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

Ever the genteel Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia daintily flicked his fingers under his chin towards a Boston Herald reporter and photographer, Peter Smith. But the effect was anything but genteel. Here is how the Herald describes the scene:

Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese’s weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship.

“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.

The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”

The photographer, who until that moment worked as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese (and has subsequently been fired, quel surprise!), released the photograph to the Boston Herald after Scalia denied he’d made an obscene gesture.

The Herald has since conceded that the gesture might not be quite as obscene as a “fuck you,” but that it’s definitely not something you’d do to your mother. Considering that Scalia was emerging from a Catholic Church where he’d just taken the Eucharist, one has to wonder at the jurist’s sense of prudence. His judicial temperament seems to have taken leave of him when he most needed it.

But given that Scalia believes in executing the insane and minor children (obscene views in themselves) one shouldn’t be surprised at an “innocent” vulgar gesture coming from the august justice. There are those on the right who are applauding Scalia for his forthrightness. I say, if he was really forthright he would’ve flipped the bird at the lawyers arguing before the Court on behalf of the insane. Now that would’ve been forthright!

Now Scalia joins Dick Cheney in the special club of those right-wing Republicans who’ve cursed their critics (in Cheney’s case it was Senator Patrick Leahy who was on the “receiving end” of a hearty “fuck you”) publicly. Imagine what might’ve happened to the intrepid photographer if the duck-hunting Scalia had with him his hunting rifle?!! Though one hopes that Scalia’s aim would’ve been as bad as Cheney’s was when he shot his hunting companion last month.

tags antonin-scalia-obscene-gesture, boston-herald, peter-smith

There is no end of those who criticize Islam and its imams for their supposed hatred against Israel and the west. One look at Little Green Footballs or even the comments threads at this site will provide a plethora of such attacks: “Show me an imam who’s ever denounced an Islamic terror attack. And even if you find one, I don’t trust him because they say one thing to a western audience and another to a Muslim one.” That’s the tenor of the attack.

Such attitudes toward Islam are unfair and anti-Muslim. I’ve argued here against such individuals saying that Islam is as varied a religion as Judaism or Christianity. It has its share of hateful extremists zealots as does our own religion. No religion should be entirely judged based on the views or actions of a minority (as the Islamic fundamentalists are).

That is why I was delighted to read at the Common Ground News Service about the 2nd Annual Conference of Rabbis and Imams, sponsored by Hommes de Parole which concluded on March 22nd in Seville, Spain. This is an excerpt from the closing statement and it should be read and pondered by anyone who doubts the sincerity of Muslims in denouncing terror and embracing tolerance:

We…affirm that contrary to widespread misrepresentation, there is no inherent conflict between Islam and Judaism, on the contrary. While modern politics has regrettably impacted negatively upon the relationship, our two religions share the most fundamental values of faith in the One Almighty whose name is Peace, who is merciful, compassionate and just; and who calls on us human beings to manifest these values in our lives and to advance them in relation to all persons whose lives and dignity are sacred. Therefore we…deplore bloodshed or violence in the name of any ideology everywhere. Especially when such is perpetrated in the name of religion it is a desecration of religion, itself and the gravest offense against the Holy Name of the Creator.

Thus, in addition to calling upon all our co-religionists to respect all human life, dignity and rights, to promote peace and justice; we call upon them and the governments of the world and international institutions to show respect for the attachments and symbols of all religions, as well as their holy sites, houses of worship and cemeteries, particularly in the Holy Land, due to its special sensitivity.

Accordingly, we condemn any negative representation of these, let alone any desecration, Heaven forbid. Similarly, we condemn any incitement against a faith or people, let alone any call for their elimination, and we urge authorities to do likewise.

We recognize that there is widespread misrepresentation of our religions, - one in the other’s community as well as in the world at large.

We affirm therefore the urgent need for truthful and respectful education about each other’s faith and tradition in our respective communities and schools; and call upon those responsible to promote such essential education for peaceful co-existence.

Solemnly we pledge ourselves to…continue to seek out one another to build bridges of respect, hope and friendship, to combat incitement and hostility, to overcome all barriers and obstacles, to reinforce mutual trust, serving the noble goal of universal peace especially in the land that is holy to us all.

According to the authors of the Common Ground report, the co-executive directors of Children of Abraham, there was some tension between the Palestinian and Israeli delegations at the urgent request by the former to place the question of Israel and Palestine at the top of the group’s agenda. The “black hats” (their words, not mine) were opposed to this and wished the conference to address solely religious matters. While I wasn’t there, I’d say that a middle ground position is necessary here. To omit the political question is to pretend the 900 lb. gorilla is not sitting in the room right next to you. But to get mired in political debate alone on this question risks forfeiting the great good that could come from such meetings. As the writers state:

…Just as most Muslims have their passion for Palestine and most Jews have their passion for Israel, so we all have a complex religious identity that is severely skewed in the conversations between our two communities that focus solely on the political situation in Israel/Palestine.

tags children-of-abraham, common-ground-news-service, hommes-de-parole, imams-and-rabbis-for-peace, islamic-extremism, israeli-palestinian-conflict, religious-tolerance

People who don’t have children will roll their eyeballs at this post thinking: “Just another obssessed parent worrying about getting Johnny into Harvard at age 6.” But those of you with young children will understand the anxiety induced by the prospect of getting your child into a good kindergarten.

Jonah just turned 5 and will enter kindergarten next year. He’s now at the Secret Garden preschool in Capitol Hill in a program we adore. We’ve agonized over what to do next year. Many parents we know are sending their children to private schools like Seattle Country Day School or St. Joseph’s. But Janis and I are products of public school education and we want our son to have the experience of learning with children of wide-ranging ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Not to mention the extraordinary expense of private schools these days. So we resolved if at all possible to send him to public school.

We spent weeks visiting those schools we wanted him to attend. Our final list included (in order of preference) TOPS, Montlake, Stevens, Orca and John Hay. Our catchment school was Madrona. But after a horrible run-in with the principal we resolved that we’d send Jonah to private school before we sent him there.

When we ranked the schools we did so with great trepidation. TOPS is a fine school, but enrollment is based on a lottery and the number of children who get in is very small. Montlake is also very good, but it is in danger of closing in the next year or so and it didn’t have many open slots. Stevens is also a good school (though we didn’t like it quite as much as the first two) and had plenty of open slots. So we ranked it third and used it as our wait list school (in case you don’t get into your first choice school you get wait-listed).

Notices are sent out the first week of April letting parents know which school their child will attend. Two days ago, one of Jonah’s preschool classmate’s moms called us to say she’d heard from Montlake that Ava had gotten in there. We realized that all the schools might know who got in and so called TOPS first thing this morning. With baited breath, Janis waited as the secretary got the “list.” She asked our child’s name. “Jonah Silverstein,” Janis repled. “Oh sure, he’s here,” she replied. And with that we discovered that we’d secured our heart’s desire: getting Jonah into a very fine school. What’s more, TOPS is K-8, so we don’t have to go through this for another nine years! Furthermore, Seattle guarantees that siblings can attend the same school as the eldest child so Miriam and Adin can attend TOPS too. We couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

All this was terribly welcome news for us. You see, lady luck has not been shining on us lately. Janis was fired from her law firm two months ago. Yes, it was horrible and the managing partner was shall we say, a less than stellar human being about the whole thing. Last weekend, during the celebrations of Jonah’s birthday, Janis got a detached retina. And yes, it IS as terrifying as it sounds because you really don’t know whether you’re losing your eyesight. Dr. David Saperstein, a retina specialist at the UW Medical Center, did a superb job performing laser surgery and reattaching the retina and Janis is on the mend. Now if we could only get that call from the major downtown law firm which we’re hoping will hire her!

tags david-saperstein, detached-retina, public-education, seattle-schools, TOPS-school

Joseph Cirincione has written a chilling Foreign Policy article, Fool Me Twice, in which he argues that the Bush Administration is preparing to attack Iran:

Three years after senior administration officials systematically misled the nation into a disastrous war, they could well be trying to do it again.

…For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

…It is the administration’s own statements that have convinced me. What I previously dismissed as posturing, I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.

I have also written here in this blog about the prospect of war against Iran: Bush Looking for New Military Adventure in Iran? I should note that Aipac and the pro-Israel lobby have been sounding the drumbeat of war for some time since Israel views a weakened Iran as beneficial to its security in the Middle East.

Cirincione recounts the budding Bush strategy to paint Iran as a rogue nation and notes the eerie resemblance to the bellicose and trumped up charges we heard from Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Bush in the runup to the Iraq war:

It is now trying to link Iran to the 9/11 attacks by repeatedly claiming that Iran is the main state sponsor of terrorism in the world (though this suggestion is highly questionable). It is also attempting to make the threat urgent by arguing that Iran might soon pass a “point of no return” if it can perfect the technology of enriching uranium, even though many other nations have gone far beyond Iran’s capabilities and stopped their programs short of weapons. And, of course, it is now publicly linking Iran to the Iraqi insurgency and the improvised explosive devices used to kill and maim U.S. troops in Iraq, though Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace admitted there is no evidence to support this claim.

In my mind I think: “Congress couldn’t possibly allow Bush to get away with yet another disastrous military adventure like Iraq, could they? Would they not have learned their lesson the first time??” But then the author points out that Democrats are so squeamish about taking anything less than a hawkish position on national security issues they may be boxed into a corner by their own previous statements:

…The administration might be able to convince leading Democrats to back a resolution for the use of force against Iran. Many Democrats have been trying to burnish a hawkish image and place themselves to the right of the president on this issue. They may find themselves trapped by their own rhetoric, particularly those [read, Hillary Clinton] with presidential ambitions.

This brings up the interesting question. What would Hillary’s position be on a military strike against Iran? It sure would burnish her credentials to support one. But I know I’d never vote for her ever again in my life if she did. She’d have to face the question which voter segment can she afford to jettison in deciding what her position is with regard to Iran.

In order to avoid the fog of war, lies and propaganda that allowed the Bush Administration to sell the American people a bill of goods regarding the Iraq war, Cirincione has a sensible set of proposals to open the debate up to the light of day and reason:

The administration should now declassify the information it used to estimate how long it will be until Iran has the capability to make a bomb. The Washington Post reported last August that this national intelligence estimate says Iran is a decade away. We need to see the basis for this judgment and all, if any, dissenting opinions. The congressional intelligence committees should be conducting their own reviews of the assessments, including open hearings with independent experts and IAEA officials. Influential groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, should conduct their own sessions and studies.

An accurate and fully understood assessment of the status and potential of Iran’s nuclear program is the essential basis for any policy. We cannot let the political or ideological agenda of a small group determine a national security decision that could create havoc in a critical area of the globe. Not again.

One wonders whether this story in the Washington Post about a “gigantic” 700 ton “bunker buster” bomb test planned for the Nevada desert this June could be part of the upcoming campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities:

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets — such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles — that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.

tags aipac, foreign-policy-magazine, iran, iraq-war, joseph-cirincione

The Israeli election results are pouring in. Haaretz reports that Kadima won 28 seats, Labor 20, Shas 13, Yisrael Beitenu 12 and Likud 11. Voter turnout was just over 63%, the lowest in Israeli history and ‘worsting’ the 68% previous record for the previous election. What does it all mean?

First, the losers: Ehud Olmert has put on a disappointing show as Kadima’s party leader and prime minister designate. It may be reasonable to assume that the 5% decline in turnout consisted of Kadima voters who voted with their feet and took Election Day as a vacation day. As recently as a week ago, polls predicted 42 seats for Kadima. So 28 seats is a shocking fall off. He ran a lackluster campaign and aside from kidnapping Palestinian terrorists from Palestinian jails and a dubious plan to set Israel’s permanent borders unilaterally, he gave his supporters precious little over which to enthuse. While Olmert still gains the right to create a governing coalition, his hand will be weaker than it would have been had he won the 36 seats projected in polls as recently as three or four days ago.

Bibi Netanyahu also loses dramatically, seeing Likud decline from 38 seats in the current Knesset to 11 in the coming one. Such a grievous outcome couldn’t have happened to someone more deserving of it. After picking the pockets and the meat off the bones of the poor and elderly as Sharon’s finance minister, Netanyahu had nothing to offer the Israeli electorate. Likud was stripped of its main campaign talking points. Settlements had become a non-issue because Sharon ensured that Israelis no longer found them terribly relevant in their domestic politics. The typical Likud red-baiting and Arab-baiting didn’t work either, perhaps because Olmert and Kadima were draped in Sharon’s bullet-proof security mantle.

And the winners: Amir Peretz definitely comes out smelling like a rose. In winning 20 votes (as opposed to 19 in the last Knesset), he took a moribund party which Shimon Peres had essentially run into the ground via his accomodationist politics and breathed new life into it. He gave the party a new relevance in direct response to Netanyahu’s draconian politics of fiscal austerity. And Peretz has done something equally important in putting a Mizrahi face on Labor. Never before has a major party put forward a Mizrahi for prime minister. But make no mistake, as Menachem Klein said tonight in analyzing electoral results, a good number of veteran Labor voters abandoned the party in a a racist gesture of anti-solidarity. But perhaps an equal number of Sepharidm abandoned their traditional Likud base to return to the Labor party for whom their parents perhaps had one time voted. Those eastern Jews who fled Labor and flocked to Likud during the days of Menachem Begin never returned to the “home” in Labor. And now, some of them have. And this could break an ethnic logjam in Israeli politics and allow Labor to break out of the elderly Ashkenazi ghetto to which Shimon Peres had consigned the party.

Avigdor Lieberman certainly wins taking a party that didn’t even exist during the last election and bringing it into the new Knesset with 12 seats. According to Klein, Lieberman too breaks an ethnic logjam of sorts. Previously, he and Natan Sharansky were the political representatives of Russian Israelis. Their appeal never really transcended that community. But with Yisrael Beitenu, Lieberman has drawn to his side the Israeli’s Israeli he needs to broaden his appeal within the Israeli electorate. Among his list, are former Labor intelligence officials, academics, etc. He himself has said that he plans to use this victory as his stepping stone to the prime ministership in the next election. Heaven forfend! But he is a force to be reckoned with.

Shas, with 13 seats also is a force to be reckoned with. It increased its representation from 11 in the last Knesset. But their position possibly doesn’t change much because they were a key element of Sharon’s ruling coalition in the last Knesset. And they may play such a role in the new coalition should they choose to do so. Of course, with its shrill, shallow and corrupt ethnic politics, it will do Olmert no favors by joining him. But almost every Israeli government includes a religious party as some form of insurance or balance to more secular political elements and the next coalition will prove no exception. The only question is whether the religious partner will be Shas or one of the other parties.

Finally, and perhaps the most shocking development is that Jonathan Pollard’s old “handler,” and the Mossad operative who single-handedly brought Israeli-U.S. relations to its knees for a time, Rafi Eitan, has led the Pensioners’ (Gil in Hebrew) Party to seven seats in the new Knesset. This may be the only blog in the world where you’ll learn this relevant background information about Eitan:

The 80-year-old Eitan fought in the Palmach pre-state army, where he won the nickname “Stinker” after falling into a pit of sewage while on a mission.

This is another party that didn’t exist before this campaign. Like Peretz, this party’s platform responds to the threat Netanyahu posed to Israeli citizens, like pensioners, who live on fixed incomes. If you add its seven votes to Labor’s 20, you find that parties running on a progressive economic platform polled as many votes as Kadima, which seemed to run away from social equity and the economy as political issues. This posed another one of Olmert’s tone-deaf weaknesses in this campaign.

How does this affect Israel’s relations with the Palestinians? Alas and alack, it probably doesn’t affect it at all in the sense that Olmert will likely continue his same tone-deaf unilateralist policies (it didn’t work for Bush regarding Iraq, so why does he think he’ll have any success at it?) toward the Palestinians. I do note one possibly slightly hopeful sign is that both Mahmoud Abbas and Olmert have called for face to face meetings to get negotiations under way. Until tonight, Olmert had told the electorate he had no interest in meeting with Abbas. However, there is little reason to be excited about this development until we know how serious Olmert is and how substantive he wishes that conversation to be. If I were a betting man, I couldn’t lose betting against Olmert. But he could fool me and I’d be delighted if he did.

In his talk tonight with Joel Migdal, Menachem Klein rejected Olmert’s unilateral approach as serious or viable. He asserted that only face to face negotiations with the Palestinians and Israeli willingness to return to ‘67 borders (with adjustments to allow annexation of Maaleh Adumim and Ariel) would bring a true peace settlement. When I asked him how he expects that any Israeli political party to move the current consensus anywhere close to his parameters, Klein replied that no progressive party like Labor was likely to create such consensus. Laughingly he deprecated himself: “I’m under no delusions that I and my leftist colleagues in the Geneva Initiative are going to take over the Israeli government and singlehandedly bring peace. We shouldn’t be fools enough to believe that Yossi Beilin will ever be prime minister. No, a centrist party is the only one which can bring such change. And I don’t care who brings peace. Let it be Ehud Olmert or Avigdor Lieberman for that matter. I’d be delighted. The most I ever expect to be is a mosquito flitting a few good ideas into the ears of Israeli politicians.

tags amir-peretz, ehud-olmert, israeli-elections, labor-party, likud, netanyahu, pensioners-party

John Mearsheimer, Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard have written a damning indictment of America's Jewish pro-Israel lobby entitled, The Israel Lobby (unedited version), in the London Review of Books. In it they analyze the pernicious influence of Aipac and related Jewish think-tanks on U.S. Mideast policy: For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed ...

With Israeli voters about to go to the polls in one of the least compelling (though not because the issues are unimportant) elections in recent memory, Hamas has marked a revolutionary change by not punctuating the voting with suicide bombings. Such a fate is what torpedoed Shimon Peres' best opportunity to become prime minister just after Rabin's assassination. The firebrands within Hamas decided that Labor was as much an enemy as Likud and provided this analysis through a suicide bomber's explosive belt. With this election, Haaretz reports that Ismail Haniye has represented Hamas' newfound moderation with an interview in which he asserted that his party does not want confrontation with Israel:...

For some time, I've had a problem with losing unsaved blog posts when my browser crashed or when I closed my browser without realizing that I hadn't saved the post I was writing. At one support forum, someone suggested I use Blazing Tools' Perfect Keylogger in order to log my keystrokes. That way, if I lost a post I could reconstruct it using the Keylogger log. I've done that successfully many times and found the product quite useful. A few months ago I made the mistake of installing Norton Anti-Virus 2006, which disabled the two software programs I used that involved keylogging. When I re-enabled both programs within Norton neither worked properly and I had to ...

Solomon Linda and the Original Evening Birds (1941) The NY Times reports the happy conclusion of one of songwriting's worst cases of exploitation in the history of the profession. In 1938, a young South African Zulu improvised one of the most amazing songs written in this century, Mbube (hear it)--or as it came to be called in the rest of the world, The Lion. The man was Solomon Linda who, with his group the Original Evening Birds, recorded the song in 1939 just as Europe rushed to war. The song became a smash hit in Africa selling as many as 100,000 ...

I've been blogging now for three years and never found a solution for a nagging problem. You're writing a post late at night. You've spent an hour formatting everything, uploading pictures, doing a spell check, researching the post and pasting in quotations. Then you get distracted somewhere else on the web and forget about your post. Then you decide that 3 AM is way past your bedtime and shut down your browser and pc. You come back the next morning looking for the post you created last night and its NOT THERE! Omigod! Where did it go? Didn't you save it? When it finally dawns on you that fatigue got the ...