Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

IDF Lt. Col. and Israeli ambassador Michael Oren unnerved by heckling at UC Irvine (Orange Country Register)

Israeli ambassador Michael Oren drew a standing-room only crowd at a talk he delivered at U.C. Irvine earlier today.  But it wasn’t the type of warm reception he’d hoped for, as a considerable portion of the audience reminded him of his role as a PR flack for the Gaza war in his role as an IDF senior officer and neocon analyst funded by Shelley Adelson Shalem Center.  He was roundly booed and interrupted with cries of “murderer” as he attempted to complete his speech.  The only reason he did was that the protestors left the hall to continue their protest outside.

Desperate times require desperate measures.  And if this is what it takes to remind the world that Israel’s war machine continues its Occupation, and its massacre in Gaza continues to go uninvestigated internally or externally, then so be it.  Cries of “murderer” are certainly unwarranted.  I’d have been happy enough just to disrupt the proceedings without the histrionics.  But then again, I’m not Palestinian and have not known the suffering of Gaza or Lebanon.

This is entirely justified guerilla political action.  I’m sorry but just because Michael Oren wants to attain respectability for Israel by associating himself with a prestigious U.S. university doesn’t mean that his audience needs to sit respectfully and listen to the pap he delivers.

Let every Israeli diplomat and general know that they face the prospect of such frosty receptions wherever they speak in this country, unless it’s an ADL, Aipac, or Israel Bonds dinner.

Israel’s education ministry feels it must protect the purity of Israeli youth by preventing it from reading some of the finest Israeli erotic poetry in the classroom.  The result is a furious and hilarious rejoinder by some of Israel’s finest poets:

An Education Ministry decision to bar a Kfar Sava school from teaching sexually explicit poetry by Israeli writer Yona Wallach shows that Israel is becoming a mini-Iran, Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk said over the weekend.

After receiving complaints from parents of students in Edna Resh’s literature class at Rabin High School in Kfar Sava, Shlomo Hertzig, the ministry’s supervisor of literature education, ordered the school and Resh to stop teaching Wallach’s sexually explicit poems, Yedioth Ahronoth reported last week.

The title of the poem alone is delightfully subversive in Hebrew: Atah haverah sheli (“You are my girlfriend”).  Note that the pronoun is masculine, which makes the speaker gay.  The economy of the Hebrew is impossible to translate into English.  You can see why government bureaucrats cringe.  We can’t have any of this nonsense in our classroom says Likud minister, homophobe and prude, Gideon Saar.

Let’s start the ball rolling with Yoram Kaniuk, who calls an Ayatollah an Ayatollah:

“We are gradually becoming a mini-Iran,” said Kaniuk. “Everyone talks about the threat of Iran’s bombs and missiles, but they forget that the worst thing is this lousy religion, which is flourishing nowadays. They’re taking over our lives. It’s terrible what they’ve done to the Jewish religion. Yona Wallach is a terrific poet.”

But the prize for funniest rejoinder to this priggishness goes to Meir Wieseltier:

“Maybe [Hertzig] thinks there’s no need to teach poems, just to teach how to raise the flag during roll call,” said Wieseltier. “The flag is raised during roll call with a rope, not a poem.”

Elie Wiesel and usual pro-Israel suspects, Dershowitz and Jon Voight (partially obscured in background) protest Ahmadinejad UN speech (AP)

Elie Wiesel’s much ballyhooed full page N.Y. Times ad came out today. It offers strong support for the Iranian reform movement and denounces the clerical regime. The only purely political stance it advocates is sanctions. There is no mention of force. As close as the statement gets is:

Concrete measures much be taken to protect this new nation of dissidents so that their sacrifice is not…in vain.

This statement echoes the current Israeli policy which advocates punishing sanctions to be followed, when they fail, presumably by calls for a military attack. I presume that in a few months we’ll see another ad by Wiesel with those Nobel laureates foolish enough to sell the spirit of their medal for a mess of porridge and a few bunker bombs.

There is one strange notion in the text of this ad. It calls on Presidents Obama, Sarkozy, Medvedev, and Gordon Brown and Chancellor Merkel to “put an end to this outrage.” How are they supposed to do this? And why would Wiesel presume that it would be a good thing for them to do so? This statement could easily be construed as an incipient call for intervention in Iran’s internal afffairs. Certainly, the next step would be an ad with such a call for regime change or military attack.

Another element in the rhetoric to which I object: there’s a distinct notion of western noblesse oblige about the whole thing.  Iran’s regime has “now attained new levels of horrror” with “thousands arrested…tortured, raped, and killed, many by hanging.”  Sounds pretty bad doesn’t it?  Till you stop to think, isn’t there another country in the region which kills on a far larger scale and with far more technological dexterity?  One that is currently under consideration by the UN for a war crimes referral to the International Criminal Court.  Hmmm, who could that be?  And could it be an accident that Elie Wiesel, friend of Dershowitz and Hagee, might have an ulterior motive in pointing to Iran as the supreme menace to world peace?

To be clear, this post is not a defense of Iran’s current regime.  Anyone who reads this blog knows that it is not my purpose.

A few interesting notes about the signatories and those who are missing. First, almost all signers are scientists and I’m not sure why we should trust a scientist speaking about Iranian political affairs any more than Iran analysts, academics and Iranian activists, almost all of whom speak of sanctions as counter-productive. Second, Desmond Tutu signed an earlier Wiesel ad which did not call for sanctions. He is missing from this ad. Also missing are Israel’s latest laureate, Ada Yonath, who pointedly attacked the Israeli Occupation the very day she won her award. It must’ve taken some courage for her to resist the urge to sign. Predictably among the signers is perhaps the most extreme right-winger among them, Orthodox pro-settler extremist, Robert Aumann. Other than Betty Williams, Jody Williams and Wole Soyinka, there are no Peace or Literature laureates at all. This includes Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama (missing). Missing also is the Iranian Peace Prize laureate, Shirin Abadi.  Missing also is Alan Dershowitz, who never won a Nobel. Maybe they’ll have to create a new category for pro-Israel propagandist.

Interestingly, Wiesel also spearheaded an earlier letter after the June Iranian elections that was formulated to support Ebadi.  That letter too contained 44 signatories.  But not the same 44.  In fact, 15 of the original signers are missing in the current ad, which leads me to believe that most, if not all, decided not the join this effort because they disagreed with it.

M.J. Rosenberg reports at Huffington Post that the Senate approved an Aipac-inspired Iran sanctions bill with only FIVE MINUTES of debate and only three senators on the floor!  How’s that for democracy?