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

I read with great interest Liza Sabater’s post about her Typepad Christmas Wish List. I thought I’d add my own wish list since she covered some, but by no means all, of my own wishes (all of which have been relayed to TP via Help tickets).

E-Mail Notification

First, I heartily agree with Liza’s gripe about TP’s lack of an e mail notification system. Why does Movable Type have such a feature (which people who know and use it say is marvelous) but TP not? I’d like to ask for a feature that the MT notification system does NOT include: allow a blog author or blog reader to sign up not only for notice of all blog post updates; but also for blog posts in specific Categories. If my reader is interested in Mideast Peace, why should he have to get a notice that I’ve updated my blog with a restaurant review?

Blog Site Ban

TP has a Comment Ban feature which prevents an unwanted commenter from leaving a comment on my blog. The ban feature uses the IP address to detect and disable access. But what if an unwanted commenter uses a different IP address to access my site? He can leave a comment.

Furthermore, why shouldn’t a blogger be able to deny an unwanted party access to their ENTIRE SITE (not just Comments)? Personally, one of Blogcritics.org’s site owners visited my site, left a nasty comment, AND copied and pasted one of my blog posts to his site. I’ve heard of other situations in which other web vandals have copied photographic images from sites and then passed the images off as their own. There’s too much junk going on on the web (and unfortunately in the blog world too) and we need tools to control some of it better. Site banning should be based on the URL of the unwanted visitor, not on IP.

Amazon.com Links Within Posts

Now, you can list Amazon.com products within your Typelists along with a jpg image. Why can’t you do the same within a post? I like to use Amazon.com books and records to illustrate reviews I’ve written in my blog. If I want to do this, I have to first create a Typelist entry, then go to my blog display and capture the hyperlink info and then go to the post and insert the hyperlink into it. All this should be automated as it is in Typelists.

Allow Posts with Html Code
If I’ve written a long essay in MS Word or any other word processing program which is code rich, there is no easy way to upload such an essay into a TP Post box while retaining the code. This is a tremendous drag when you have an 18 page essay and you have to go into the TP post box and add all the formatting manually. Another example, if you do mobile blogging say from your e mail program–why shouldn’t TP upload your e mail blog post with all the formatting intact? Now, TP strips all code and formatting out of such e mail-to-blog posts. If Blogger.com allows you to do this why can’t TP?

Ability to view & maintain files uploaded to TP’s server

If you upload lots of photo images (or any other files) to your TP blog via the TP server, you can’t view , maintain or delete them. This is a drag. And for someone who’s worried about trespassing the maximum memory capacity or bandwidth usage this could be a real problem. Thanks to the author of A Welch View, whose Typepad Christmas List trackbacked to my post AND reminded me of an important issue which I, & other TPers have brought up before with TP Help staff.

Personalize the New Post Screen

I may be getting old, but why do I feel that the longer I sit at my PC composing posts in those tiny TP Post boxes with the tiny font sizes, the blinder I get? Does TP want to be responsible for blinding its users? I’d like greater flexibility in configuring the New Post box. Allow larger font sizes and allow for increasing the box size.

Keyword Search of All TP Blogs

I’d like TP to increase our ability to interact with our fellow TP bloggers. Sure, there’s trackback, comments, TP UserGroup and countless other efforts to create community. But I’d like the ability to search all TP blogs via keyword search. I’d also like to be able to bring up a list of every TP blog that covers any particular category (say, Web-Tech).

TP photo blogs

Why are the photo blogs the orphan stepchild to the text blogs? The level of development, innovation and sophistication evident in the text blogs is not matched by the photo blogs. Just a few gripes:

1. you can only upload photos one at a time (no zip file uploads). If you have 50 images to upload you can only do a maximum of 15 (I believe) and the upload is much more likely to fail than if you uploaded one at a time.

2. horizontal images are squished so that they will fit into the photo gallery’s vertical default thumbnail display. I saw a few of my images mauled like this & decided I needed a better photo gallery software. I now use Pbase.com which has solved both of the issues above.

Seattle’s Lake Washington Boulevard crosswalks are a hazard to pedestrians and motorists. Many (but not all, thankfully) drivers have forgotten about that quaint old concept of pedestrian right of way. That’s why crossing that street can be a real crap shoot. And if you, like me, cross with a dog and infant–crap shoot isn’t the ideal or safest way to cross the street.

All of us drive along Lake Washington Boulevard and many of us who hike the Madrona Woods trails also use the Lake Washington Blvd. crosswalks in order to get to the Lake itself. I find using these crosswalks an increasing hazard due to speeding, negligence and just plain rudeness of drivers. I walk my dog almost every day through Madrona Woods and cross at the crosswalk in front of the Madrona Dance Studio. Often, I also have my 2 1/2 year old son, Jonah with me strapped to a backpack. Even standing smack dab in the crosswalk, oncoming traffic doesn’t stop.

I’ve developed a entire repertory of crosswalk techniques:

1. take two steps into the crosswalk and beg them to stop

2. stand at the roadside but point insistently at the painted lines indicating a crosswalk (& hence pedestrian right of way)

3. walk into the middle of the road and dare them to stop

I don’t mean this to sound as if I’m a reckless pedestrian (I most definitely am not). I surely value my own health and that of my family above making a point about driving etiquette. But the driving along Lake Washington is dangerous to pedestrians, period.

The worst driving behavior I’ve seen involves speeding (do any cars drive under 40 mph on Lake Washington Blvd?), inattention (try looking at a map in your front seat while a man, dog and baby are attempting to cross in front of you), or cluelessness (how ’bout the driver who blithely drives by me standing in the middle of the crosswalk with his hands upraised as if to say (”What you want me to do?”). Sometimes, drivers recognize their mistake, slam on their brakes to try to stop, and in the process come very close to initiating a 2 or more car pileup. I’ve heard plenty of screeching tires on the Boulevard!

This hazard presents a serious danger to pedestrians. Our Council members and City agencies (Traffic, Police) should take notice and address it. I sent an e mail to Richard Conlin about this subject and he replied (this was about a year ago) that the City was attempting to address this issue comprehensively in order to encompass all City crosswalks. All well and good–but what was the outcome? Nothing’s changed down on Lake Washington Blvd.!

My strong suggestions:

1. mark crosswalks much more clearly with blinking yellow lights or (short of that) signs without lights (many crosswalks are unmarked except for the actual painted crosswalk)

2. traffic enforcement action to target speeders and those who ignore the right of pedestrians

3. clear all underbrush and debris away from Madrona Woods trails that abut roadside crosswalks

I contacted the Department of Traffic last year about the tall grass and weeds which obscured driver views of pedestrians using the Madrona dance Studio crosswalk. It took them several months of interagency battling before an agency acknowledged responsibility and removed the obstruction. Surely, we can do better.

I spend a lot of time creating and editing the posts in my blog. But I spend an enormous amount of time figuring out how I can make my blog more accessible on the web. Basically, how can I get more readers to see what I write? I think this issue is grossly underaddressed by most blog services (including my own Typepad). They feel if they’ve hooked up with weblogs.com or blo.gs that they’ve done their duty. Well, not in my book.

So we bloggers have to do a lot of that work ourselves. You do the basic things like submitting your site to all the search engines and blog directories you can think of. Depending what you think of webrings and their efficacy, you might register with a few of them. These are the basics. But there’s lots more you can do.

Scribbling.net has a great blog post about improving Google’s ability to search and link to your site Help the Googlebot understand your web site. A few suggestions really sounded dead on target:

1. Instead of using hyperlink titles like “here,” or “there” or “this,” use a descritive titles like “John F. Burns’ report from Iraq.” This allows the googlebot to search and archive more of your blog.

2. Always give photo images an alt= title. If you do, then the Googlebot will also search and link to your images. If you don’t, Google won’t even know you have any images in your blog.

3. Link early and link often. In other words, bring the world of the web into your blog. The more you link to others in your blog; the more they will link to you.

There is of course much more at Scribbling.net worthy of your attention. If you’re more technically savvy than me, Scribbling.net’s code related suggestions will probably resonate as well.

As a fellow TPer suggested at the Typepad UserGroup forum, you can range across the blog world looking for likeminded bloggers. Get to know them. Leave a comment at their site. Link to them if you like what they’re doing; and ask them to link to you. When you’ve created what you think is an interesting post, go to a web forum dedicated to whatever your post topic is (for example, I post often about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and will provide links to forums like the Charlie Rose Show and the New York Times–each of which has a Mideast Peace forum) and give yourself a discreet plug with a hyperlink to the post. Write a post in your blog about a post you liked in someone else’s blog. If you’re writing about a TP blogger, you have a great excuse to use the trackback feature!

If you don’t participate in a group (or “Community”) blog like Open Source Politics, consider doing so. Group blogs provide another means of expanding your potential viewing audience. I participate in Open Source Politics. And while it doesn’t provide me with a huge number of blog visitors, those who do stop by my blog and comment are thoughtful and serious readers, just the kind a blogger likes to have. With that piece of advice, there’s one thing to kind in mind: find out beforehand from the Group Blog administrator whether you as author will be able to control your own posts and comments left with them. A site like Blogcritics.org does not allow this and I find it irksome, which is why I withdrew as a Blogcritics author.

Don’t use your blog service’s domain name as your blog URL. Get your own domain name through an outfit like Godaddy.com. My blog hits roughly doubled after I got my own domain name and completed the forwarding process. For some reason, search engines don’t like spidering through a URL like http://richards1052.typepad.com/, possibly because there are so many other bloggers with the same domain name. The search engines much prefer http://www.richardsilverstein.com.

I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg. If you have other handy suggestions for improving your blog’s popularity, let me know.

Since 1999, Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony, has engaged in a courageous, visionary quest to show that music can provide the bridge among the warring peoples of the Middle East. In truth, the inspiration for Barenboim’s quest came from Edward Said, who describes in Bonding across Cultural Boundaries how he met Barenboim at a London party and, after screwing up his courage, invited him to a late night dinner at a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant where they bonded deeply both as friends and as artistic and political collaborators. So began a remarkable friendship between Jew and Arab Christian and musician and literary critic.

The two first spoke together publicly at a 1995 Columbia University conference on the music and politics of Wagner. The interchange was so successful and stimulating that they continued by recording private conversations and eventually delivered a series of public talks at Carnegie Hall. They then decided to redact all of this material into a book, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. It is an impassioned discussion about politics and culture, the importance of a sense of place, the differences between writing prose and music, the difficulty of playing Wagner, the importance of great teachers, and the power of culture to transcend all national and political differences——something they both witnessed when they brought together young Arab and Israeli musicians to play at Weimar in 1999. Scott Simon interviewed Barenboim and Said together for NPR’s Weekend Edition (Parallels and Paradoxes NPR Weekend Edition interview) after the book came out.

Their first musical “collaboration” consisted of Said persuading Barenboim in 1999 to perform a recital at Bir Zeit University. It was an extraordinary musical, historical and political moment. In his Op-Ed article in the Times, Said notes that Barenboim’s was “the first recital ever at the [Bir Zeit] University and the first by an Israeli in Palestine.”

The New York Times’ Serge Schmemann memorably chronicles in Moonlight and Mendelssohn in the West Bank a later performance by Barenboim at Ramallah’s Palestine National Conservatory:

The old Steinway grand had seen better days, but when Daniel Barenboim drew the first nostalgic notes of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata from it today, 200 neatly uniformed Palestinian students froze in delight.

Music, and especially music of this caliber from a live Israeli master, is not something that has often graced young lives more wrapped up in the daily misery of curfews, roadblocks, dangers and hatreds.

After closing the recital with a four-handed composition performed with a Palestinian pianist, Valdes asks Barenboim to explain his motivation for spearheading a musical project devoted to Mideast peace:

At the conclusion of that recital - believed to be the first in Palestinian territory by a Jewish artist since Yehudi Menuhin played there decades ago - Barenboim joined Arab pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar in a round of four-hand Schubert. „I felt the need to stretch out my hand, to bring together people who are suffering such animosities,” Barenboim said at the time.

In a similar vein, Schmemann quotes Barenboim’s remarks to the Palestinian Conservatory audience:

“Each one of us has a responsibility to do what is right, and not to wait for others to do it,” he said. “My way is music. What I can do is play music, play music for you, and maybe this way, in a very small way for these few moments, we are able to build down the hatred that is so much in the region.”

In a later interview with Schmemann, he expands upon his earlier statement:

“I’m not a politician,” he said. “I don’t have a plan to end the conflict. But I think the lesson we have to learn from the 20th century is that every human being — small, young as you or older like I — has to think of his responsibility as a human being and not always depend on the politicians and the governments.”

NPR’s Israel correspondent also covered Barenboim’s Palestine National Conservatory visit .

Barenboim and Said’s second collaboration was the West-Eastern-Divan Workshop. Here is how Said described its inception:

Daniel, Yo-Yo Ma and I convened a carefully selected group of 78 Arab and Israeli musicians aged 18 to 25 in Weimar, Germany, the European cultural capital in 1999. Even eight young Syrians turned up, along with Palestinians, Egyptians, Israeli, Arabs and Jews and Lebanese, complemented by 12 Germans.

Barenboim’s vision was for the musicians to live and play together and thus learn how to come to terms with each other’s musical, religious, national and political background. They have done so gloriously throughout Europe. Here is Said’s description of how things went for the young musicians:

During those three weeks, all sorts of surprising things happened: an Israeli soldier-cellist and a lissome Syrian violinist seemed to have fallen for each other, heated arguments about identity and politics dissolved into incredible ensemble playing and everyone was struck dumb with horror during a visit to nearby Buchenwald.

Lesley Valdes in Lessons in Harmony (Symphony, January/February 2000) adds further background to the development of the Diwan project:

Youth orchestras proliferate. But until the Divan, it is doubtful there had been one in which Arabs and Jews shared music stands, let alone dormitory rooms - as Barenboim insisted during this experiment in musical and extracurricular harmony. Divan players hailed from Israel (both Jews an Palestinians) and from nations with which the Jewish state has had essentially warring relations: Lebanon, Syria, Egypt. There were also students from Iraq, Tunisia, and Germany, and a few second-generation Middle-Easterners from the U.S.

Valdes quotes Said, who nicely summarizes what the Divan can and cannot do:

„This isn’t about politics, but about learning how to listen to each other and perhaps understand each other better, using our common language, which is music,” Said observed early in the festival. „We are not going to solve the political problems of what is really quite a small land, but we surely should not wait for the politicians before we ourselves can meet.” And, he added, „there is this parallel between life and music: that in an orchestra we have to listen not only to ourselves but to each other, constantly finding the way each passage connects and interrelates to what comes next and what has come before. „If only life followed the rules of an orchestra!” the humanist remarked with a sigh.

Truth be told, this is unfortunately a European venture, based in Europe. The plain sad fact is that this project could not be sustained today in any Middle Eastern country. But one hopes that sometime in the near future the Diwan will perform in all the major capitals of the Middle East.

In August, 2003, Avraham Burg wrote an extrordinary article in Yediot Achronot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. It is a powerful, elemental jeremiad directed against current Israeli policy and the climate of escapism and denial dominating Israeli society. It was subsequently translated into other languages and printed in Le Monde, The Guardian, The Forward and the International Herald Tribune. I’ve chosen to link to the Guardian version, Avraham Burg wrote an extrordinary article in Yediot Achronot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. It is a powerful, elemental jeremiad directed against current Israeli policy and the climate of escapism and denial dominating Israeli society. It was subsequently translated into other languages and printed in Le Monde, The Guardian, The Forward and the International Herald Tribune. I’ve chosen to link to the Guardian version, The Zionist Revolution is Dead.

I quote long passages from the piece simply because of its undeniable power and the chilling message it presents to anyone who cherishes or values what the State of Israel might stand for if it ever lived up to its original promise to be a ‘light unto the nations.’

First a word about Avraham Burg. He was the Knesset Speaker under the previous Labor government (1999-2003). He is currently one of the few Labor representatives who retains a seat in the Knesset. Burg’s father is Dr. Yosef Burg, founder of the National Religious Party and one of those who was “there at the creation” with David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and others who witnessed the establishment of the State of Israel. Burg is an observant Jew with dovish views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–quite a rarity in Israel.

So to hear such a person pronounce the death knell for Zionism would be a bit like hearing George Washington’s son announcing that the American dream for which his father fought was on its death bed. To paraphrase a pungent aphorism: “There is nothing like death to focus the mind.”

Though I believe that Burg has somewhat overdramatized his case in order to “focus our minds” and make us realize how desperate Israel’s position is–this doesn’t in any way diminish the power of his words or their immense significance in the current political debate.

The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.

In the next passage, Burg satirically alludes to financial scandals which Sharon faces:

The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there’s nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.

Anyone who has ever visited Israel will understand the dark humor in Burg’s reference to a “nation of chatterboxes,” because Israelis love to talk, to argue, to joke, to berate. They are a nation of talkers and storytellers. To hear that the “chatterboxes have fallen dumb” is another dramatic image that reinforces the desperation facing Israel today.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.

This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism’s superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.

What is especially telling about the following section is the cause and effect relationship that Burg notes between Israel’s cruel and immoral treatment of the Palestinians and the moral and social decline in the quality of Israeli life:

We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don’t hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don’t even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands.Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

Here Burg recognizes that like the French in Algeria and Vietnam and like the Americans in Iraq today Israel cannot kill enough guerilla opponents to keep up with the swell of new recruits added each time you kill another guerilla. This reminds me of that Dutch boy trying to stick his finer into the holes in the dike to prevent a deluge:

We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below from the wells of hatred and anger, from the “infrastructures” of injustice and moral corruption.

If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.

The following passage is the heart of Burg’s message. The fire, passion and despair for the future burn even brighter than in any previous or subsequent passage of the article. One can tell that Burg himself would love to be the Prime Minister in order to deliver this message to his people. Part of his profound despair lies in his awareness that in the present political climate there is very little chance that he either could become the Labor Party leader or that he could win an election for Prime Minister. Burg knows how to end the conflict. But he also knows that Israel in its present state of historical amnesia and moral blindness would never elect him to do so:

Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:

The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.

Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish state—not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.

Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let’s institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.

Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse—separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements—all of them—and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.

Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.

Burg compares Arik Sharon unfavorably to previous strong-willed Israeli Prime Ministers. His message: “woe to a nation with ‘leaders’ such as these:”

But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head. David Ben-Gurion sometimes erred, but he remained straight as an arrow. When Menachem Begin was wrong, nobody impugned his motives. No longer. Polls published last weekend showed that a majority of Israelis do not believe in the personal integrity of the prime minister—yet they trust his political leadership. In other words, Israel’s current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law—combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead.

In the following section, Burg makes a very important distinction between morality and politics by saying that the utter direness of the current Israeli predicament transcends politics. He adds that those who look at the political quagmire as an opportunity for political advantage are doing themselves, their party and the Israeli public a terrible disservice:

This is the time for clear alternatives. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position—black or white in effect—is collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What’s needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.

Israel and the Occupied Territories Whenever I read an article with a title like Tony Judt's, Israel: The Alternative, I cringe. That's because whenever someone comes up with an 'alternative' to Israel, it's usually something that subverts, negates or extinguishes the Israel that I, and so many other Jews, know and value. And so it is with Judt's opus in the New York Review of Books, which blithely sounds the death knell of Israel and ushers in a new and idyllic age of peace and brotherhood between Israelis and Palestinians living together harmoniously in a ...

I've noticed that in perusing the web for news, information and opinion about the Mideast conflict, there are many individual sites.  But there are few sites which act as a compendium or directory for all the others.  So to answer this need, I’ve compiled a comprehensive (well, as comprehensive as possible) list of online American Jewish and Israeli resources devoted to Mideast peace.  I’ve created three sections: one devoted to organizations; one to weblogs and the last to media and research resources.  No such list as this can be truly comprehensive.  Organizations may have been left out unintentionally.  Organizations whose mission appears anti-Zionist have also been omitted.  If you feel I have left out a significant peace resource, please let ...

In today's New York Times, Edward Rothstein tackles Tony Judt's incendiary New York Review of Books article, Israel: The Alternative . Rothstein's critique of Judt's thesis that Israel as the Jewish homeland is obsolete is at Seeking an Alternative to a Jewish State. Rothstein's aim is to point out that while Judt's claims may be overstated they are hardly more radical than the views of Israel's own intellectuals and political thinkers. I think it is important to point out to those who believe that Israel and Zionism are monolithic entities that there are a wealth of political perspectives expressed in Israeli society from the most bellicose and triumphalist ...

UPDATE: Smoky Mountain Journal seems to have gone the way of all blogs and is no longer of this world I'm sorry to say. However, a similar Blue Ridge blog has taken its place or at least tries to take up where it left off and I commend it to your attention. An important part of blogging is not merely creating and maintaining your own blog, but visiting the blogs of those who visit you; and searching for blogs that complement your own interests. Doing this opens you up to new ideas and new blogging possibilities. In travelling the blog world, I've discovered a wonderful phenomenon: the ...

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story on Tariq Ramadan, the European Muslim intellectual who has attacked French Jewish intellectuals for their support of the War in Iraq. Those attacked by Ramadan waged a counterattack of their own in which they accused him of anti-Semitism as well as intellectual opportunism in speaking tolerantly to Jewish audiences and militantly to Muslims. I wrote a post critical of Ramadan's views on the issue: Tariq Ramadan: A European Muslim Attacks French Jewish Intellectuals. Then I read a Muslim blogger's post which quoted Ramadan giving a very strong affirmation of Judaism as a kindred religion to Islam, and one deserving of Muslims' deep respect. I decided I needed ...