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

My family loves Kubota Garden, one of the earliest Japanese gardens in Seattle. It’s located in the Rainier Beach neighborhood on the south shore of Lake Washington. Fujitaro Kubota bought the land on which the garden exists in 1927. Then he built a family home and created a nursery business and eventually a garden. Now it is a Seattle city park and beautiful Japanese garden. In my opinion it is one of the more beautiful and least-known local park.

Last weekend, the sun shone full and gorgeous and we decided to pack Jonah in the car and make a visit. The garden is set on 20 acres, though it feels quite compact. The major features are a small manmade “mountain,” a natural stream and waterfalls, a set of “necklace” ponds replete with ducks and Japanese painted bridges, a lawn and stately old evergreens and other tree varieties. The mountain was created in the 1960s by hauling in thousands of tons of rocks and building a promontory several hundred feet high giving a visitor splendid views of the lawn, trees and ponds below.

For an excellent summary of Kubota Garden and its history see Historylink.org.

tags japanese-gardening, kubota-garden, Seattle

The Israeli Army possesses some of the most sophisticated weaponry known in the world today. It’s counterterrorism capability is the envy of many military forces including the U.S. Its very presence has been known to throw the fear of God into Israel’s enemies (though not lately). And now, the Israeli Army has added a new weapon to its arsenal: the common bank heist.

Israel has utilized many morally depraved weapons in its war against Palestinian terror (to be fair, the Palestinians seem to have a more reduced, but no less lethal arsenal of morally depraved tactics): extrajudicial killing, targeted assassination (which somehow always cause “collateral damage” to innocent civilians), demolition of the family homes of suicide bombers, expropriation of land, uprooting of Paletinian olive groves, etc. But this new one, if it wasn’t equally heinous would actually be comic–a dark comedy mind you, but comic nevertheless.

The story is chronicled in the New York Times by James Bennett in Israelis, in Raid on Arab Banks, Seize Reputed Terrorist Funds. The Israelis apparently barged their way into Cairo Amman and Arab Bank branches and, using Palestinian bank personnel kidnapped (or to be more technical “arrested”) the night before, stole (or should we say “appropriated”?) between $6.7-9 million from “hundreds” of personal and institutional Palestinian bank accounts. I wonder why the Israelis themselves don’t know how much they’ve stolen?

According to Bennett, Israeli officials claimed this expedition to enrich the Israeli treasury “was aimed carefully at terrorist financing and in line with President Bush’s call for action against such funds.” I’d say it was aimed about as “carefully” as those missles aimed at terrorists which kill innocent civilians. How are we to know how they determined the funds were tainted? What was their proof? They certainly didn’t go before a judge to get permission (I’m certain no judge would give it to them). In the Israeli system, the military doesn’t have to give much in the way of explanation of its actions and this is yet another example of the deficiencies of such a system of governance (or misgovernance).

And let’s not forget the laughable justification that the bank robbery was “in line with President Bush’s call for action against such funds.” Oh really??? I wasn’t aware that Bush sanctioned bank robbery as a tool in the war against terrorism. From the State Department’s hostile response, I’d say they “misinterpreted” Pres. Bush’s “call for action.”

If you’re like me, when you first visited Madrona (for me it was while house-hunting) you fell in love with its beautiful old homes, stately Cascades views and its wooded setting. After all, if you didn’t care about these qualities you could’ve found much more house at much lower cost by buying a suburban palazzo out in Issaquah.

One day last spring, I walked past a 1904 Craftsman home I had long admired only to see it being razed to the ground. The new owner intended to install a swimming pool and cabana in its place. I blogged about this incident in Another Seattle Craftsman Comes Crashing Down. The shock of this loss of such a beautiful old home in my neighborhood led me to explore what safeguards are in place to maintain and preserve our old housing stock. The unfortunate answer is that presently there is little that can be done. The destruction of this home and its replacement use was perfectly legal.

That being said, there are important ways to work within the community to educate our Madrona residents about the value of historic home preservation. At the February Madrona Community Council meeting, Beth Chave of the Department of Neighborhoods-Historic Preservation, introduced the issue to her audience asking it to consider the differences between a neighborhood like Madrona and one like Issaquah. Madrona has a long and full history, it has scores of fine old homes and woods and Cascades views. All of these constitute a treasure and we residents are stewards of that treasure. If we ignore or forget what we have then we stand a good chance of losing it.

So it is incumbent on us to learn about Madrona’s architectural heritage. In order to appreciate this historic legacy, we must inventory and study these great public buildings, Queen Anne Victorians, Ellsworth Storey homes and Craftsman bungalows. To paraphrase the historian George Santayana: “those who do not understand their history are doomed to lose it.”

After hearing a panel of respected film critics rave on Charlie Rose about The Girl with the Pearl Earring, I was eager to see it. After leaving the theater, it took me some time to decide what I thought about it. The effect is has on you is very subtle and you have to think long and hard before you can decide whether you liked it or not.

Ultimately, I was left feeling cold by the movie. While telling a story about a man totally immersed in a passionate pursuit of artistic beauty, the story left me strangely unmoved. There is very little plot to speak of and characterization is quite meager. Most characters are either ciphers or caricatures (e.g. Vermeer’s wife and his patron). Even Vermeer himself seems an incohate mass of artistic and sensual impulse with little or no depth.

The only character who is more fully fleshed out is Scarlett Johannson’s lead character, the servant girl, Griet. Make no mistake, she is quite a compelling character. Her creativity and artistic inquisitiveness contrasted with her lowly, uneducated origins make her very appealing.

What does this film have going for it? Visuals, visuals and more visuals! The scenes in which Vermeer teaches the maid to mix his paint are breathtakingly beautiful. I can’t remember when I’ve seen such luscious colors in cinema. The blues are stunningly, electrifyingly blue. The coppers, greens and oranges equally so. As she mixes these colors in Vermeer’s studio, bringing together chemicals and minerals from the earth’s core to create such incredible visual beauty, it is as if earth and eye melded all of Nature’s forces to create Painting.

The passion in this film is undoubtedly in the painting and not in traditional cinematic elements like story or character. Everything that is not about art seems incidental and that seems a shame. A film that had more of a balance of these elements might have satisfied more fully and deeply. I liken it to cargo handlers who load a plane with the entire cargo wedged into the far back corner. When that plane takes off, it will strain under the imbalanced cargo distrbution and perhaps crash. While Girl With a Pearl Earring is by no means such a disaster, it achieves its full potential fitfully and inconsistently and thereby disappoints.

The film’s final scene, in which one of Vermeer’s servants brings Griet the very pearl earrings she wore when he painted the famous picture (and which caused her expulsion from the household), is also a letdown. The entire film has been about Art to the exclusion of all else. At the end, the director would have us believe that Vermeer’s transfer of the real earrings to Griet is some kind of meaningful act. To me, on the contrary, it seems like a betrayal of all that both Vermeer and Griet held dear. In the face of the extraordinary beauty of the painting, centered in the single luminous flash of white paint on the girl’s earring, how can the real thing mean anything significant?

Ari Shavit has published an astonishing & deeply disturbing interview, Survival of the Fittest, with the Zionist historian Benny Morris in Haaretz. In the interview, Morris reveals an outspoken anti-Arab racism and a willingness to discard all moral qualms in the effort to condone acts of Israeli terror during the 1948 War. I have read deeply both in historical sources and secondary research about Zionism and this is perhaps the most deplorable, troubling and ultimately maddening article on the Israeli-Arab conflict I’ve ever read.

What makes Morris’ words even more disturbing is that in his Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987), he for the first time laid out for the all Israelis and the world to see the atrocities and expulsion ordered by Israeli military and political leaders against the Arab population within Israel.

Before that, Israelis honored a national myth which proclaimed the 1948 War as a glorious, magical and morally untainted victory attained by our glorious boys in shining armor atop white horses. While this was a comforting myth, many Israeli knew vaguely that bad things were probably done in their name. But David Ben Gurion, who Morris names as the explicit architect of the expulsion and transfer of Israeli Arabs, hushed up these acts of terror. Very few who knew of these crimes ever spoke publicly about them.

I can remember visiting Peretz Kidron in London in 1979 while he was Israel correspondent for Pacifica Radio News. He told me he had recently translated Yitzchak Rabin’s autobiography, Pinkas Sherut (The Rabin Memoirs in the English-language edition) into English. Kidron mentioned that Rabin had admitted to him that Israeli troops had deliberately and systematically expelled Arabs. At my urging, he called in a report to Pacifica on the subject. But this type of public admission was rare until Morris came along. With the publication of his book, for the first time Israelis could see documented historical evidence, both oral and written, that such crimes happened and were ordered (not just improvised).

In Morris’ upcoming revision of his earlier book, he deepens his research, finds many more incidences of mass murder and rape, and for the first time finds strong evidence that the entire policy of expulsion and transfer originated with Ben Gurion himself. These are bold, shocking and ultimately convincing accusations.

But the problem with Morris is that while his research appears to be impeccable, the moral and political conclusions he draws are utterly divorced from the facts which he himself has uncovered. In fact, Morris believes that “preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts.” An incredibly jarring and bizarre statement, what Morris means to say is that Israel’s moral depradations were not only understandable, they were the ONLY policy that Israel could adopt to prevent its annihilation.

Even more stunning is Morris’ denunciation of Ben Gurion for not going far enough. That’s right, it wasn’t enough that Ben Gurion expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs, he should have expelled every last one of them. By not doing so, Ben Gurion (or so Morris’ twisted rhetoric goes) may have ensured the ultimate destruction of the Jewish State.

Another memorable quotation: “In certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.” So in adopting Lenin’s despicable and smirky defense of Bolshevik terror, Morris means us to feel we’re now on high moral ground??

And further, in answer to Shavit’s question:

And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba [Arabic for “catastrophe”)?

“You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts.

I’m not sure the notion of a “small” war crime has ever been tested in a war crimes tribunal. Perhaps Morris would like to try his hand at that some day? We’re supposed to feel assuaged that during the War of Independence the Palmach massacred a mere 800 innocent Arabs and raped 12 women most of whom were murdered (according to Morris’ own research)?

Very rarely, aside from the writings of Adolph Hitler or Macchiavelli, have I ever read words so utterly devoid of moral underpinning and so coldly cruel and unblinking. My fingers are almost shaking with anger as I type this post at the white hot pace of moral indignation.

Morris’ deep-seated anti-Muslim racism is also deeply disturbing and completely divorced from any historical understanding of Islam or Arabs:

“There is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game. Revenge is also important here. Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions. If it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them. If it is able, it will also commit genocide.”

While Morris appears to be a formidable Zionist historian, his grasp of Islam and Arab culture is nil.

And in one of his valedictory pieces of advice for Israeli policy makers, he unveils this charming statement about the Palestinians:

“Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”

He also calls them “serial killers” who should be locked up or executed.

While I strongly support Israel and her right to exist, I’m sorry to say that Benny Morris represents the ultimate, sordid decline of mainstream Zionism and its historians. Having dropped any pretence of moral foundations, the Zionist school represented by Morris justifies itself purely as a naked and aggressive means of ensuring the survival of the Jewish State.

I rather believe with Martin Luther King that our survival is not something that can be justified “at any price.” Survival is not an end in itself, but rather a means to contribute to the human race and civilization. If we have no overarching values or principles to contribute to humanity then what is our survival really worth?

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What's wrong with this picture? Just about everything. Don't you just love this image of a bunch of white, male Repulican Senators holding hands and singing "We Shall Overcome" at the Civil Rights Memorial? What's going on in their minds here? Do they seek to overcome the tremendous suffering they experienced growing up in bastions of Southern white privilege? Or are they trying to overcome their party's long and honored tradition of racism? Or the racist "wedge" politics and coded political slogans which worked so successfully for Republicans since the days of Richard Nixon in splitting off ...