a gleam in Sheik Ahmad Yassin’s blind eye, Israeli right-ringers were implementing a strategy to eliminate the authority of Palestinian moderates by building up religious extremists. These Israelis (some very high in Likud governments) believed that only supplanting Arafat’s Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.
Jerusalem Post Not Endorsing Guiliani Thursday, June 14, 2007
The other day, as a reader forced to register at the Jerusalem Post to read content, I got one of the umpteen ads that we are obliged to receive. I've been thinking of giving up the Post as I tend to read Haaretz anyway. Then I got an advertisement for Rudy Guiliani that I assumed amounted to a defacto endorsement. Then this arrives today:
The bottom of this email advertisement stated that it was "Paid for by the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee, Inc." However, correct practice is to mark such emails as advertising in the "Subject" box as well. Because of an internal error, this practice was not followed. We have taken steps to insure that it will be in future.
We would like to stress again that the content of this advertisement has no connection to The Jerusalem Post newspaper or its online content, and does not reflect the editorial views of The Jerusalem Post in any way.
I don't exactly here them apologizing for selling our email addresses. Memo to self: Dump the Post!
Shimon Peres Elected President of Israel Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Interesting move into a largely ceremonial role. Question: Will Peres try to make the traditionally empty role more politically active? My guess is yes.
Despite the octogenarian Peres' record as a Nobel laureate, former prime minister, protege of David Ben-Gurion and founder of Israel's nuclear program, much of his political legacy was still riding on the vote, following a string of electoral defeats going back decades.
The Peres victory followed an especially painful defeat seven years ago at the hands of then-Likud MK Moshe Katsav. On the eve of the vote, Peres was said to have been assured by no less than 66 lawmakers that they would vote for him. But when the votes were counted in a secret ballot, 63 MKs had voted for Katsav and only 57 for Peres.
Katsav, who now faces the possibility of rape and sexual assault charges, has suspended himself from presidential duties.
Rivlin, a former speaker of the Knesset who enjoys broad popularity in the house, was until recently seen as the clear favorite in the race. But a late surge by Peres, courting the endorsement of ultra-Orthodox spiritual leaders and other key figures, closed the gap.
Lots of commentary has spewed forth about the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. Here's a sample of the pro-Israel position from someone who was there.
Like anyone who believes in the justice of Israel's existence, I was deeply relieved by its victory on June 10. I had heard the bloodthirsty Arab threats of a new Holocaust. I had seen the "Kill the Jews" posters in Gaza schools. I had seen the bunkers and mass graves that Israel had been forced to dig in expectation of invasion, if not defeat.
Yet, as we mark its 40th anniversary, it's become fashionable in some circles to rewrite the history of the Six-Day War. Radicals, so-called "humanitarians" and others who love to hate Israel now claim that what was essentially a war for survival was in fact just an excuse for Zionist imperialism. Even serious journals like Britain's The Economist say that while the war may have been necessary, it has ultimately proven "a calamity for the Jewish state."
How ridiculous! Despite the seemingly insoluble problems that have arisen over the past four decades - not the least of them, Israel's continuing rule over occupied territories and a million-plus hostile Palestinians - the war was not only necessary, it was one of Israel's finest hours.
An interesting debate has broken out in Germany over whether Israel should encourage German Jews to migrate or leave them be to replant the Jewish community depleted because of the Holocaust. I'm with the Germans here. The Diaspora is good for Judaism and good for Israel.
The leaders of Germany's Jewish community have warned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert they would request the German government's help in preventing Israel from encouraging Jews settled in Germany to immigrate to Israel.
Stephan J. Kramer, who heads the Central Council of Jews in Germany, sent the warning following Israel's decision last week to extend the jurisdiction of Nativ , the government body in charge of promoting immigration from the Former Soviet Union to Israel. Nativ and the Jewish Agency will cooperate in running ulpans (Hebrew courses) and other educational programs in Germany, which is home to some 200,000 Russian-speaking Jews who moved there from the Former Soviet Union in recent years.
Picked up at a talk by the Dean of Yale College on Saturday at my 20th Reunion. The top four languages at Yale: Spanish, French, Chinese, and Arabic. Italian was formerly fourth on the list. Otherwise, the only thing I learned that Chinese and Arabic are both new on the list.
The Garden of Eden Returns Wednesday, May 23, 2007
In WHERE GOD WAS BORN I tell the story of a pioneering nature group run by the wonderful and brave Azzam Alwash that was attempting to reflood the Tigris-Euphrates marshes in southern Iraq that Saddam Hussein had drained. Azzam sent this link today to a hopeful update on his progress.
I thought I'd never need to read another book on the Six Day War after Michael Oren's Six Days of War. Was I wrong?
In a new book that "totally contradicts everything that has been accepted to this day" about the Six Day War, two Israeli authors claim that the conflict was deliberately engineered by the Soviet Union to create the conditions in which Israel's nuclear program could be destroyed.
Having received information about Israel's progress towards nuclear arms, the Soviets aimed to draw Israel into a confrontation in which their counterstrike would include a joint Egyptian-Soviet bombing of the reactor at Dimona. They had also geared up for a naval landing on Israel's beaches.
"The conventional view is that the Soviet Union triggered the conflict via disinformation on Israeli troop movements, but that it didn't intend for a full-scale war to break out and that it then did its best to defuse the war in cooperation with the United States," Gideon Remez, who co-wrote Foxbats over Dimona, told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday. Essentially, the Soviet Union at the time was regarded as having evolved "a cautious and responsible foreign policy," the book elaborates. "But we propose a completely new outlook on all this," said Remez.
Can Lionel Ritchie Bring Peace to the Middle East? Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Mrs. Feiler Faster was in Jordan this weekend attending a World Economic Forum (you know, the Davos folks) forum at the Dead Sea. Actually, she was the first woman ever asked to co-chair one of their events in the Middle East. One night, all the assembled business executives, politicians, and media elite attended a dinner in a massive tent that belonged to King Abdullah. The entertainment was Lionel Ritchie. He sang one song, apparently, and people were polite enough, at which point he announced, "I thought you were a good crowd. Why don't you all move forward to the stage."
Mrs. Feiler Faster: "I thought no way any of these staid business people would do what he was asking. But sure enough, everyone in the tent started moving toward the front of the stage, sticking their hands in the air, and swaying back and forth to the music like it was a high-school prom. Everybody knew every word to every song! I couldn't believe it!"
I mentioned this story to some friends over the weekend, and one of them told me about an article that Andrew Corsello wrote in GQ a few months back about how HUGE Lionel Ritchie is in the Middle East. Andrew and I share an agent, so I'm trying to track down the article. In the meantime, here's an interview he did about his piece on NPR. Say you, say me.
I drank in many of Bernard Lewis's books on Islam a few years ago; I bet I read at least four. They are nearly universally calm, well-reasoned, and old-fashioned in an avuncular way. I certainly recommend them. But I have also been disheartened in recent years to read about his role of adviser to Dick Cheney and others. In these sessions, apparently, he takes the approach that Islam only responds to pressure, violence, and strength.
Could the two sides of his persona possibly read true. This piece, I fear, is an example in the wrong direction.
We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility.
From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.
Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.
More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting.
How's the plan of democracy in the Middle East going? The CSM reviews.
Critics of Bush say Iraq is a sinkhole of despair and the campaign for democracy in the Arab world is a hopeless quest. There is something in the Arab psyche, they suggest, that renders democracy unattainable.
Supporters of the president argue that while Iraq is not moving politically with the dispatch that impatient Americans expect, it has held elections in which millions of Iraqis voted despite threats of reprisal by terrorists, it has developed a constitution, and it has formed a government.
The truth probably lies somewhere between these two extremes.
Installation of democracy of the Jeffersonian character is unlikely. Where reform is budding, the outcome may be freer structures of representational government, but not necessarily patterned upon those of the United States or the West. They are more likely to incorporate local customs and traditions. Islamic countries would probably develop governmental systems that pay heed to religious beliefs. Afghanistan and Iraq are examples.
While outsiders can encourage and support, indigenous peoples must take the initiative in the movement toward freedom. In his second inaugural address, Bush recognized this when he said, "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way."
The Arks Go Marching Two by Two Friday, May 18, 2007
Is it just me, or are there suddenly a glut of Noah's Arks out there. To see what I mean, click here and here. But now another one is going up on Mt. Ararat itself.
Environmental activists are building a replica of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat—where the biblical vessel is said to have landed after the great flood—in an appeal for action on global warming, Greenpeace said Wednesday.
Turkish and German volunteer carpenters are making the wooden ship on the mountain in eastern Turkey, bordering Iran. The ark will be revealed in a ceremony on May 31, a day after Greenpeace activists climb the mountain and call on world leaders to take action to tackle climate change, Greenpeace said.
"Climate change is real, it's happening now and unless world leaders take urgent, decisive and far-reaching action, the next decades will see human misery on a scale not experienced in modern times," said Greenpeace activist Hilal Atici. "Those leaders have a mandate from the people ... to massively cut greenhouse gas emissions and to do it now."
Disturbing news from a Zogby poll about how Arab opinion toward the U.S. is worsening. TIME summarizes:
--There is a hardening of negative attitudes toward the U.S. and now even a downwards slide in attitudes toward our people, culture, values and products.
--There is less confidence that there will be peace and stability in the region in the next five years, with growing concern in several countries about the regional consequences of an Iraqi civil war; the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and a mounting concern about Iran’s intentions and U.S.-Iranian tensions.
--There is a turning inward. Arabs are investing more in their own economies instead of in the West, and more engaged than ever before with problems closer to home.
--There is a turning away from the U.S., as Arabs are factoring the East (China, India, and Southeast Asia) more significantly in their future investment strategies.
--There is a growing public pressure on Arab governments, especially those who maintain strong ties to the U.S. to distance themselves from our policies.
Finally, the beginnings of a real coalition of the willing?
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf yesterday opened the 34th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM) at the majestic Jinnah Convention Center in the sprawling Pakistani capital and proposed the creation of a Muslim peacekeeping force to help stabilize Iraq.
“The mass killings that are taking place there have to end,” said a jaded and very tired-looking Musharraf. “All outside interference should stop immediately,” he said. “And if all the warring factions in Iraq accept, then maybe a peacekeeping force from Muslim countries grouped under the United Nations could be looked at as a possible solution,” he said. “There can be no two opinions that a political solution is a dire necessity now.”
And a fascinating and smart justification. A political solution is the only solution:
He said Pakistan and India finally realized that there was no military solution to the conflicts between them. “The relations between the two of us were never as good as they are now,” he said. “Both the countries decided to fall back and to give peace a chance. A little swallowing of egos can do wonders, can help a lot. We are building on the trust that we have created between ourselves.”
At a special cabinet meeting on Jerusalem Sunday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced plans to channel NIS 5.75 billion worth of benefits into the capital over the next five years, in an attempt to reverse the capital's demographic trends which Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski warned could lead to Hamas taking over the city without firing a shot.
"Jerusalem could, God forbid, end up not under Jewish sovereignty, but rather that of Hamas," Lupolianski said at the meeting, held at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center overlooking the Old City walls in honor of the 40th anniversary of the unification of the capital.
A recent study carried out by Hebrew University demographer Prof. Sergio Della Pergola predicted that if the situation - and Jerusalem's borders - remained unchanged, only 60% of Jerusalem's residents would be Jews by 2020, with the remaining 40% Arab, while another survey predicted that the number of Jews and Arabs living in the city would reach parity within a quarter century.
The real money has always been on demographics to change the political situation in Israel. These numbers strike me as representing slower growth than I would have imagined.
The number of Arabs living in Jerusalem grew twice as fast as the city's Jewish population over the past decade, according to a report by an Israeli research institute.
It said the Arab population would rise from 34 percent to 40 percent over the same period.
The city's population in 2007 stands at 720,000 people, a figure that includes east Jerusalem which was captured and later annexed by Israel after the 1967 war, as well as new districts built in the same area.
Over the past 40 years the Arab population has grown by 257 percent from 68,000 to its current level of 245,000, while the number of Jews living in the city has risen by 140 percent -- from 200,000 to 475,000.
The Arab birth rate for the past decade has been between three percent and four percent, more than double that of Jews. If this trend continues Arabs will make up 50 percent of the population by 2035, the report said.
Jerusalem's demographic evolution has been altered by the departure of thousands of Jewish families from the city itself to the outskirts and nearby settlements in the occupied West Bank, where living costs are cheaper.
Update: Now I see why. Later in the report the study points out that Hasidic Jews will up the birth rate among Jews in Israel."
After 2025, the Jewish majority will rebound past its current 80 percent position as natural growth in high growth Jewish sectors overtakes growth in Arab population groups."
The so-called secular and traditional Jews would drop from the current 64 percent to 56 percent of Israel's population. The secular-traditional sector would decrease from the current 80 percent to 71 percent of the Jewish community.
The report linked predicted Jewish growth to the current "baby-boomer" generation as well as steady immigration. At the same time, Arab fertility rates dropped from over nine births per woman in the 1960s to 4.4 in 2000 and 3.6 in 2006.
This is a mixed blessing for moderate Jewish lovers of Israel, as the ultra-Orthodox are not particularly Zionist, don't serve in the Army, and are a heavy financial burden on the State because of the subsidized education they receive.
More articles you won't read in the American press, which is buying hook, line, and sinker into the mindless warmongering against being propagated by the White House and others. The Guardian reports what's really happening:
A grand coalition of anti-government forces is planning a second Iranian revolution via the ballot box to deny President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad another term in office and break the grip of what they call the "militia state" on public life and personal freedom.
Encouraged by recent successes in local elections, opposition factions, democracy activists, and pro-reform clerics say they will bring together progressive parties loyal to former president Mohammad Khatami with so-called pragmatic conservatives led by Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The alliance aims to exploit the president's deepening unpopularity, borne of high unemployment, rising inflation and a looming crisis over petrol prices and possible rationing to win control of the Majlis in general elections which are due within 10 months.
Parliament last week voted to curtail Mr Ahmadinejad's term by holding presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously next year.
Though the move is likely to be vetoed by the hardline Guardian Council, it served notice of mounting disaffection in parliament.
Just a few days after Condi Rice was in the Sinai for a regional peace meeting about Iraq, a blow to peace on the peninsula:
A plane carrying foreign peacekeepers across the Sinai desert crashed Sunday near a stretch of highway where it had tried to make an emergency landing, killing eight French soldiers and a Canadian, officials said.
Capt. Mohammed Badr, a police officer in Sinai, said the plane went down 50 miles from the nearest major town, el-Nakhl.
It appeared the Canadian-made DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter tried to land on the mountain highway but crashed nearby after clipping a trick, said Normand St. Pierre, a spokesman for the Multinational Force and Observers, an independent force created by Egypt and Israel to monitor their border in the Sinai after a 1979 peace deal.
The crash wiped out more than half of the 15-member French contingent and destroyed the mission's sole fixed-wing aircraft, St. Pierre said. A ''higher than normal'' load of passengers and crew were aboard the aircraft at the time of the crash because it was on a training mission. The truck driver escaped unharmed.
"Judaism and Zionism Are Not One" Tuesday, May 1, 2007
One of the chapters in WHERE GOD WAS BORN that gets the biggest reaction is the one on the time Mrs. Feiler Faster and I spent in the Jewish Community in Iran. "Jews in Iran?" many say. Yes. The Jewish community in Iran is the largest in the Middle East outside of Israel -- 35,000 people. The CSM checks in:
Iran's Jews are buffeted by inflammatory rhetoric from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about "wiping Israel off the map" and denying the Holocaust, and a politically charged environment that often equates all Jews with Israel and routinely witnesses the burning of the "enemy" flag.
But despite what appears to be a dwindling minority under constant threat of persecution, Iranian Jews say they live in relative freedom in the Islamic Republic, remain loyal to the land of their birth, and are striving to separate politics from religion.
They caution against comparing Iran's official and visceral opposition to the creation of Israel and Zionism with the regime's acceptance of Jews and Judaism itself.
"If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not," says Ciamak Moresadegh, chairman of the Tehran Jewish Committee. "We have common problems with Iranian Muslims. If a war were to start, we would also be a target. When a missile lands, it does not ask if you are a Muslim or a Jew. It lands."
A diverting if trivial debate has broken out in the blogosphere about whether John McCain hurt or helped his campaign by singing "Bomb, Bomb Iran" a number of days ago. You know how it goes: Conventional wisdom says he hurt his candidacy, then the imperative of pundits to then challenge the CW kicks in and a number of people say it actually helps his campaign among core Conservatives. Then another minor blip emerges and the pundits and blogosphere go chasing that diversionary story for a while.
Anyway, I was indulging in a bit of reading on this the other day when I stumbled onto Eunomia, a blog by Daniel Larson, a Conservative PhD student in Byzantine studies, who offers this sentence:
The voters McCain most needs to win over right now are Fred Thompson-adoring Persophobes who believe, as the members of the audience in the video believe, that bombing Iran is the obviously right and necessary thing to do.
What jumped out at me in this sentence was the word Persophobe. I'd never heard it before, and don't know its origin, but I love it! Persophobes. Perfect for the warmongering Iran-bashers out there right now.
Looks like the Israeli-Palestinian issue trumps Iraq among the 50% of Southeast Asians who are Muslims. From Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek column this week.
The Bush administration's basic policies in Asia have been intelligent. Washington has maintained good and productive relations with China while also strengthening ties to Japan, India, Australia, Singapore and Vietnam. But the relationship is plagued by two problems. First, the administration has been obsessed with Iraq, and so everything else, including Asia, gets too little sustained and strategic attention. Second, America is still beleaguered by the total collapse of its image abroad, which makes it difficult for countries like Indonesia and Thailand to take measures that are seen as pro-American.
When I asked Prime Minister Lee how to change this dynamic, he reminded me that nearly half of Southeast Asia's population is Muslim and said, "The single most important thing that the U.S. could do to shift its image in the region would be to take a more active role on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in a balanced way. The issue is more important for Southeast Asia's Muslims than even Iraq." Singapore's strategic elite, with close ties to the United States and Israel, aren't trying to score ideological points. They don't offer the usual stinging criticism of America's Iraq policy, for example. When I asked Lee about it, his concern was simple: "If you lose standing [because of] Iraq, it's bad for us."
If a heated conversation I had over the weekend in Central Park is any indication, Barack Obama's chief problem is still his lack of experience, and his lack of specific ideas beyond his message of hope. Well, message to certain friends: He's beginning a set of three policy speeches to begin filling in the details. First up, foreign policy. How'd he do? Safe, I'd say, but at least no whoppers. I think he did a good job of weaving a few details into his larger theme of taking back leadership in the world with a message of hope to overlooked corners. But hard to see how he can bring that much hope. Are Americans in that generous a mood after Iraq. I doubt it.
For what it's worth, he didn't follow Bob Wright's advice and say that living in Indonesia, a Muslim country, makes him better prepared. As I predicted, he's staying away from that hot falafel. Here's what he said about the Middle East beyond Iraq:
Moreover, until we change our approach in Iraq, it will be increasingly difficult to refocus our efforts on the challenges in the wider region – on the conflict in the Middle East, where Hamas and Hezbollah feel emboldened and Israel’s prospects for a secure peace seem uncertain; on Iran, which has been strengthened by the war in Iraq; and on Afghanistan, where more American forces are needed to battle al Qaeda, track down Osama bin Laden, and stop that country from backsliding toward instability.
Burdened by Iraq, our lackluster diplomatic efforts leave a huge void. Our interests are best served when people and governments from Jerusalem and Amman to Damascus and Tehran understand that America will stand with our friends, work hard to build a peaceful Middle East, and refuse to cede the future of the region to those who seek perpetual conflict and instability. Such effective diplomacy cannot be done on the cheap, nor can it be warped by an ongoing occupation of Iraq. Instead, it will require patient, sustained effort, and the personal commitment of the President of the United States. That is a commitment I intend to make.
Spring 2007 was not expected to be a time of settler assertion. After the evacuation of 9,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza 20 months ago, Ehud Olmert was elected prime minister on a platform that included removing thousands more settlers from the West Bank and an end to the occupation of large swaths of that territory.
But much has changed in the past year. The militants of Hamas are in power in the Palestinian government, and Israel’s war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah last summer has left Mr. Olmert politically weak.
Those who took over the Hebron building now say with confidence that they will stay for many decades.
“We know that we must say, ‘This is my place,’ and be determined to live in it,” said Yesca Levinger, 31, who is sharing a small room in the building with her husband and three children.
Political analysts say the settlers see an opening.
“They finished licking their wounds,” said Akiva Eldar, a columnist for Haaretz. “They feel much stronger because there is a kind of consensus that the disengagement was a mistake. They paid the price for the mistake, they are the underdogs and everybody in the Israeli mainstream has to ask for their forgiveness. The government will be very careful not to touch them.”
Why Pelosi Should Go to Syria Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Richard Holbrooke strikes back at the White House and defends the Speaker's trip to Syria. From The Horse's Mouth, a liberal blog about media and politics.
Note how reporter David Gregory -- quite uncharacteristically -- employs one of the more vacuous and exhausted GOP talking points of this whole affair. And note Holbrooke's response:
GREGORY: But why is it appropriate to have Congress and have Democratic leaders pursuing a shadow foreign policy?
HOLBROOKE: David. David. They're not pursuing a shadow foreign policy. They're making trips to the region. The Republican group had gone out before her. She had Republicans on her group. Congressmen are supposed to travel to understand better how to spend the taxpayers' money, which is their responsibility.
One other favorite bit. Holbrooke offers his diagnosis of the media's coverage in stinging terms:
HOLBROOKE: I think this whole thing has been blown out of proportion by a deliberate ambush plan by the opposition, in this case the Republicans, and frankly, exploited by journalists who are just looking for a fake controversy. There is no issue here. Congressman Wolf, a major Republican, was in the region a few days earlier. Republicans were on her trip. There's no issue. None.
Why Israel Wants Pelosi in Syria Thursday, April 5, 2007
Josh Marshall moves beyond the faux brouhaha over the White House criticism of Pelosi's trip to Syria (after all, Republicans are there now, the Baker-Hamilton Commission went to Syria, including now SecDef Gates) to point out that the Israelis actually sent a message via Pelosi to the Syrian leadership.
The Israelis use of Pelosi as a go-between between them and the Syrians tells not only the specific but the larger tale. Isn't this what the US -- or whatever country has the pretense of being the great power in the region -- is supposed to do?
Here's what the message was about. As often seems to happen between these countries, the Israelis had been picking up hints that the Syrians thought the Israelis were going to attack this summer. And the Israelis worried that the Syrians would preemptively attack on the Golan Heights to get a jump on the Israelis. But the Israelis say that they're not planning anything like that. So they asked Pelosi to convey this message to Damascus -- to prevent a possible chain of misunderstandings leading to war.
This seems of a piece with February's news that the Bush administration was insisting that the Israelis not pursue exploratory talks with the Syrians about a potential peace deal.
Pelosi's trip is an embarrassment for the president because it shows an American actually involving herself in realities on the world stage rather than stuck in denial and fantasy. That may sound a bit starry-eyed. But think about it and I'll think you'll see that that's a lot of what this is about.
Update, from the AP: Three Republican congressmen who parted with President Bush by meeting with Syrian leaders said Wednesday it is important to maintain a dialogue with a country the White House says sponsors terrorism.
"I don't care what the administration says on this. You've got to do what you think is in the best interest of your country," said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. "I want us to be successful in Iraq. I want us to clamp down on Hezbollah."
Nancy Pelosi is in Syria today for talks in an attempt to sway the Administration's policy and the White House attacked her hard for talking to the enemy. Here's the NYT on the visit and the controversy:
Ms. Pelosi, the third-highest ranking elected official in the United States government behind the president and vice president, is the most senior American leader to visit the country since Syrian-American relations faltered in 2003.
The United States has been trying to isolate Syria diplomatically, accusing the country of allowing militant fighters safe passage into neighboring Iraq and of meddling in Lebanese politics. The government in Damascus denies the accusations. Ms. Pelosi, who is leading a group of Congressional representatives visiting the country, was greeted at Damascus airport this afternoon by Walid al-Moallem, the Syrian Foreign Minister, who whisked her away for a tour of old Damascus. She made no public remarks.
The group of lawmakers is expected to meet with members of the Syrian parliament and opposition leaders over dinner this evening at the American ambassadorial residence in Damascus. The United States recalled its ambassador in 2005, following allegations that the Syrian regime may have had a hand in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.
President George W. Bush criticized Ms. Pelosi’s visit today during a news conference at the White House. He said the visit sent “mixed signals” that “lead the Assad government to believe they are part of the mainstream of the international community, when in fact they are a state sponsor of terror” and supporter of anti-Israeli militants like Hamas and Hezbollah. “Sending delegations hasn’t worked,” Mr. Bush said. “It’s just simply been counterproductive.”
But as Josh Marshall quickly showed, plenty of Republican delegations have visited Syria in recent months and one is in Syria right now! In other words, it's okay for Republicans to visit Syria but not Democrats.
I knew as a general matter that the White House was just bamboozling the press with this Pelosi-in-Syria malarkey since plenty of Republicans from Congress have recently gone there too. But I didn't know the precise details. In addition to recent trips by other Congressional Republicans there's actually a GOP House delegation in Syria right now, according to ThinkProgress. And in March a senior State Department official held talks in Damascus about flow of Iraqi refugees.
Enough with the petty politics. Follow the bi-partisan Baker-Hamilton report: Talk to Syria and Iran.
I received a mass email from a friend and feminist activist yesterday tauting the fact that Israel has decided to give its highest honor to a, well, feminist activist. "It is nothing short of astonishing that a strong, declared, dedicated feminist activist has won the Israel Prize. For those unfamiliar with the prize, it's the highest honor bestowed by the State of Israel. Click here for more information about the prize." Here's an article about the recipient at Haaretz:
The Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Special Contribution to Society and the State of Israel will be awarded to Professor Alice Shalvi, a religious scholar and one of the country's leading feminists, and to Dov Lautman, former head of the Israel Manufacturers Association.
In their decision, the judges called Shalvi "revolutionary and courageously trailblazing, with intellectual integrity and long-term vision." She will be given the prize during an Independence Day ceremony.
Shalvi served as principle of the Pelech School for Girls in Jerusalem, turning it into one of the first religious experimental schools and a model for other experimental and democratic schools throughout the country. She began her feminist activity in the 1970s, battling for the rights of women whose husbands refused to grant them a divorce. She was also among the founders of the Israel Women's Network, and chaired it from its founding in 1984 until the beginning of this year. Shalvi was born in Germany in 1926 but fled to Britain shortly after the Nazi rise to power, when she and studied English literature at Cambridge. After immigrating to Israel in 1950 she received a position as a professor of English at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
This email brought a smile to my face this weekend:
I'am sure you do not remember me but I met you in Cleveland last fall....my question my seem silly to you, but I would greatly appreciate your answer. I am going to Israel this June and July and we are going to visit many of the archeological digs and I thought someone with your experience could tell me the best shoes to buy for this trip since we will be walking a lot. This has been a dream for me since I was a very young girl (I am now 70). If there is anything else I should know I would love it if you could tell me.
I am a Christian but I believe that Christ, being a Jew, did not intend to start a new religion, but man just seems to want everything tied up with rules, etc.
Thank you in advance and God Bless you for the great writing and congrats on your new family, girls are great I have 6 granddaughters...we don't do boys I guess.
I was very pleased to see that in the midst of the anniversary of the war that MSNBC devoted a few minutes to the life of David Bloom, the correspondent who was killed during the initial drive to Baghdad. A staggering one-hundred-and-fifty-three journalists have died covering this war, the most since World War Two. Though David died before it descended into chaos, his death is no less tragic. I knew David and his wife briefly; his wife is interviewed in this clip and talks about deep-vein thrombosis. (I met his kids once, but didn't realize until this interview that he had twins, now twelve.) His death made us all aware of DVT -- 300,000 Americans get this condition, his wife says in this exchange. Just the other day, while flying back from L.A., I made a point of doing leg exercises. Do yourself a favor and make this a habit during long plane rides.
What Not to Wear When Meeting a Nobel Laureate Wednesday, March 21, 2007
First of all, let me apologize for some missteps in the last few days while we were switching Feiler Faster and all of brucefeiler.com to a new server.
But just to prove that we at Feiler Faster will stop at nothing to bring you topical news and information, here's the very latest from Leo in the Holy Land. For those of you who missed the Breaking Celebrity News from last week, Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh from his shutout at the Oscars, took his latest supermodel girlfriend, Bar Refaeli, back to her home country. While visiting the tunnels along the Western Wall (easily the best single tourist thing to do in Israel that's been added in the last decade), he created something of a riot. A Paparazzi Intifada, if you will. Here's how Reuters reported the incident:
Israeli police arrested on Monday two members of actor Leonardo DiCaprio's security team after they clashed with photographers during a visit to Jerusalem by the star and his Israeli girlfriend Bar Refaeli.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said DiCaprio and supermodel Refaeli were taking a private tour of the Western Wall tunnels, next to the Western Wall which is Judaism's holiest site, in Jerusalem's walled old city.
Rosenfeld said the photographers waited outside the tunnels for the couple to emerge.
"Two of his (DiCaprio's) security guards were arrested by police after being involved in a fight that broke out," Rosenfeld said. "They are being questioned."
Covering their faces after the tour, DiCaprio and Refaeli were whisked away in a waiting white van.
As a public service (and really, Mrs. Feiler Faster, that's all that it is) I append here a few pictures of Refaeli.
But there's more! Seeking, no doubt, to counter this bad publicity, DiCaprio's team leaked this story to People. But their plan ran square into a fashion problem.
Leonardo DiCaprio's reputation as an activist has reached as far as the Middle East: On his recent trip to Israel, he was asked to help promote environmental conservation and peace in the region, PEOPLE has learned.
Israeli Vice Premier and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres requested a meeting with DiCaprio, 32, within hours of the actor's March 11 arrival in Tel Aviv with his Israeli girlfriend, model Bar Refaeli, 21, a Peres aide tells PEOPLE.
"The meeting was pleasant and interesting," says the aide. "Shimon told Leo about his Peace Valley project [a joint Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian economic development plan] and Leo spoke about [11th Hour,] his documentary on the environment."
The DiCaprio and Refaeli were dressed casually – he wore a sweater and backwards baseball cap; she a sweatshirt and jeans. Peres told local newspaper Ma'ariv on Monday: "They called my office and asked to meet me and I immediately agreed. Leonardo apologized for not dressing properly and in order to look fine turned his baseball cap."
Scott MacLeod makes some important points here at TIME.com about how strange it is to be an American living in Israel and hear Israelis loudly debating Israeli actions but not Americans.
Nicholas Kristof's NY Times Op-Ed today raises two valuable points: 1) there is too little debate in the U.S. about Israel's policies and American policy toward Israel; 2) Washington does Israel as a nation no favor by blindly supporting the policies of the Israeli government of the day.
There are many reasons for this, some legitimate, some not so much. American governments and politicians are hesitant to criticize a close strategic and political ally--in part, not to give succor to Israel's real enemies. America's elites--in politics and culture--are rightfully attentive to the suffering of the Jewish people through history and especially to the Holocaust of the not-so-distant past. The refusal of Arab and Islamic states for many decades to deal with Israel--and the indiscriminate terrorism unleashed against Israelis--strengthened the support of many Americans for Israel. There has been a perhaps instinctive, understandable tendency to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism or even sympathy with terrorism (and a desire not to be labeled as such).
But none of that gives Israel a free pass when it comes to Americans honestly debating Israel's policies or America's policies toward Israel; they would include, at the moment: Israel's willingness to negotiate with the new Palestinian unity government; attitude toward the 2002 Arab peace initiative; use of force against Palestinian civilians; illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank; undeclared nuclear weapons program. As Kristof suggests, there is far more discussion within Israel itself about all these issues than in the U.S.
His colleague Phil Zabriskie (who actually lives in Israel, not Cairo, like Scott) goes even further:
I'd add that the lack of debate in America about Israel and the particulars Scott mentions--settlements, unforeseen consequences of policy initiatives, etc--can at times make it strange to be here as an American. I say this a week after numerous top politicians and 2008 candidates went to the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) convention and made sure to say all the "right" things. Being here, and hearing all that purposeful, largely unqualified, seemingly unexamined, completely un-nuanced (if that's a word) support coming out of that meeting from American politicians--who repeatedly displayed the tendency to judge the policies of the government here (and the U.S. government backing of the same) on some highly subjective and possibly imagined scale of morality, rather than actual effectiveness, rather than if they work or not--you can start wondering if you are looking at or talking about the same place. There are unquestionably things here worth supporting and defending. And of course it's not only the Israelis who have to really work if they are interested in making things better. The Palestinians first and foremost, along with Arab countries and others obviously have a huge role to play, and have to make some real decisions. But I'm not sure how one looks at how things have been going here over recent years--as the emphasis has moved from peace to security, which are different things, the first delivering the second but the second not delivering the first--and thinks it's working, or is even slightly satisfactory.
I'm in the process of planning a trip to Libya that I hope will happen sometime this year. Getting a visa is a huge challenge. So my brother and I (he would accompany me) have been exchanging any news articles we see. He sent one from the WSJ talking about Libyan fiction. It almost sounds like a joke, like that novel Saddam wrote, but no!
Libya's decision in late 2003 to dismantle its nuclear weapons program was the first hopeful announcement to come out that country in about 30 years. Before then -- and, alas, since -- Libya has often played the international oddity, thanks to its self-appointed "guide," Moammar Gadhafi, whose ludicrous pensees and Poncherello sunglasses can make him seem, at times, more buffoon than danger. Occasionally his genuine danger posed by Libya flashes beyond Libya's borders, as with the murderous bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. But to the Libyan people who live under the constant threat of Mr. Gadhafi's regime, he has created a nation of fear.
Hisham Matar depicts this terrified climate in his semi-autobiographical debut novel, "In the Country of Men." At the age of 9 in 1979 -- when Mr. Gadhafi had been in power for a decade -- Mr. Matar fled Libya to safety abroad and has returned home only through the writing of this book. The novel tells the story of Suleiman, a young boy whose parents exile him to safety in what amounts to a Libyan Kindertransport after the Mokhabarat, Mr. Gadhafi's secret police, tortured his father and executed a neighbor. "In the Country of Men" is a poetic and powerful account of the days of dread that Suleiman and his mother endure while pockmarked government agents stalk their small family in ever-tightening circles.
Mona Lisa v. Osama Bin Laden Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Can Leonardo win the War on Terror? Jacques Chirac thinks so: He's selling out France's artistic legacy to Arabia in a bid to cure the clash of civilizations (and chub up the country's sagging coffers.)
The most visited museum in the world -- the Louvre -- is set to open its first international outpost on a currently uninhabited island off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
In the largest foreign museum deal in French history, the petro-rich but museum-poor Persian Gulf emirate agreed last week to pay France $1.3 billion to borrow the Louvre's name and hundreds of its artworks, as well as treasures from the Picasso Museum, Pompidou Center, Chateau de Versailles and other French museums.
French President Jacques Chirac described the mega-museum agreement as an important way of bridging what the "world considers a clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. To many French art experts and historians, however, it represents little more than putting the nation's priceless patrimony up for rent.
"Appalling!" declared Daniel Alcouffe, 68, an honorary curator of the Louvre who headed its decorative arts department for nearly two decades. He echoed the outrage expressed by some of the country's most prominent art experts and historians. "It's a shame to see France selling out its heritage," he said.
The "Desert Louvre," as the French press has dubbed the deal, is part of a revolutionary initiative by France to expand its global influence through its vast cultural heritage and holdings -- the one realm where it remains a dominant world power -- in the face of its shrinking diplomatic and economic clout.
This trend is hardly new, but the NYT gives renewed attention to Americans buying getaway homes in Israel.
Indeed, from downtown Tel Aviv to the heart of Jerusalem, foreigners — especially Americans — searching for second homes are redefining Israel’s high-end real estate market. Part of Tel Aviv is, in fact, in the midst of a mini-Manhattan makeover with the recent arrival of New York-style residential projects designed by the likes of Philippe Starck and Richard Meier. Even Donald Trump has entered the Tel Aviv marketplace with plans for a 70-story residential and commercial tower — Israel’s highest — in the suburb of Ramat Gan.
Real estate analysts estimate that while foreigners made up less than 5 percent of total home buyers in Israel last year, they snapped up a third of the luxury properties — roughly defined as those priced above $500 a square foot. Taking advantage of a decrease in terrorism and property prices still far below Western levels, foreigners bought over $1.2 billion in Israeli real estate in 2006, according to the Israel Central Bank, more than double the $445 million in sales just three years earlier.
While deals like the $13 million purchase of a Tel Aviv triplex by Shari Arison, the Carnival Cruise Lines heiress, illustrate the upper end of the market, most foreign buyers are far more modest. But their desire for larger properties appears to be growing.
“The Americans have shifted from buying one- to two-bedroom to four- to five-bedroom apartments over the past half decade,” said Werner M. Loval, managing director of the Jerusalem office of Anglo-Saxon Real Estate in Jerusalem, one of Israel’s largest real estate agencies. “But they’re still usually spending from about $400,000 to $1 million.”
Davyd Tal, the Welsh-born owner of the real estate agency Jerusalem Homes, said that about 65 percent of all foreign buyers are Americans, most of whom are in their 40s and 50s. In Jerusalem, a quarter of all homes sold in 2006 went to foreigners.
Hollywood (Not Washington) Attacks Iran Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Oh this is awfully good. Drudge has picked up a brilliant piece that captures our time: Iranian officials have lambasted the new blockbuster movie "300" for attacking Persian culture. Don't get me wrong. I love Iran. As I have written, of the 60 countries I have visited, Iran is the one that is most like America. (By the way, turn this statement around, and doesn't it sound like it could come from some American Anti-Defamation League!) But Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution spent the first decade attacking Persian culture and even considered tearing down Persepolis, the jewel of Ancient Persia, because it was so associated with the Shah and was part of the "silence" before Islam. Now they suddenly want to attack Hollywood for not loving the place!
An Iranian official on Sunday lashed out at the Hollywood movie "300" for insulting the Persian civilization, local Fars News Agency reported.
JavadShamqadri, an art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the new movie of being "part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture", said the report.
Shamqadri was quoted as saying "following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture," adding "certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."
The movie's effort wound be fruitless, because "values in Iranian culture and the Islamic Revolution are too strongly seated to be damaged by such plans", said the Iranin official.
Shamqadri, who is also a filmmaker, said that production of more domestic and artistic films which portray Iranian achievements is a proper response to movies like "300".
"300," an ancient epic about the famous Battle of Thermopylae in Greek history, set a new record at the box office in North America this weekend
As if we needed more proof, this is why dictator's don't need "art advisers."
When I was in Iraq three years ago, I was lucky enough to find an Internet cafe in every single one of the half dozen towns I visited. Now comes word that the Internet has truly penetrated the place: Internet dating has come to Iraq! The LAT has a piece about love-clicking in a war zone:
Young Iraqis, trapped in their homes in the mean streets of this bloodstained capital, are increasingly turning to the Internet to chat with relatives, hang out with friends and search for love.
Such virtual relationships offer a refuge of sorts from numbing isolation and fear during a time of staggering violence. But all too often they are mirages — a seductive reminder of a life now tantalizingly out of reach for most.
"They are like birds in a cage," says Anas Attar, 22, one of a growing number of businessmen cashing in on the demand by selling access to their satellite-based Internet connections.
Is Osama Bin Laden Martin Luther? Thursday, March 1, 2007
My old friend Fareed Zakaria has an intriguing piece in Newsweek suggesting that we are, at last, seeing a Reformation in Islam, which he deems as both good news and bad. He says the dominant reality in the region is the growing schism between Sunni and Shia -- from the violence in Iraq, to warning of a Shia crescent in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to the Palestinian turn to Shia. Here's a summary, provided by the WSJ:
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri founded al Qaeda in the 1980s as a pan-Islamic organization. To that effect Mr. bin Laden initially resisted sanctioning violence against the Shiite minority in Afghanistan during the war against the Russians. Similarly, after the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Zawahiri reproached al Qaeda's head there, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for attacking Iraq's Shiites.
Nevertheless, Mr. Zarqawi's approach has won out. Al-Qaeda's anti-Shiite message has boosted its appeal among a Sunni minority disenfranchised by the fall of Saddam Hussein. However, while the anti-Shiite stance might boost al Qaeda's appeal in "Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some parts of the gulf," Mr. Zakaria says it means that everywhere else al Qaeda has lost its original appeal as a uniter of Muslims against a common, powerful enemy.
While al Qaeda finds itself dragged into an internal battle between Muslims, the U.S. should stay out of it, Mr. Zakaria says. This way it can ensure that what is a war between sects evolves into a war of ideas. "Islam must make space for differing views about what makes a good Muslim," says Mr. Zakaria. "Then it will be able to take the next step and accept the diversity among religions, each true in its own way."
The idea is certainly appealing here: Sit back while Islam fights an intramural battle and spends more time fighting with one another than with the outside world. Daniel Benjamin made a similar argument a few weeks ago. But I think the rising Shia argument is very weak; where are the new recruits going to come from? Shia seems to have topped out at 15% of the Muslim world. And maybe Bin Laden's dream of being a pan-Islamist might not give him the possibility of uniting the entire Muslim world, but isn't 85% of it fairly substantial? The real issue of Bin Laden is what percentage of the Muslim world is committed to fighting the West vs. what percentage is committed to trying to coopt its financial model. In places like Morocco, which is outside the Shia sphere, that is the real battle. I think there is quite a difference between a sectarian battle within Islam for the future of the faith vs. an internal reform movement that substantially changes the base theology, which is what the Reformation was about.
The U.N. (Hearts) Jimmy Carter Monday, February 26, 2007
First Carter, now the U.N. A UN human rights envoy has compared Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories to elements of apartheid. The UN's Special Rapporteur, John Dugard, describes the regime as being designed to dominate and systematically oppress the occupied population. And to boot: He's South African!
In a new report, Mr Dugard says: "Israel's laws and practices certainly resemble aspects of apartheid".
He points to what he describes as "unashamed discrimination" against Palestinians in favour of Israeli settlers.
"It is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of Israel's laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination," says the report.
So what's Carter's reaction now? He's tried to climb down from his remarks, saying he was just using the term to be provactive, and that Israel's system was not at all like South Africa's. Now the South Africans are chiming in saying he was right. Of course, the U.N. has never been a place to love Israel. They're more Arabist than Carter. The one-two punch of the term is not likely to elevate it to international standard, but it is likely to do more harm than good -- needlessly puffing up the Palestinians and needlessly distracting the Israelis who can rightly defend themselves from this overreaction.
Abraham's Path: Getting to Yes Friday, February 23, 2007
A few years ago I was asked to give some advise to Bill Ury, the quixotic and visionary Harvard professor, who had an idea to open an Abraham Path across the Middle East, from Turkey to the Palestinian Territories. The idea was rudimentary then but has becoming more real through his dogged efforts. The Christian Science Monitor has a major, behind-the-scenes piece about their efforts:
The two researchers – one British, one Jordanian – are tracing the footsteps of the ancestral patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the hope that people today will rediscover the common roots of many generations past – and inspire coexistence and understanding in the present.
This is the making of the Abraham Path, a route that will start in Harran, Turkey – the place where many sources suggest Abraham heard "the call" from God – and will continue into Syria, down through Jordan, across the river into the West Bank, winding through both Israeli and Palestinian territory before ending in Hebron, or Al Khalil, described in the Book of Genesis as Abraham's burial place.
Eventually, the route would go to Egypt, where Abraham was also a sojourner. In the much longer term, the founders hope to have the path go into Iraq – Abraham's birthplace was Ur – and possibly to Mecca, the home of the kabbah, the holiest site in Islam, which Muslims believe Abraham helped to build.
To its initiators, the dream of building the path presents an endless array of possibilities: for religious pilgrimages, for developing the region's underrealized tourism potential, and, most important, for breaking down barriers of fear and misunderstanding between East and West. To skeptics, however, it sounds like an idealistic peace plan that doesn't easily fit into the landscape of a volatile Middle East, where even different sects find themselves embroiled in conflict.
But the project, conceptualized and studied for several years under the auspices of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, doesn't intend to ignore or overcome the political realities of the Middle East. Rather, it seeks to increase contact between average people, on a point of reference to which followers of all three major monotheistic religions can relate.
"We're not creating this path. This path already exits. In some ways, we're just dusting off the path so you can see the footsteps," says Harvard's William Ury, a world-renowned expert on conflict negotiation and a co-author of the bestseller, "Getting to Yes." The concept of the project dawned on Professor Ury after decades of working to bring warring sides together, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland.
There Is No Clash of Civilizations Thursday, February 22, 2007
Here's some hopeful news on the clash of cultures between Islam and the West: Most people are smart enough to realize there is no clash of cultures. It's a political struggle using religion as a proxy.
A majority of people do not believe that Islam and the West are in a conflict of cultures and that the prevailing tensions are a result of conflict over political power rather than for causes relating to either culture or religion.
A survey by the BBC World Service covering 28,000 people in 27 countries also indicated that most of the people do not believe the conflict could lead to any clash of civilizations. On the contrary, majority of the people -- 56 per cent -- are positive about a common ground that can be found between the western culture and Islam, while only 28 per cent believe violence could ensue as a result of the conflicts.
When repeatedly asked about the causes of the current friction, 52 per cent said they believed these could be the result of political disputes, while 58 per cent said minority groups caused the tensions.
Doug Miller, president of polling company GlobeScan, which conducted the survey for BBC, said the results indicated that there are no prospects of an inevitable and wide-ranging "clash of civilizations." Most people feel the tensions and clashes are the result of political power and interests and not religion or culture, he said.
He also pointed out to the fact that most victims of Islamic intolerance and terrorism are Muslims themselves.
Any reporter who has been to Iraq feels an instant, kindred spirit with anyone else who has been there. This is especially true for anyone who was hurt or killed. I knew David Bloom briefly from several appearances I made with him on The Today Show over the years. I have never met Bob Woodruff, despite working closely with some folks at ABC over the years. Still, my wife and I took the news of his attack very personally, given that I had trod many of those roads a few years earlier.
The picture above is a scan of Bob Woodruff's skull created at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., on Jan. 31, 2006 -- just two days after Woodruff and his team were hit by an insurgents' bomb in Taji, Iraq. (The second picture is him two days after waking from a five-week coma.) The scan shows the rocks and debris that were lodged into Woodruff's face and neck, and the areas around his eyes. They were posted on the ABC News website to promote an upcoming report about his recovery (Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 10 pm). This news sends chills down my spine just thinking of what he went through. Hooray!
An update on the riots at the Temple Mount we've been discussing here on Feiler Faster. As you know, riots broke out ten days ago after excavation work on the ramp to the Muslim portion of the Temple Mount -- the plaza on top -- created some problems. The knee-jerk reaction among the commenters on this site, and in the Israeli press, is that the Muslim authority has overreacted. Wouldn't be the first time this happened. The Palestinians are fond of using sideshows like this as a way to score points against the Israelis. That's why I called this an Archaeology Proxy War.
But now it turns out that the Israeli government may have found a Muslim prayer room in the excavation and kept it secret from the Palestinians for three years. Now I hardly think finding a Muslim prayer room near a site that was controlled by Muslims for more than twelve centuries is surprising. But how stupid of the Israeli government to keep this secret for three years. Imagine how this plays on Al Jazeera. I often hear Jews complain that the Arabs have better PR machinery. They turn out to have some collaborators in the Israeli Antiquities Authority.
An Israeli archaeologist said the site of an archaeological dig outside a disputed holy compound in Jerusalem might contain a Muslim prayer room, and the work drew renewed condemnation Sunday.
Muslim leaders and critics of the dig said the announcement of the find, three years after it was discovered, confirmed their fears that Israel is intent on hiding Muslim attachment to the site. Israeli officials denied that.
Two weeks ago, Israeli archaeologists began a salvage dig ahead of the construction of a new pedestrian walkway up to the disputed hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The site is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The dig, outside the compound's Mughrabi Gate, is meant to ensure that no valuable archaeological finds are damaged by the construction. But it has ignited a long-standing feud over who controls the site, and drawn Muslim charges that Israel is planning to damage Islam's holy places. The new report of the find provided more fuel for those allegations.
The Israel Antiquities Authority, which is running the dig, said Sunday that the room might not be a prayer room at all, and that archaeologists would know only after research was complete. If it was found to be a prayer room, a spokeswoman said, it would be carefully documented and left in place.
“If it's found to be important, it will be preserved and will remain as part of the archaeological park” outside the holy compound, the spokeswoman, Osnat Goaz, said.
One of my favorite scenes in WHERE GOD WAS BORN came in a meeting in Iraq with a man who called himself The Last Rabbi of Baghdad. He was interesting, funny, and quite emotional -- plus he wanted me to introduce him to a Jewish woman in America. After 2600 years, the Jews had abandoned a place where Judaism, in many ways, was born.
I thought of that when a friend sent me this link to a story about the Last Jews of Cairo. The photos are amazing and the story is quite well-written. The pull-out quote reads: "On the eve of Ramadan, in the center of the Arab world, we found ourselves – two agnostic Jews with no interest in or ties to the Jewish community back home – [scrambling] to join in prayer and worship with the remaining Jews of Cairo."
"The Only Egyptian To Ever Hit Hollylwood Big Time" Convicted of Hitting in Hollywood
Egyptian-born Omar Sharif, of all people, has been in the news this week, after he was convicted of punching a valet parker in L.A. for not getting his car quick enough. On top of that, he called the attendant a "dirty Mexican."
The Independent offers this summary of his rise to fame: "Back in the 1960s, Sharif wowed Western audiences with his performances in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago and developed a reputation as an international playboy who could reliably play the foreigner - preferably swarthy and sexy, though not necessarily - in any given movie production. In his heyday, Sharif was something truly remarkable - perhaps the only Egyptian, if not the only Arab, ever to hit the Hollywood big time. The job offers flooded in, as did the marriage proposals, as many as 1,000 of them a week, according to legend."
Then in capitulates his sad demise:
Omar Sharif hasn't had a hit in years. Unless, of course, you count the time he headbutted a police officer in a casino in the Parisian suburbs in 2003, for which he received a £1,000 fine and a suspended sentence. "It made me the hero of the whole of France," he later said, less than apologetically. "To headbutt a cop is the dream of every Frenchman."
Or the time, a year later, he whacked his fellow actor John Noble with a lamp while on location in India for a barely noticed biblical movie called One Night with the King. ("We were drunk," Sharif later explained.)
Or, going back a bit further to 1985, the time he knocked Ian Dury out cold on the floor of Le Caprice in London. (Both men were still furious about the fight when, four years later, they wound up in the cast of the same film, an obscure Polish production called The Rainbow Thief.)
Most recently, the Omar Sharif hit most in the news has been a punch to the nose he allegedly delivered to a parking valet outside a Beverly Hills restaurant in 2005. According to the prosecution in this week's quick-fire trial, Sharif - accompanied by an unidentified female - was intoxicated and became enraged after the valet at Mastro's Steakhouse, one Juan Anderson, refused to accept a €20 note as payment for parking the actor's four-wheel-drive Porsche.
In retaliation, the prosecution alleged, Sharif called Anderson a "stupid Mexican" (he is in fact of Guatemalan descent) and broke his nose. Sharif chose not to fly to Los Angeles to defend himself - he has been in his native Egypt of late - preferring to plead no contest and accept a sentence of probation plus mandatory anger management therapy. He is also likely to have to pay restitution to the valet for the broken nose, something the judge will decide at a sentencing hearing scheduled for April.
Feiler Faster EXCLUSIVE: Inside Interfaith Peace Talks with Iran Friday, February 16, 2007
I received the following email this week from John Chane, the Bishop of Washington, who gave me permission to post this news.
I recently returned from Tehran where I spent three days in inter-faith dialogue with former president Khatami and many high level religious leaders in that country. We will be meeting again in Switzerland this Spring to continue our discussions and to find ways in which we can lower the rhetoric between the US and Iran. Was in New York Monday for a social gathering at the UN with the Ambassador of Iran to the UN and many in leadership positions within that country.
I met with President Bush several weeks ago, not to reveal the confidential discussions had with Iranian leaders, including the head of their nuclear development program...but to let him know that we intended to keep the conversations going. He gave a thumbs up. It was he who signed the order to allow Khatami to visit Washington last September.
Our next round of discussions in Switzerland will address the anti-Israel, anti-semetic stance taken by the current Iranian president and to further discuss Sunni/Shiite violence. Have been meeting as well with all ambassadors from Middle Eastern countries now serving in Washington to remind them that although religion cannot be blamed for the current crisis in the Middle East, it is in fact the "fault line" and therefore it needs to have a place at the table for ongoing negotiations that seek peace.
For more on this story, click here. Meanwhile: TALK. TO. IRAN.
I am writing because I found a very interesting TV program that you might try to catch sometime. It is called Day of Discovery and I found it on a cable channel. Most of its programs are shot in Israel and they consider both religious and political issues very warmly and fairly. The presenters are evangelical Christians and yet they treat their subjects very fairly. There is none of the fanaticism and hoopla that one finds on TBN, for instance. I think their website is www.rbc.org. When I checked it last, they had a listing of local cities. The program is lighthearted and yet handles heavy themes such as the Israeli/Arab conflict well and even handedly. The photography, too, is done very professionally.
It's Bob Dylan week here on Feiler Faster. First, Dylan's song about Abraham pitches up on an NPR show about my book. Then a friend sends along this email about Dylan's love that dare not speak its name: His love for Israel.
Back in 1983 Bob Dylan wrote "Neighborhood Bully" and sang it on an album entitled "Infidels". "Neighberhood Bully" is an amazing pro Israel song, a commentary on the Jewish people and its contribution to the world; on the eternity of the Jewish people; on the world's hypocrisy; as well as the persistence of anti-Semitism over the centuries.
Unfortunately very few people seemed to notice it at the time but its never been more appropriate than it is today. I recently shared it with a colleague (and dedicated Dylan fan!) who confessed that he had missed it as well. So for the edification of all of us who remain Dylan fans, for all of us who love Israel and hate the world's hypocrisy, I'm reprinting the lyrics below. Read it and share it with your kids ....download the song from itunes (it's actually a great song...well worth the $.99!)...
Here's a sample:
Neighborhood Bully by Bob Dylan
Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man, His enemies say he's on their land. They got him outnumbered about a million to one, He got no place to escape to, no place to run. He's the neighborhood bully.
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive, He's criticized and condemned for being alive. He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin, He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in. He's the neighborhood bully.
The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land, He's wandered the earth an exiled man. Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn, He's always on trial for just being born. He's the neighborhood bully.
Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized, Old women condemned him, said he should apologize. Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad. The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad. He's the neighborhood bully.
George Bush for President ... of Israel? Tuesday, February 13, 2007
I wrote a few months ago about how great I think Michael Oren is, based on his previous book Six Days of War, about the Six Day War. I have just been sent a copy of his new book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, about the U.S. in the Middle East. I haven't read it yet, but I intend to. Now I see, courtesy of the folks over a Jewlicious, that he gave this quote in an interview to the Forward:
“If it hadn’t been for George Bush between 2001 and 2005, I’m not sure the Jewish state would have survived,” Oren said. “Because when the bombs started going off at the end of the Clinton administration, Israel was not given much latitude to respond to Palestinian terror. A year into the Bush administration, after 9/11, Bush started giving an unqualified green light to the IDF to go in and smash terror. By doing that, they created a situation where the tourists came back, foreign investment came back. The fact that you could walk down the street as a tourist in Jerusalem today owes a lot to the Bush administration. But the Bush administration owes a lot, in turn, to evangelical backing. So how am I to gainsay that this particular community helped save the lives of my family?”
Wow. So he would take Bush and the war in Iraq as a better situation for Jews in Israel than the deal that Clinton was trying to push through and containment for Iraq. Hard to believe.
One of my favorite memories from my trip to Iran a few years with my wife, which is described in WHERE GOD WAS BORN, was sitting in an Internet cafe watching a woman with fake fingernails emailing her lover, in English, across the country. (Yes, I admit, I read over her shoulder.) The Internet is, of course, highly regulated across the Arab world, but bloggers do have increasing power. The AP rounds up the situation:
Mideast governments for decades have dominated the media, trying to keep a monopoly on information and deter criticism of authorities. But bloggers are chipping away, writing about everything from human rights to the region's rulers to the most taboo topic - Islam.
Weblogs - or blogs for short - started taking off in the Mideast a few years ago as access to the Internet and technology for creating sites grew. There are now hundreds of Arabic- and Farsi-language blogs posted from the Middle East.
Many of the blogs are just personal musings. But many others strive to tackle political and social issues, and their authors are increasingly getting into trouble, with governments blocking their sites and throwing them in jail.
"I firmly believe that blogs now with normal people using them have become the fifth estate. They watch the watchers, especially in this area of the world, because there are no controls over them," said Mahmood al-Yousif, a Bahraini blogger.
Al-Yousif said his blog was blocked by authorities briefly last year after he published articles about an election-related scandal on the Persian Gulf island kingdom.
One interesting stat: Reporters Without Borders has five Mideast countries - Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Syria - on its list of the globe's 13 worst Internet freedom enemies that block Web sites and detain bloggers.
And another: Though the number of Internet users has grown nearly fivefold since 2000, only about 10 percent of the region's people have access to the Internet, according to the online Internet World Stats, which monitors Web usage around the world.
As part of its fascinating package on Blogs in Arabia, the AP includes a helpful set of links to blogs around the region.
EGYPT:
-- http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com Arabic-language blog by democracy activist Wael Abbas. Has been instrumental in bringing attention to police torture and sexual attacks on women, publishing videotaped accounts of both in recent months.
-- http://karam903.blogspot.com Arabic blog by Abdel Kareem Nabil, on trial for allegedly insulting Islam and causing sectarian strife with Internet writings critical of Islamic institutions in Egypt.
-- http://www.manalla.net Arabic and English political blog by husband and wife team, Alaa Abdel-Fattah and Manal Hassan. Abdel-Fattah held six weeks last year after being arrested during rally at Cairo court in support of other detained democracy activists.
SYRIA:
-- http://saroujah.blogspot.com English blog by Sasa Kajam. Called Syria News Wire, says it features ''independent news from the streets of Syria and Lebanon.''
SAUDI ARABIA:
-- http://saudijeans.blogspot.com English blog by Ahmed al-Omran, pharmacy student who writes about politics, social issues and trends.
IRAN:
-- http://hamedmottaghi.blogfa.com Farsi blog by Hamed Mottaghi, freelance journalist who lives in holy city of Qom and writes about human rights, culture and other social issues.
-- http://www.kosoof.com Farsi photo blog that publishes pictures of Iranian dissidents with their families after release from prison.
(Both Iranian blogs were awarded Reporters Without Borders prize during 2006 Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards for taking strong stands on freedom of information.)
BAHRAIN:
-- http://mahmood.tv English blog by Mahmood al-Yousif, Bahraini businessman who writes about politics, human rights and daily life on Persian Gulf island kingdom.
Here we go: News of the archaeology proxy war between Israelis and Palestinians intensified today, and my email box is proof. A reader writes to link this story:
An Israeli archeologist said Wednesday that he has pinpointed the exact location of the Second Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount.
The site identified by Hebrew University archeologist Prof. Joseph Patrich, based on the study of a large underground cistern on the Temple Mount and passages from the Mishna, places the Temple and its corresponding courtyards, chambers and gates in a more southeasterly and diagonal frame of reference compared to previous studies.
Patrich based his research, which is about to be published, on a study of a large underground cistern on the Temple Mount that was mapped by British engineer Sir Charles Wilson in 1866 on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, along with passages from the Mishna.
The giant cistern, 4.5 meters wide and 54 meters long, lay near the southeastern corner of the upper platform of the Temple Mount. Examining the location and configuration of the cistern together with descriptions of the daily rite in the Temple and its surroundings found in the Mishna, Patrich said that this cistern is the only one found on the Temple Mount that can tie in with the ancient rabbinic text describing elements involved in the daily purification and sacrificial duties carried out by the priests on the altar in the Temple courtyard.
On this basis, he says, one can reconstruct the placement of a large basin that was used by the priests for their ritual washing, with the water being drawn by a waterwheel mechanism from the cistern.
The reader adds: If further studies prove it to be true, I doubt either side would be willing to share the site. I think it would be just another example of the 'all or none' philosophy that seems to control religious thought today.
As a writer, every now and then something you write comes alive, writ large in the news. This happened Friday in Jerusalem, when a riot nearly broke out on the Temple Mount during Friday prayers. As Haaretz reported: "Israeli-Arab protesters on Friday agreed to leave Temple Mount peacefully after clashing with police to protest Israeli renovation work near the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. About 200 police officers entered the area around the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hurled stun grenades to disperse Muslim protesters there midday Friday, as hundreds of demonstrators threw stones at security forces."
The backstory is that Israel is doing some renovations on the ramp that leads up to the Mount, the one that goes alongside the Western Wall. Haaretz:
Excavations near the Temple Mount's Mugrabi Gate were approved two weeks ago as a necessary precursor to replacing a ramp that provides access to the gate. The ramp collapsed three years ago, and was replaced by a temporary wooden structure. Plans have since been approved for a permanent replacement, and by law, any construction work in the Old City must be preceded by a salvage dig.
The dig is taking place in the Jewish Quarter, outside the Temple Mount, but the Islamic Movement in Israel has accused it of being meant to undermine the Temple Mount. Meanwhile, Arab ambassadors to the United Nations asked the UN Security Council on Thursday to "to take immediate and urgent measures" to stop the excavation. They said in a statement that they "denounced the Israeli occupation authority's escalation of its aggression on Islamic endowments in occupied East Jerusalem by starting to destroy a historic route."
This exact scenario is outlined in chapter 4 of WHERE GOD WAS BORN, in which I interview dueling Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists about the battle over the Temple Mount. In effect, each side uses archaeology as a proxy war to wage their geopolitical struggle over the city. Archaeology, with its mix of science and emotion, appears to be a perfect weapon in this struggle, because it appears to offer what each side would like to be the ultimate answer: Proof that their claim to the land is more legitimate. But archaeology can offer no such assurances. In fact, the sooner we disentangle scripture, faith, and science from what is, at heart, a political struggle, the sooner we are likely to find a solution. Neither the Bible nor the Koran offer a solution to the Middle East crisis.
What Are Soldiers are Learning in Iraq Wednesday, February 7, 2007
A reader writes that her son's two tours of duty in Iraq has challenged her to learn more about the Bible.
I want you to know that I really enjoyed your book "Where God was Born" I enjoyed the way you put the Bible and history of the Mid East together. When I was a little girl I wanted to be an archaeologist but marriage and 4 boys came and digging in the backyard was the only archeology I was able to do. I have done a lot of reading on the Mid East recently as my son has done 2 tours of duty in Iraq and I find it fascinating and mysterious. I can only wish that you could have included photos of the places like the staircase and the mosques that you visited. You gave me the opportunity to travel with you on a trip that I know that I will never be able to make and I loved every minute of it. Thank you so much and God bless you
P.S. I found that when my son returned from Iraq the second time he told me that Mohammed was born first before Christ and that Muslims wrote the Bible and that everyone else stole it. So I started studying and reading educating myself because I know that I better get my facts straight before we discuss this. I started with Karen Armstrong and several other books and now you, but you were the only one who put the history and with now and the Bible. Thanks again.
First of all, some good news: The paperback of WHERE GOD WAS BORN has photos of my travels in Israel, Iraq, and Iran, including the staircase in Persepolis she mentioned. Second, Mohammad was born 600 years after the birth of Christ, so you're on safe ground there. But I do agree that Iraq, known by its ancient name Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers) does hold interesting clues about the shared ancestry of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
For me, one of the highlights of my decade of traveling was the time I spent visiting biblical sites in Iraq. Three years ago this week I traveled to Iraq, and during my time in the country I went to the Garden of Eden, Ur -- the birthplace of Abraham, Babylon, and Nineveh, where Jonah goes after being swallowed by the whale. The Tower of Babel was built here, too, and I think that story holds a wonderful message for our time. After the people build the tower, God smashes it and disperses them around the world, forcing humans to speak different languages. God wants us to be different. God wants us to speak different languages. He rejects fundamentalism, the idea that we all speak the same language. God wants us to be diversified.
This is the legacy of Iraq. And it's too often lost today.
Note: To post a comment about WHERE GOD WAS BORN or my other books, visit our new discussion boards here. To write me an e-mail, click here.
Today is publication day for the paperback of my latest book, WHERE GOD WAS BORN: A Daring Adventure Through the Bible's Greatest Stories. A 10,000-mile adventure through the heart of the Middle East -- from the Garden of Eden to the rivers of Babylon -- WHERE GOD WAS BORN visits biblical sites unseen by Westerners in decades and explores the little-known origins of Judaism, Chrsitianity, and Islam.
In honor of the publication and the launch of this blog, I've received special permission to post a few excerpts in the coming weeks. Today, a slightly abbreviated version of the opening pages. Enjoy.
---------- I feel the tension before I know its source. My legs begin to quiver, then shake. Soon my whole body is quaking with vibration, or is it fear? Up above, the whir begins to build into a thudding bass beat. Cold air blows through the cracks and up my spine. I’m shivering. My feet are trembling. “Are you ready?” The sound in my ears is crackling, and a bit wicked. I nod. Within seconds, the shaking becomes overwhelming, the thumping dense, and the pull so strong it seems ready to suck my head off. I feel as if I’m in a full-body migraine. And then, just as suddenly, quiet. The sound dissolves, my body relaxes. I’m in the air, in a war. I’m at peace.
The helicopter pauses for a second, then accelerates into a gentle glide. Down below, the landing pad disappears, and rows of orange and avocado trees poke up toward the sky. I see the hairs on a donkey’s ears. Our nose is tipped, we’re flying, yet we’re not moving very quickly. Lifting off in a helicopter is like drifting off to sleep: You leave one realm and shift into another; the features seem dreamily unfamiliar; you want to touch what you see, but you can’t.
We bank toward the Mediterranean. Voices in my headphones interrupt. “This is the Air Force. Identify yourself! Do you have permission to be here?” Boaz, the pilot, smiles. We did have permission, garnered over the preceding six months, from three government agencies, but the flight was still risky. War was raging – between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between a fragile coalition and Iraq, between the pluralist West and Islamic extremism. Ripples were reverberating around the globe. The Cradle of Civilization – the tiny, fertile crescent of land that stretched from Mesopotamia to North Africa – had once more seized control of the world’s destiny and the future of civilization seemed to be at stake.
The bloody clash of faith and politics that filled front pages at the beginning of the new millennium seemed surprising, coming at the end of a century that seem to mark the end of God as a force in world affairs. Hadn’t Nietzsche declared at the end of the previous century (1882) that God was dead? Hadn’t science, capitalism, and the World Wide Web rendered faith a quaint hangover from the past?
History wasn’t ending, of course; it was finally coming home. The collision of politics, geography, and faith has dominated nearly every story in the Middle East since the birth of writing. It also dominates the greatest story every told. Jews and Christians who smugly console themselves that Islam is the only violent religion are willfully ignoring their past. Nowhere is the struggle between faith and violence described more vividly, and with more stomach-turning details of ruthlessness, than in the Hebrew Bible.
Yet nowhere is this conflict conveyed with more humanity and hope.
And so, I thought, what better way to confront my doubts about religion and consider the future of faith than to travel to the land where God was born? And what better guide to read along the way than the text that defines identity for half the world’s believers?
I would journey to the flashpoints in the new world war over God – Israel, Iraq, and Iran – and bring along my Bible. And I would begin my quest with the second half of the Hebrew Bible, at the moment when the children of Israel, sprung from Adam and Eve, descended from Abraham, and freed by Moses, face their harshest challenge. “Conquer the Promised Land,” God says to Joshua, Moses’s successor, at the start of the books of the Prophets. “Destroy the pagans who live on the land,” God commands. “Seize the future for yourselves – and for me.”
------------ "Breathtaking ... Goes from cover to cover, from one eye-opening story to the next, without a letup." Boston Globe
"Feiler is a real-life Indiana Jones." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A few years ago I traveled to the Sinai a few days after the bombing at the Hilton in Taba. I had passed that hotel many times -- it's right past the border crossing at Eilat -- and to see the gaping hole in the side of the building and the air of ruin around a usually bustling place was eerie, even post-Apocalyptic. Unlike 9-11, where New York quickly returned to a moving city, that part of the Sinai was simply dead.
That bombing was one of a series in the Sinai that left the normally mystical and eternal place jerked into contemporary politics. For such a serene location, the stench of terror seemed deeply out of place. The chapters on Sinai in WALKING THE BIBLE are my favorites, and the images that the cinematographer captured for the third hour of the show on PBS are what help give that show an elevated feeling.
A new report, highlighted on TIME.com, shows that lumping these attacks under the umbrella term Al Qaeda is unhelpful. The first attack was motivated by the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and the subsequent on the reaction of the Egyptian government to the first one. And the big shocker: It recommends scuttling the "war on terror" and replacing with economic development. Sounds like the Baker-Hamilton report...
Press speculation supported by official spin suggested that the attacks were part of Al Qaeda's global terror campaign. The IGC report, Egypt's Sinai Question, starts off by correctly noting that facts about the perpetrators and the attacks are scarce. Based on the known identities some of the attackers and a review of political factors, however, the IGC sketches the possibility of a complex picture. The terrorists were Sinai bedouin in a group led by a local dentist and an Egyptian of Palestinian origin who was a law school graduate. The Palestinian had worshipped in a Sinai mosque that preached jihad sermons. The bedouin came out of a Sinai community that has roots in the tribes of Arabia and experienced systematic discrimination from the Cairo government. The group's members were apparently aroused by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence in the nearby Gaza Strip abutting the Sinai. The initial bombing of the Taba hotel frequented by Israelis may have been motivated by the Palestinan cause. On the other hand, the subsequent attacks in Sharm el Sheikh and Dahab may have been carried out as a grudge against the Egyptian government--including anger over mass arrests following the Taba attack.
Bedouin discontent, Palestinian connections, radical Islam--it's pretty hard to solely blame Al Qaeda, much less the other side of Bush's extremist coin, Iran. The IGC's main recommendation is not more war against terrorism but a comprehensive social and development plan to "transform attitudes" and address what it says is "the Sinai question."
Zahi Hawass is everywhere today. In addition to bashing the Seven Wonders online poll, he is heralding the new King Tut exhibit about to open in Philly. The exhibition was controversial when it opened two years ago, largely because of the unprecedented fees and percentage of the gift shop that Egypt kept for itself. In Ft. Lauderdale, the show played at the Museum of Art, who hosted my talk on Tuesday night. Let's just say Mr. Hawass left a strong impression.
Then, on the same day, someone sent me this interview he did promoting the opening of the King Tut show in Philly next month.
Some highlights:
What do you hope people will gain from viewing the exhibition? When people visit this exhibition, they can understand one important thing: they can know that when people like Egyptians ruled in peace and had a vision of ma'at--justice and truth--they were really able to build an empire. Each artifact can tell us about those great people, and can teach us about the golden age of Egypt, and about the Valley of the Kings. It can tell them how the discovery of King Tut was not the end of archaeology. The tomb of Tutankhamun was in a valley of mystery and secrets; and I believe that it has more secrets to reveal, after KV 63. If people can understand our history, and read it well, it can give us all a good future.
Why is King Tutankhamun so important to ancient Egyptian archaeology and history? Because his tomb was found largely intact. It captured the hearts of not only archaeologists, but also of the common man. If you try to look at his name before the tomb was found, it was nothing. The discovery opened a new vision into the history of the 18th Dynasty, about the wealth of Egypt, foreign relations, and family relations. It especially made us wonder about the wealth of a tomb of someone who ruled longer that Tut--what would have been buried, for example, in the tomb of Ramesses II?
How is Egypt benefiting from the "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" touring exhibition? This is the first time that Egypt has benefited from such a show. From this exhibition and the other, King Tut II, which will be in the U.S. two years from now, Egypt will receive $100 million. There will be no free meals anymore. Before, Egypt got nothing. Museums always say it is about education, not money. But is not only about education. We need money to build museums, carry out training, do site management, and to save our monuments. No one has helped us, apart from a few countries. King Tut is helping us to restore the monuments of Egypt in a scientific way.
Nothing stirs up controversy like the seven wonders.
A few months ago I participated in picking the "New Seven Wonders of the World" for "Good Morning America" and USA Today. Six of us were locked in a room for seven hours and not allowed to leave until we had come up with a list, made all the more challenging because the organizers insisted we mix natural and human-made wonders. To see our final list, click here; to read an essay I wrote about one of the seven, click here. Hint: It's holy for half the world's believers. Not surprisingly, few people loved our list.
Now another effort to unveil the "New Seven Wonders" by online vote has come under attack: Not for something off the list, but for something on the list. Zahi Hawass, the prince of Egypt's antiquities, has criticized the effort, the winnders of which will be unveiled on 07/07/07, for making the pyramids compete alongside the other nominees.
The pyramids are "living in the hearts of people around the globe, and don't need a vote to be among the world wonders," said the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, according to the state-run Middle East News Agency.
Egyptian officials refused to meet with the organizer of the "New 7 Wonders of the World" contest, the Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber, when he visited Egypt earlier this month, said the contest's spokeswoman Tia B. Viering. When Weber tried to hold a press conference near the pyramids, she said, police shut it down.
I met Hawass in a similar-sounding meeting that's described in WALKING THE BIBLE, and certainly anyone who has ever filmed at the pyramids, as we did for WALKING THE BIBLE on PBS (see the image on the upper right hand corner of this page) has had similar encounters.
Israel won a surprising two awards at Sundance this weekend:
The World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic was given to SWEET MUD (ADAMA MESHUGAAT) /Israel, directed by Dror Shaul. On a kibbutz in southern Israel in the 1970's, Dvir Avni realizes that his mother is mentally ill. In this closed community, bound by rigid rules, Dvir must navigate between the kibbutz motto of equality and the stinging reality that his mother has, in effect, been abandoned by the community. To read a review, click here.
The World Cinema Documentary Competition Jury presented a Special Jury Prize to HOT HOUSE/Israel, directed by Shimon Dotan. Here's a description: Veteran Romanian/Israeli director Shimon Dotan's doc "Hot House" is described by Sundance as a "brilliantly constructed, disturbingly provocative film [that] is both a humanizing force and an alarming wake-up call." The doc spotlights Israeli prisons and how they have become a breeding ground for the next generation of Palestinian leaders as well as a hive for future terrorists. Granted unique access to the prisons, Dotan interviews inmates who are committed to engaging Israel in negotiations as well as others who feel no remorse for their participation in suicide bombings.
No More Faxing That Prayer to the Western Wall Friday, January 26, 2007
When I was growing up, I heard stories about how anyone could fax a prayer to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That's so 1979. Today, in a Web 2.0 world, you can send your prayer via a new service called Pray Over IP (IP standing for Internet protocol). POIP sells phone cards that allow customers to record their prayers, which are then transmitted to a holy site of their choice via Internet phone and Webcams. Reports the WSJ:
"It's just $5 or $10, and you get eternal life," says Hanan Achsaf, chairman of POIP. "With the lottery, you pay that amount, and what do you get? A piece of paper. This is much better value." The start-up is part of an explosion of technology being used for religious purposes in recent years.
Churches in Brazil offer audio clips of services through cellphones. Ringtones using religious music are gaining popularity. A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 30% of adults online use the Internet for their religious pursuits.
Mr. Achsaf's company, which estimates it has 1,500 users a day, sells its phone cards on two Web sites -- one for Christians and the other for Jewish users. The sites stream video from the company's Webcams, giving users a real-time look at where the prayers are broadcast. A user records his prayer by using a POIP phone card, which allows a prayer of as long as two minutes. After calling a POIP phone number (1-888-HE-HEARS in the U.S.) and inputting a personal-identification number from the card, the user gets a choice: press one for the holy site of Jerusalem, press two for the holy site of the Sea of Galilee, and so on.
Major developments in the Jimmy Carter story today. Carter appeared at Brandeis on Thursday night, the appearance that Dershowitz initially tried to squelch. The significant headlines: 1) Carter apologized for a passage in his book that some had said promoted violence
"I apologize to you personally and to everyone here," Mr. Carter said when asked about the passage by a student during his appearance at Brandeis University on Tuesday. After explaining that the passage was "worded in a completely improper and stupid way," Mr. Carter said he has asked publisher Simon & Schuster Inc. to change the wording in future editions of the book.
The questionable passage, which appears on Page 213 of the book, reads: "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."
Some of Mr. Carter's critics, including the Carter Center board members who resigned, say the text reads as defending terror tactics until a peace accord can be reached between Israel and Palestinians. "Repeatedly I call on all to terminate the use of violence," Mr. Carter said in response.
2) He defended the title, saying he was trying to be provocative. 3) Clearly trying to go on the offensive, he released a transcript of a meeting he had with John Paul II in 1979 in which he urged the Pope to recognize Israel. "I reported that the Jews in our country at least thought that he was biased against them because he had never yet mentioned Israel in one of his speeches," the transcript reads. "He replied, 'I have mentioned Jerusalem.' I replied, 'This is not adequate for the Jews.' "
After the appearance, Dershowitz told the crowd that this was the "Brandeis Carter," whom he liked, but that he didn't like the "Al Jazeera Carter," a clear reference to the fact that Arafat and others used to say one thing in English and another in Arabic. In other words: I don't accept your apology.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav, facing charges of rape and abuse of power, asked parliament Wednesday to temporarily remove him from office in an effort to blunt growing calls for his resignation.
Katsav has been under intense pressure to quit since Attorney-General Meni Mazuz notified him Tuesday that he planned to indict him on a rash of charges after a monthslong investigation into allegations by four women who worked for him.
The president, who has not commented publicly on the impending charges, stopped short of resigning, which would deprive him of the immunity he enjoys while in office.
I have been to Iran twice this decade, and on both trips I visited the Jewish community. That's right. There are Jews in Iran -- the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel, as many as 35,000. One of my favorite chapters in Where God Was Born (which, as you can see on the left with our handy new icon, goes on sale next week in paperback) describes my travels in the Jewish community with my wife, including a funny moment when she completely upstaged me after giving a short thank you speech at a local synagogue.
In light of the recent rhetoric about destroying Israel coming from the increasingly ostracized Iranian president, the BBC checks in on the Iranian Jewish community in Israel:
Every day the Voice of Israel radio broadcasts to Iran in Farsi. Twice a week Menashe Amir, a Persian Israeli, hosts a rather unexpected talk show. The callers are all from Iran and the vast majority are Muslim.
The show attracts two to six million listeners everyday from a country where the Jewish community is just 20,000 strong. [ed note: I think this number is low.] "I would say if 10 people are calling us from Iran, only one is talking about destroying Israel or death to Israel," said Mr Amir.
The Iranian callers cannot ring Israel directly. They have to phone a number in Germany which is patched through to the Jerusalem studio.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decided Tuesday that President Moshe Katsav should face charges for alleged rape, sexual harassment, obstruction of justice, fraud and breach of trust. The sexual assault charges relate to the claims of four women who worked for Katsav during his terms as president and before that as a cabinet minister.
Katsav's attorney, David Libai, told reporters Tuesday that the president would fulfill his promise to the High Court of Justice and suspend himself until Mazuz issued a final decision on the matter.
Now remember, the Israeli president is a largely ceremonial position. He lives in a nice house, not far from where I once lived in Jerusalem. And he cuts a lot of ribbons and goes to a lot of funerals. But the power lies in the office of prime minister.
"I Don't Think the Bush Administration Understands Iran" Saturday, January 20, 2007
That message loud and clear from Sen. Rockefeller, who's finally said out loud what anyone following this story has known for some time: The Bush Administration, and its water carriers, are following the Iraq playbook when it comes to Iran:
The new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday sharply criticized the Bush administration’s increasingly combative stance toward Iran, saying that White House efforts to portray it as a growing threat are uncomfortably reminiscent of rhetoric about Iraq before the American invasion of 2003.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who took control of the committee this month, said that the administration was building a case against Tehran even as American intelligence agencies still know little about either Iran’s internal dynamics or its intentions in the Middle East.
“To be quite honest, I’m a little concerned that it’s Iraq again,” Senator Rockefeller said during an interview with the New York Times in his office. “This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre.”
Looks Who's on the Wrong Side of the Ayatollah Now Friday, January 19, 2007
The drip, drip, drip of pressure against the president of Iran is growing -- and not from the right in the U.S. From the right in Iran. Feiler Faster has been reporting for some time that internal pressures against the president of Iran are ultimately a greater threat to his security than external pressure, and much more in our interest. Now the NYT reports that the supreme leader in Iran is sending public signals that Ahmadinejad should back off his saber rattling with the West:
Just one month after the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran to curb its nuclear program, two hard-line newspapers, including one owned by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on the president to stay out of all matters nuclear.
In the hazy world of Iranian politics, such a public rebuke was seen as a sign that the supreme leader — who has final say on all matters of state — might no longer support the president as the public face of defiance to the West.
Cheney Knew of Secret Talks Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Haaretz advances the ball on its exclusive story about secret talks between Israel and and Syria by reporting that Cheney was kept abreast. Cheney.
Senior officials in Washington told Haaretz that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was kept in the picture about these indirect talks between Syria and Israel. Ibrahim (Ayeb) Suleiman, the Syrian representative, also said this at his meetings with former Foreign Ministry director general Alon Liel, adding that Cheney had made no move to stop him from participating in the talks.
And yet the Bush administration just ignored the Baker-Hamilton proposals to negotiate with Syria and has encouraged the heavy-breathing about war with Iran.
Carter "Truly Imbecilic"? Monday, January 15, 2007
A reader writes in response to my recent post about Jimmy Carter: "My concern with Carter is not that he might have been "bought" by Arab money. Funding usually trails the opinion, not the other way around. Carter has been sympathetic to Arab viewpoints, so funding came to his programs. My concern was the inflammatory language and revisionist history in his book."
And later:
Mr. Carter's decision to wade into the debate with such a slanted tone does not help this problem; rather it feeds the divisions that polarize the dialogue. His factual errors are damning, and his selective memory smacks of propaganda, not history. There are villains and dirty deeds on both sides of this conflict; why Carter chose to take such a one-sided view of the battle is beyond me. His explanations to date have been unctuous and unbelievable. I have listened to several, and he sounds oblivious to the reality of his writings and his manner suggests that he is either lying about his motivations or truly imbecilic.
Prime Minister Dershowitz: "No Carter Without Me" Friday, January 12, 2007
Prime Minister Dershowitz is not content to savagely attack Jimmy Carter on the Internet: Now it turns out he's been saying that Carter should not be allowed to speak at Brandeis unless he debates Dershowitz. Eh? The president who negotiated the Camp David accords cannot be heard on the subject of Israel-Palestine unless he debates Alan Dershowitz?!? If Dershowitz is so concerned about balance, where's the other side?
As the Boston Globe reported this week, Carter originally turned down the invitation (Good for him!) but this week a compromise was worked out:
Last month, the former president told the Globe he had declined an invitation from a university trustee to speak at Brandeis, because it came with the suggestion he debate Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School who has criticized Carter's book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."
Carter's original decision set off a furor on campus and sparked a petition of more than 100 students and faculty members, who said Carter should be invited to speak without debating Dershowitz. Others contended that inviting Carter to speak without a debate would violate the university's responsibility to promote free speech.
The invitation to Carter also triggered questions about how open the predominantly Jewish campus is to views critical of Israel.
At least we finally have an answer of who should take the next open seat on the U.N. Security Council.
There Was Not a Single Spot on the Ground That Was Free of a Human Body
Time posts on its new Middle East blog an account of its correspondents visit to Mecca this year. It's quite arresting if you've got the time. Here's a key passage:
"The Hajj rituals are the ultimate lessons in self discipline, tolerance and patience. If you lose your temper and argue or fight with someone, your Hajj is spoilt. It is an incredible training in self restraint and acceptance. I never thought that I could spend 18 hours in a bus to cover a distance of 5 km and still be smiling. The traffic was like nothing experienced before. Coming from gridlocked Cairo you are used to being immobile for a while, but those 18 hours from Arafa to Mena topped it all. During the Hajj, the Saudi traffic police are in total control. They are continuously blocking routes and opening others and you are completely at their mercy and one has no choice, but to accept.
"You also accept that you walk shoulder to shoulder and chest to back with people you never thought you would be so physically close to. I never saw so many people in my life. When we reached Mena where we would spend three days to pelt Satan with pebbles, the people sleeping on the street, on the pavements and in white tents stretched as far as the eye could see. There was not a single spot on the ground that was free of a human body. In every direction there were crowds of people of every color and age. If they were not sleeping or standing everywhere, thousands and thousands were all moving together in the direction of the three pillars representing Satan to throw their pebbles. The moving sea of people were all chanting one line, "God we are coming to you.''
"It is at that moment that I realized the strength of my faith. We had traveled in luxury from Cairo and had stayed in five stars hotels in Medina and then air conditioned serviced tents in Mena, but I looked around me in every direction for miles and miles and it was one image: old men shuffling along in the sun leaning on walking sticks, able bodied men carrying their sick mothers on their shoulders, young mothers carrying their new born babies, whole families from Asia and Africa carrying all their belongings, bags, blankets and cooking utensils. They were all there on the most important journey of their life. Many of them had spent weeks and even months traveling from far away lands. We encountered a man who had carried his mother on his shoulders and made his way to Mecca sometimes by foot coming all the way from Ethiopia. Every time while we prayed in the Prophet's mosque in Medina or in the Holy Mosque in Mecca, we prayed for men, women and children who had died on that day. Many dream of dying in Islam's holiest places.
Not just Washington is for Muslims anymore. Word out of Jerusalem today that Israel has appointed its first Muslim cabinet minister. And the reaction is just what you'd expect if you've been reading the headlines here and here: It's a threat to Israel's religious heritage; it's a threat to the Arab campaign against "apartheid."
ISRAEL'S first Muslim cabinet minister received a baptism of fire yesterday as an extremist Jewish coalition partner termed him a "plague" and hard-line Arab nationalists denounced him as a "fig leaf" for apartheid.
EsterinaTartman, an MP from the YisraelBeiteinu (Israel is Our Home) party said that the appointment of GhalebMajadale to the post of science, culture and sport minister harms Israel's character as a Jewish state. "We need to burn this plague out of our midst and god willing, the lord will help us with that," she told Israel Radio.
Mr Majadale, 53, a businessman and veteran Labour party functionary from the northern town of Bakaal-Gharbiya, hailed his own appointment on Wednesday as "a historic, precedent- making step that I could not turn down." AmirPeretz, the defence minister and Labour party leader whose popularity has plummeted since Israel's failure to win last summer's war with Hezbollah, is believed to have made the appointment in order to secure the support of Mr Majadale and Arab Labour party members for his June bid for re-election as party chairman.
Is Carter "Bought and Paid for by Arabs?" Thursday, January 11, 2007
A wave of news, and, I'm afraid, a setback on the Carter front today. For newcomers to the site, Feiler Faster has been writing about the controversy surrounding Jimmy Carter's new book for some time now -- first criticizing the hysteria among Jews who deride a book by a well-known Arabist as, well, sympathetic to the Arabs; then, complimenting the much more interesting second-wave of commentary on the book that shows how Carter is actually going against decades of Christian thought on Israel. Helpful hint: Lambasting a Christian for being anti-Christian is much more newsworthy than lambasting him for being anti-Jewish.
So, first the news today: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today that 14 members of a Carter Center advisory board quite in protest of the book, which they view as being critical of Israel.
In a letter to Carter, the members of the Board of Councilors wrote that the former president had clearly abandoned your historic role of broker, in favor of becoming an advocate for one side."
"I wish the Carter Center continued success, but they they also have to traffic in truth and fact," said developer Steve Berman, one of the 14.
Fair enough. This was an advisory group that met infrequently, apparently, and if they don't like the book, fine. I wonder if some on the group would have resigned had he become an "advocate" for Israel, which is pretty standard for U.S. presidents and pretty much expected by many Jews. I doubt it. But then again, their behavior is more evidence that the topic of this book has gone from rational to irrational for many Jews very, very quickly.
To wit: Alan Dershowitz has fired yet another missile at Carter, responding to Carter's criticism that many in the U.S. media are bought and paid for by Jews by saying that Carter is bought and paid for by Arabs. Here's his opening salvo:
It now turns out that Jimmy Carter--who is accusing the Jews of buying thesilence of the media and politicians regarding criticism of Israel--has beenbought and paid for by Arab money. In his recent book tour to promote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter has been peddling a particularly nasty bit of bigotry. The canard is that Jews own and control the media,and prevent newspapers and the broadcast media from presenting an objective assessment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Jews have bought and paidfor every single member of Congress so as to prevent any of them fromespousing a balanced position. How else can anyone understand Carter's claims that it is impossible for the media and politicians to speak freelyabout Israel and the Middle East? The only explanation - and one thatCarter tap dances around, but won't come out and say directly - is that Jewscontrol the media and buy politicians. Carter then presents himself as thesole heroic figure in American public life who is free of financial constraints to discuss Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis.
The heart of his attack is here:
It now turns out that the shoe is precisely on the other foot. Recent disclosures prove that it is Carter who has been bought and paid for by anti-Israel Arab and Islamic money.
Journalist Jacob Laksin has documented the tens of millions of dollars that the Carter Center has accepted from Saudi Arabian royalty and assorted other Middle Eastern sultans, who, in return, Carter dutifully praised as peaceful and tolerant (no matter how despotic the regime). And these are only the confirmed, public donations.
Carter has also accepted half a million dollars and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred. Zayed's personal foundation, the Zayed Center, claims that it was Zionists, rather than Nazis, who “were the people who killed the Jews in Europe” during the Holocaust. It has held lectures on the blood libel and conspiracy theories about Jews and America perpetrating Sept. 11.
Another journalist, Rachel Ehrenfeld, in a thorough and devastating article on "Carter’s Arab Financiers," meticulously catalogues Carter’s ties to Arab moneymen, from a Saudi bailout of his peanut farm in 1976, to funding for Carter’s presidential library, to continued support for all manner of Carter’s post-presidential activities.
I consider this attack to be way over the top. Some of this money might be problematic, as Dershowitz points out. I don't know a lot of the details. But it's the broad brush here that grates. Since when is taking money from Muslims considered inherently anti-Jewish? Since when is working closely with Arabs considered anti-Israel? If either of these were true, Jews would not exist and Israel would not exist. Period. It's clear that the Carter Center, for instance, had many Jews on its board and advisory board who knew about these donations before today. If not, how could so many resign! It was fine with them before today, why today is it all suddenly suspect?
Meanwhile, one can presume that some of them gave money to the Center. Why list only the Arab and/or Muslim money and not list the Jewish money? It's okay for Jews to give money to support Carter's work but not Muslims and Arabs? This is Muslim-bating, pure and simple, and Jews in particular should be careful of this path.
The letter from the 14 who resigned accused Carter of no longer being a broker, of being an advocate. If we set the standard for involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and involvement in Jewish-Muslim relations, that parties can only talk with one side and take money from one side then we are going to have an awfully one-sided conversation. We'll be the only ones in the room.
As someone who has been to Iran twice in the last decade, including a long trip chronicled in Where God Was Born, I believe that a lot of the hype of surrounding Iran in the media these days bears an all-to-comfortable connection to the alarm that was hyped about Iraq a number of years ago, with the aid of a vicious dictator with a track record of gassing his own people. The voice of pause are too few, and too rare. But they seem to correspond to nearly anyone who's visited the country.
John Chane is the Bishop of Washington and a friend I made through the interfaith work I began in 2002 with the publication of Abraham. Long before that book was featured on the cover of TIME and became what it became, he offered his clout to an Abraham Salon I was trying to organize in WDC. Since then we've done a number of events together and I find him to be a gracious and passionate advocate of moderation and humanity in religion.
He's just come back from Iran and has posted a report here. Some excerpts:
The recent victory of reform-minded candidates in Iran's municipal elections, coming on the heels of the Iranian government's reprehensible conference for Holocaust deniers, neatly symbolizes that country's complex and confounding nature. Which event tells us most about that nation's future course?
I believe Americans and their religious leaders can help shape the answer to this question by establishing relationships with moderate religious leaders in the Islamic Republic. I recently visited Tehran with three other leaders in the Episcopal Church, a trip that deepened my belief that the future of our world hinges on fostering respect and cooperation among the three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. ... Over the course of three days in Tehran, we engaged in intense mutual scrutiny. In candid conversations with top religious and political leaders, we discussed the war in Iraq, the unhelpful rhetoric of both of our presidents, the controversy surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and our mutual fears over the volatility of the Middle East. We did not leave these meetings having come to agreement on all of the political issues that divide our two countries, but with the sense that our conversations had been fruitful and friendly, and that we should explore moving beyond dialog and into true partnership.
Where are the moderate voices in Islam? is a question I often get. Here's a moderate voice in Christianity on Iran. Will it be heard?
Following up on a story I talked about before the holidays, El Al, Israeli Airlines, appears to have completely caved to the right wing in Israel, which make up a bulk of its airline passengers. El Al has agreed to observe the Sabbath, and if it wants to break the Sabbath for some reason (i.e. a plane gets delayed from Europe and wants to fly a few hours later, as triggered the crisis some months ago), the airline has to ask permission of a leading rabbi in Israel. Ask permission from a rabbi who would likely be celebrating the Sabbath?!
In trying to save face, El Al released details of conditions it has purportedly turned down: "El Al said some of the rabbinical committee's main demands were not accepted. Among them were the demand for a veto-wielding rabbi who would rule on company decisions, as well as specifying sanctions against the airline in case the agreement was violated."
They say they are strong because they rejected a "veto-wielding rabbi!" Threats of boycott by conservative religious groups in the United States seem thrown around all too easily here, and seem less and less effective. In Israel, they still work apparently.
As I mentioned earlier this week, my brother and I have an annual predictions game. I'm going to post my predix for 2007 in the next day or so. One of our categories is picking world leaders who will no longer be in power by year's end. Looks like I may have missed a chance in not picking the prime minister of Israel. A new poll shows his chief rival, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, would trounce him in his own party. "Israel Radio on Thursday released the poll of 345 Kadima voters conducted by Panorama Markets. It found that 49 percent of Kadima voters would back the Israeli foreign minister as party leader if early elections were held, compared to 8.7 percent for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert."
A lot of talk about this report in the New York Sun that U.S. officials have captured documents in Iraq showing that Iran is influencing both Shia and Sunni insurgetsn in Iraq to create "total mayhem." The key graf:
An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force — the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads — is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.
Despite what you may hear, this story reinforces what I've been saying that reports of a broad Shia Crescent stretching from Iran to Gaza are grossly exaggerated. Just as the U.S. was doing back in the '80s when we supported Bin Laden (and Saddam) against various of our enemies (Afghanistan and Iran), Iran is primarily ensuring that the U.S. gets bogged down in Iraq, even if it means supporting their natural enemies. The rivalry between Iran and Iraq is too deep -- and too old -- to be easily erased.
From Haaretz: Theodor "Teddy" Kollek, who as mayor for more than a generation shepherded the transition of Jerusalem from a Mideast backwater with a glorious past to a world capital of culture and politics, died Tuesday at age 95.
"Teddy was Jerusalem and Jerusalem was Teddy," Mayor Uri Lupolianski said Tuesday. "With his spirit and personality he symbolized the true unified Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. The city of Jerusalem and the entire state are indebted to Teddy for his tremendous contribution to the people of Israel, the state and its capital."
Interesting tidbit: According to the article, he was named after Theodore Herzl, the legendary founder of Zionism.
Indiana Jones and Noah's Ark Monday, January 1, 2007
I've spent quite a lot of time in recent years both trekkingup Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, reading about all the people, from Czar Nicholas to astronauts to photographers on Air Force One, who claim to have found Noah's Ark, to the endless number of websites that track the hunt. In the course of that time, I once stumbled onto a "real actual script" that purported to be the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series, in which he races to find the ark. Makes sense. I flipped through the script online, then thought little about it.
Suddenly, today, Steven Spielberg confirmed that he will begin shooting the fourth episode this year, for release in 2008. No word on topic. Within minutes, the blogosphere erupted with speculation about the topic, and a movie buff in the UK has provided the backstory to the script I saw.
In the spring of 1995, Last Crusade screenwriter Jeffrey Boam privately admitted to having been asked to write a script, with subsequent rumours suggesting that the story concerned an attempt to foil a Soviet plot to establish a missile base on the moon, or had something to do with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico - or both. Then on May 29, 1996, a script entitled Indiana Jones And The Sons Of Darkness, credited to Boam (from a story by George Lucas), was posted on the internet by someone who claimed to have lifted it from Lucasfilm's offices. The script, which concerned a race by Indy to beat the Russians to the remnants of Noah's Ark, was removed fro the web a day after its initial posting, fuelling rumours that it was genuine. But four months and several cease-and-desist notices later, ambitious Indy fan, Robert Smith 'fessed up to having written the bogus script. "I was paid the ultimate compliment by those fans who believed the script was the real McCoy," he said later. Smith's confession didn't stop the ever-reliable Daily Mail from reporting that Sons Of Darkness was going ahead, with Kevin Costner as Indy's 'bad seed' brother.
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.
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.
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.
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 casusbelli 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.
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.
Egypt Joins Ahmadine-bashing Monday, December 25, 2006
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.
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?
And Mel Gibson for Prime Minister Thursday, December 21, 2006
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.
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.
I was thinking of these issues while reading an interesting 
