Counting Up The Bodies, Part Two

I thought that I would want to rant on about the “Body Count” ‘study’ at greater length, but really, I find there isn’t much to say. It’s a strange piece of non-history, produced by someone who apparently does work as a professional in the field. It was produced for a religious institute, and it has one clear purpose—to insist in a scientific-sounding way that Christianity is violent and Islam is not. This is not, of course, just an attempt to bash Christianity, it’s an attempt to defend Islam. “Body Count”, has its anti-Muslim counterparts. (Include Links). Similarly decontextualized and badly researched, these documents insist that the history of Islam is not only a single wash of blood, but that it was inevitably and intentionally so from the beginning, and that it is worse, absolutely worse, than any of the (now conveniently whitewashed) things carried out in Christianity’s name, let alone that of any other religion. Absolutist positions lead to absolute nonsense, and any semblance of truth lies somewhere between “Islam is the single worst thing ever to happen to the human race” and “Islam is a religion of peace which has only been misinterpreted by anyone who ever did anything bad in its name”. And both those arguments are being laid out, repeatedly, by people who really ought to know better. You can’t understand either the past or the present like that. The average Tumblr blogger forwarding Naveed Sheikh’s pointless pie charts does so, I think, out of a worthy motivation. They believe, with some reason on their side, that Islam, and Muslims, are being falsely portrayed in the West as mindlessly and essentially violent. These numbers, unexamined, seem to offer a counter to that. They hand the pie charts on, believing they’ve done something useful. I would argue that they’re not; they’re merely contributing to an already worrying pile of bad, partisan history. In the past few years I’ve debated history with people who dismiss the Transatlantic slave trade as the sole responsibility of Muslims, who insist that Jews are not actually Semites, who think that Palestine was an independent nation before the Zionist conquest, who claim that the Serbs who carried out genocide in Bosnia were simply protecting themselves from the Islamist menace…it’s all out there, being eagerly passed from site to site, a barrage of lies and half-truths and obsessive reinterpretations. Perhaps the most cloying form of the unwinnable argument is the ongoing quarrel about whether Christendom or Islam was better (or worse) for the Jews. Despite the inarguable fact that Jews lived in both ‘civilizations’ as outsiders and social inferiors, were sometimes tolerated, sometimes allowed a measure of safety and prosperity, and sometimes slaughtered, people will argue fiercely for their home team’s treatment of the Jews, firmly brushing aside evidence against their case, and highlighting the most inane proofs in their favor. I’ve had people explain to me quite seriously that anti-Semitism was introduced to Europeans by Arabs, and other people explain that it was introduced to Arabs by Europeans. And I’m tired of it, I’m bored with the bad history, the ignorance and the illogic. Naveed Sheikh is not helping, and neither is anyone who forwards his pretty numbers on, without checking their source or understanding their agenda.

Smearing the Victims of Racism: Beyonce Concert Edition

So, a group of young Israelis attending a Beyonce concert in Berlin encounter a little classic anti-Semitism:

“Some of them noticed that we were speaking Hebrew,” Zerad told JTA. “One of them said, ‘You stink, you should go back to Israel.’ A girl said, ‘You guys smell so bad. Why didn’t he die in the Holocaust?’ ”

The young Germans began to shout at the Israelis to “go, go, go,” he said. They accused the Israelis of pushing, “which was not true because we were first in line. We had no need to push. We were there already.

“So they started pushing us; they said ‘You are Jewish, go back to Israel, we wish that the Holocaust would succeed so you all die,’” Zerad recalled.

The whole article is at: http://forward.com/articles/177451/israelis-suffer-abuse-at-berlin-beyonce-gig/#ixzz2UaBkdcEw

Richard Silverstein decides that no outburst of anti-Semitism is complete without a little victim-blaming:

Israeli, pissed u weren't 1st in line @ Beyonce concert, & pushed by others? Call it anti-Semitism! bit.ly/Zq5O8F
— Tikun Olam (@richards1052) May 28, 2013

@revolawtionary But if u turn it into anti-Semitic incident then Jews are always victims & always right, right??
— Tikun Olam (@richards1052) May 28, 2013

Defend racists, attack their victims, and do it all under the name 'Tikun Olam'. How perfect.

Adding Up The Body Count: Part One

My bachelor's degree is in history, and while I have never worked in the field, except for a short stint as a Social Studies teacher, I try to approach history from an educated and critical perspective.

Which is why THIS annoys me so very much. If only I could stop laughing.

These pie charts, currently winging their merry way around the Internet, purport to be the result of a 'study done by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute in Amman, Jordan- on the death toll for both violence in general and specifically, genocide (from 0-2008 BCE)'. (They mean CE. The author of the actual study does say CE. Unfortunately, he does refer to the study beginning in the year 0.)

The study found that Muslim societies/governments were responsible for less than 6% of violence in general historically, and less than 8% of genocides historically.

This is being forwarded on across the Internet--Tumblr, Facebook and the like--usually with attached comments like "But Muslims are supposed to be the violent ones, amirite?" Clearly, in the mind of the forwarder, this odd pie chart has pertinence and import. Because of this, I'm taking it rather more seriously than I otherwise might.

There are a number of things here, so let's try to take them on one at a time. Today, the study itself:

THE STUDY ITSELF: 

First, this is an absolutely ludicrous thing to claim to have done a 'study' of. The death toll for 'violence in general', worldwide, over a period of two thousand years, isn't something you can just add up on a calculator. Real historians do not deal with issues this mindbogglingly broad and haphazard in 'studies'. So I looked a little closer. The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute is actually the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought--a full title that gives you a clue that a. we may not be dealing with the most nonpartisan of researchers, and b. we may be dealing with people who know more about theology than history here. No one who had posted the pie charts to Tumblr posted a link to the actual study, so I went hunting and found it. Its full title is Body Count: A Quantitative Analysis of  Political Violence Across World Civilizations, and it is a publication of the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center. You can download the whole thing from their website, here.

The study is forty pages long, and is attributed to Naveed S. Sheikh, University of Louisville. There is some introduction, and some waffle about 'methodology', but the bulk of the paper is a very long chart listing first all the violence ever, and then all the genocidal violence ever, complete with death toll, and the 'belligerent civilization' responsible. No bibliography is given, nor are citations used. The author claims that 'we have in each case attempted to corroborate numbers from several sources and guesstimated a reasonable range, supported by scholarly accounts'. I suspect Wikipedia was the main source used.

About those civilizations: Sheikh has split the world neatly up into seven of them, as though they were the warring factions in a fantasy novel. These are Antitheist (Commie, in other words), Buddhist, Christian, Indic, Islamic, Primal-Indigenous (pagans of various sorts), and Sinic. There is also an occasional classification of 'unclassified', which seems to include Jews, and perhaps others. 

A person might wonder about the ability of the author to neatly discern whether violence carried out in China would be 'Sinic', 'Buddhist' or 'Antitheist', but the author does not worry about these things, he sweeps on quite confidently.This division of the world, of course, leads to some odd issues...well, actually, too many odd issues to actually count. It begins with the attribution of World War II to Christians and Buddhists, and just gets better from there.

The attribution of violence to religiously based 'civilizations' means that, for example, the Second Congo War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crusades, the Wars of the Roses, the Tupac Amaru Rebellion and the Mau-Mau Uprising are all classified as "Christian". 

Sheikh comes to some conclusions at the end. He concludes, somewhat poignantly, that the death toll from political violence in the past two thousand years is roughly twice the current population of the United States. 

He also determines, and this is the meat of this long, and loopily constructed argument, that "In comparative terms, we have found the open secret of world history to be that the Christian civilization is the most bellicose on all counts: It is the civilization which is responsible for the highest number of death in world history, between 119.32 and 236.56 million (median: 177.94 million). This is over 30% of global fatalities for the period 0-2008 CE. In terms of number of instances of political violence, the Christian share is even higher, accounting for 166 events out of 321 in total (nearly 52%). Thus more than half of all major acts of political violence can be attributed to the Christian civilization. Finally, in terms of genocides too the Christian civilization has perpetrated nearly half of all genocides (14 out of 30, or 46.67%). Still, these 14 genocides have had a total death toll of 33.24 million, a whopping 65.50% of all genocide deaths. The Christian civilization, therefore, emerges as the most violent and genocidal in world history."

Whopping. You've got to like a guy who uses 'whopping' in summing up his conclusions about genocide in a (theoretically) academic paper.

OK, now here's the open secret of this paper: the passage above is the money shot, the only goal of compiling all these numbers to begin with.

There is no attempt made (probably because it would muddy the waters and make the math hard) to adjust any of these numbers, in terms of world population of the Seven Civilizations, either over the complete two thousand years, or at any given time. To point at only the simplest issue, Islam is actually extant for only seventy percent of the time period artificially chosen. But that's just one arbitrary point. There's so much wrong with this that it's almost impossible to cover it all.

I hate bad history.

Anyway, tomorrow, some thoughts on why this piece is going around, what it means to those who post it, and why an equal and opposite reaction is equally stupid.

An Irritated Analogy

Imagine, if you will, that you are a white American feminist. Imagine that someone points out that white American feminists have long failed to show sufficient concern or respect for American feminists of color. We have not understood or acted on behalf of their issues and needs, we have not educated ourselves, we have not listened, we have not created an inclusive movement, we have, indeed, allowed ourselves to think that ‘all the feminists are white, and all the blacks are men’.

If you are someone who values truth, and someone who values understanding her own privilege, you will agree that these things are true, and strive to address them.

Now, imagine if you will, that someone comes along and says that women of color are oppressed solely by white feminists. This person has no interest in any other factor creating oppression in the lives of women of color. They seem entirely unaware that any men have ever been involved systemically or significantly in the oppression of women of color. They certainly don’t believe that women of color were facing any oppression before feminism came along in the nineteenth century. They’ve read, in fact, that before feminism, American women of color lived in perfect harmony with their neighbors of all colors, and had no problems at all. Now that there’s feminism, of course, they face economic and educational inequality, problems of access to adequate health care, race and gender based discrimination, and many other difficulties, and this is all clearly the result of feminism.

 All progressive people, therefore, they assert should be fundamentally opposed to feminism, and see it as an entirely and uniquely destructive force in the world. Women of color, in particular, should never be fooled into thinking that they have any problems that were not directly inflicted on them by the white feminists, and if they start to think anyone else is causing them problems, they should just review all the terrible things white feminists have done to them.

 You might be tempted to write this person off as ludicrously uninformed, or you might suspect that this is someone who hates women, and hates feminism, and is trying to find a convenient reason why feminism is awful that you will have to agree with. You might, if you did a little digging, find that they have a whole arsenal of other reasons why they assert feminism is terrible, most of them just as spurious or historically inaccurate.

This is exactly the nonsense that spills out when people who hate Israel try to use the Mizrahim, the Ethiopian Jews, and other Jewish communities of color as a way to beat up on Israel and Zionism. These are people who have somehow managed to educate themselves about the discrimination these communities face in Israel, (or perhaps ‘educate’ is not the term, given the high ratio of lies that tend to creep in) but have somehow managed to not learn about, or not care about, any other oppression these Jews experience now or in the past at the hands of anyone except Israeli Ashkenazim. Just like that, generations of segregation, bigotry, murderous hate, and racist laws simply vanish. Ancient communities become blunt instruments to try to wield against other Jews.

 In other words, yes. The Mizrahim, the Ethiopians, the Russians (oh, we forgot about them, since the anti-Israel crowd likes to paint them villains), the Bokharans, all of them, have faced difficulties and often discrimination in Israel. We have internalized colonialism and racism as much as any other oppressed people, and we continue to struggle with them. But if you like to passionately assert that these problems indicate rot at Zionism’s heart—you’re ignorant.

 If you do not know both what the Farhud was, and how it fits into the broader history of collaboration with the Nazis by Middle Eastern governments, you do not have the right to enter this discussion. If you don’t know that there were camps in Tunisia as well as Poland, you do not have the right to enter this discussion. If you do not understand the intersections of colonialism and traditional anti-Semitism as they affected the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, you do not have the right to enter this discussion. If you dismiss the fascist connections of pre-war Palestinian leadership, and think that discussions of anti-Semitism in Islamic societies are simply ‘Islamophobia’, to be scoffed and dismissed, you should stay well out of this discussion. If you do not understand the speed and the racist venom with which ancient Jewish communities were dismantled and exiled in the years following the establishment of Israel, you simply don’t know enough to even approach this discussion.

 Or you could go through life thinking that American women of color had no problems until Seneca Falls, and would have none today if we could only dismantle NOW. Sometimes willful ignorance can’t be overcome.

An Arab Christian Israeli Military Prosecutor--With a Jewish Grandmother

(Photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)

I can't be the only person who thinks that this woman's life and profession would make her a natural heroine for a series of mystery novels, except that people would probably find her too unrealistic, and complain that the author was trying to throw in everything but the kitchen sink.

Arin Shaabi's story is fascinating. Her family's complicated history is similar to others I've heard about, and her thoughts and concerns about her work as a prosecutor in military courts in the West Bank are challenging and informed, something that's not always easy to find once this subject comes up. Well worth a read.

The Israeli Army's Most Improbable Arab Prosecutor

A Chareidi Woman In the IDF

An eight-year-old girl, dressed for school in her light blue shirt and dark navy skirt, presses the elevator button as she hurries to school. When the elevator appears, she dashes inside and finds herself standing next to two Israeli soldiers with M16 rifles slung over their backs. The soldiers, sporting kippot, are her neighbor’s sons, who are heading back to the base after Shabbat. The little girl looks at them admiringly. She decides that one day she’s going to be just like them—a defender of the Jewish people.

That little girl was me.

The idea that religious Israeli Jews are growing in numbers, take from and control Israeli society, and don't contribute has become part of the anti-Israel narrative. It provides cover to lament that Israeli democracy is being undermined by people who--mysteriously--are imbued by the narrator with the traits that classical anti-Semitism attributes to all Jews.

The work of women like Fayga Marks, who find ways to live out their intersectionality in positive and bridge-building ways stands as a contradiction to these gleeful predictions of the destruction of Israel's democracy because of religious Jews.

Read Fayga's story, here.

The Same Ones

On a smart, politically progressive blog that I love, a post begins by solemnly announcing that, as with Aurora and Newtown, we may never find out why the Boston Marathon bombing happened. I am reminded, abruptly, of a scene in "Driving Miss Daisy", when the driver, Hoke, tells his disbelieving employer that her synagogue in Atlanta has been bombed. "Who would do such a thing?" she protests. "You know as good as me, Miss Daisy," he tells her, a little sharply. "It always be the same ones."

Now, in the present time and place, it is not always the same ones. In the first swirling days following the bombings in Boston, we didn't know who had done it, or why, and responsible people tried to stop themselves from speculating. Of course, plenty of people were speculating madly. Pam Geller and her ilk announced that it was obviously Islamist, but they say that regardless. In the progress-o-sphere, speculation ran to right-wing extremists (a theory I favored, due to the location and timing of the attack). But when we eventually identified the bombers, and learned a little about their backgrounds, it became fairly clear this was an Islamist attack.

However, scanning progressive blogs, I find people still firmly resisting that fact. We don't know, and they may have acted alone, and even if they were supplied by jihadi connections, it might not really be about religion, and we just can't know... No. I do not believe that Muslims should be the target of hate because of Islamist terror. I do not believe that Islam is an inherently problematic religion. I do not believe that any crime committed by a Muslim is motivated by religion. But do we really need to pretend that we are starting from scratch again, each time?

It's true, as people have said, that non-Muslim domestic terrorists are identified as 'lone wolves', and their crimes decontextualized. But that's a bad approach, not one to adopt for other sorts of terrorists as well. Imagine that this was the man many of us expected, an anti-government, American-born white Christian. In that case, people on the progressive blogs would be clear what his motivations were. Even if he had acted alone, they would put him in context: a tradition of violence, an ideology, and an atmosphere of incitement. All of these things are true as well of Islamist violence. It is stupid and self-indulgent to pretend that's not true.

I grew up with the constant threat of terrorism, and the experience of learning again and again that Jews around the world had been targeted. I am not willing to pretend that Islamic fundamentalist terror is not systemic, interconnected, and aimed directly at me and mine. And it frustrates the hell out of me when people ask "Who would do such a thing?" You know, Miss Daisy. I know. And we're no better people for saying that we don't.

OK, There Are Apparently Officially NO White Jews

From the This Is White Privilege Blog: White privilege is not having to Google if there’s discrimination against your ethnic group in a country you want to visit. Discrimination? Hell, you may want to check if you can get in, and if you can bring your tfillin with you.

Stupid Things That People Say When They Talk About Israel, Part One

Today's favorite: "Why doesn't the UN build a new headquarters on the Temple Mount? Then all the nations could help pay for its defense." Yes. I certainly want the UN on top of the Temple Mount, and I'm sure that the Muslims of the world will smile happily at the thought of the al-Aqsa mosque being turned into a bureaucratic headquarters for the United Nations. (Interestingly, the Knights Templar did exactly this during the Crusades, I mean, a headquarters for themselves, not the UN, and peace did not ensue.) Because the UN has worked so hard to bring peace to the region. MASSIVE FAIL. On the other hand, perhaps this is EXACTLY what is needed. Then, Israelis and Palestinians would unite to get the UN off the Temple Mount, and forget all of the petty land-water-national sovereignty stuff until that was over.

Roman Polanski, Gore Vidal, and "Charges of Anti-Semitism"

Goddamnit, I get tired of this.

So I wander over to Tiger Beatdown, to see what the hardcore feminists are talking about, and as it happens, they're talking righteous smack about the newly late Gore Vidal, and his defense of Roman Polanski. I am still, as it happens, unbelievably angry about the spineless, unbelievable defense of Polanski exhibited by far too many Hollywood names ('rape-rape', Whoopi? WTF?), so I settle down for a quick read.

Now, apparently Vidal said this: "The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then."  And then right in the middle of the take-down of Vidal's victim-blaming and viciousness, I get this, not from Gore Vidal, but from blogger Garland Grey:

"I take charges of Anti-Semitism very seriously, but I also know that sometimes (as when people show even a sliver of support or concern for the state of Palestine and its people) accusations of such are misused to shut the conversation all the way down."

Well.

I wrote a quick response on the comment thread:

I agree that accusations of anti-Semitism were used to deflect blame in the Polanski case, and avoid confronting his actual rape and abuse of this young woman.

You should, however, be aware that the formulation used above, that accusations of anti-Semitism are used to control conversation about the Israel/Palestine conflict, is, in fact, often used to cover for actual anti-Semitism, and to provide people with an excuse for not learning the real history of the conflict, or taking responsibility for the bigotry they may speak.

It's remarkably similar to many other accusations about people 'playing the race card', and it plays a similar function.

Was there some reason for bringing in an unrelated topic to illustrate your idea that people sometimes lie about the bigotry they face? Or was it easier than explaining why you don't believe anti-Semitism was a factor in the Polanski case?

That was was much more restrained and polite than I felt like being. There's a fine line between trying educate and just wanting to break stuff, and this makes me want to break stuff. For real? Is there some way this does not break down into "I take accusations of anti-Semitism very seriously, but Jews and their friends sometimes lie about it, anyway, to shut people up, you know, like if you show any sympathy (a 'sliver') for the Palestinian people, so I guess I can dismiss this contention of Gore Vidal's without seeming like I'm not giving it enough attention, because this is just another example of using charges of anti-Semitism to make people be quiet"?

Is there another form of racism that a serious anti-oppression blogger would treat like this? I'm betting not.

It's really pretty funny, because I think Polanski is scum, so it's fairly hard to offend me when railing on him and his defenders. I wouldn't have blinked if the writer had simply said she thought Vidal was full of shit on the anti-Semitism issue re: Polanski.

Hilarious, too, is the fact that Vidal himself was an anti-Semite fond of veiling his hate in rants about Israel:

Commenting for the Huffington Post on his infamous 1986 piece "The Empire Lovers Strike Back", David Greenberg writes:

It was the kind of piece that should give pause to those who ritually deny that anti-Zionism is rooted in anti-Semitism; it should be read in full. Describing the Podhoretzs as propagandists for Israel (“in its never-ending wars against just about everyone … a predatory people”), he cast Podhoretz, who was born in the United States, as someone who would never become “an ‘assimilated American,’ to use the old-fashioned terminology.” Addressing Decter, he declared, “I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.”

So unquestioningly has this idea been accepted, that calling anti-Semitism by name is only a way to 'shut the conversation down', that it now creeps into conversations as far afield from Israel as this. Charming. Really charming.

Stunning Photos from This Weekend's Pride Parade In Jerusalem

Over at CIFWatch, Adam Levick posts his gorgeous pictures of the tenth annual Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade. Pinkwash this!

Dividing Nations at the Olympics

What is it about judo and the Middle East? First, Iran decided to leave their judo champion home, osenstibly because he had an iffy tummy, more probably because he was the only Iranian competitor in danger of facing an Israeli. Now, the Lebanese judo team has decided that they can't train while looking at the Israeli judo team. And the Olympic officials have decided to accomodate them, erecting screens across the gym.

This is, frankly, disgusting. It is part of an ongoing attempt to portray Israel as a uniquely transgressive nation, one which can be freely discriminated against, with accomodation from the Games themselves. And it is already being defended by anti-Israel voices such as Ben White's, and compared to boycotts against apartheid South Africa. The Olympics have made their message loud and clear this year, first through refusing to honor the memories of the Israeli athletes murdered in 1972, and now through giving in to the political posturing of Lebanon. At an event supposedly dedicated to allowing nations to meet without political burdens, in an open spirit of athletic dedication and competition, Israel, and no other nation, is being delegitimized by her enemies, with the cooperation of the IOC.

A Spectacular Piece from Chas Newkey-Burden

This is something so good I just had to repost it immediately, and get it out to as many people as possible. Over at Oy Va Goy, Chas Newkey-Burden takes apart the inherent anti-Semitism of the common anti-Israel plaint that after the Shoah, the world has the right to demand more moral behavior from Jews than others.

Newkey-Burden writes: Let us strip the “they-of-all-people” argument down to its very basics: gentiles telling Jews that we killed six million of your people and that as a result it is you, not us, who have lessons to learn; that it is you, not us, who need to clean up your act. It is an argument of atrocious, spiteful insanity. Do not accept it; turn it back on those who offer it. For it is us, not you, who should know better.


Read the whole thing here.

Stand With Israel, Jimmy, And Call Your Sister

This sign is, according to www.passiveaggressivenotes.com, somewhere in South Texas. It's been there for a while.

As you can see, Jimmy owes his sister some money for his fourth divorce. This is not the part that made me laugh. The part that made me laugh is the 'Stand With Israel' lawn signs, standing guard to either side of the big pink sign.

I'm on Jimmy's sister's side. Her brother owes her $2,500 bucks, and she's an Israel supporter.

Commenter Aquapt writes: And then there are the “Stand with Israel” signs. Somehow, I’m picturing Israel inching away, in a desperate attempt not to stand with this.

A Play Attendee Reports From London

Sarah AB at Harry's Place was able to see the performance. Sounds like an excellent performance, although I really hate Merchant.

Loved this part: Generally people heeded the opening plea to keep calm and not respond to disruption. But at one point, when an audience member started to recite a Palestinian themed parody of Shylock’s famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech, an exasperated ‘piss off’ met with warm applause.

BDS Activists Lose, Act Out In London

I've been trying to recast Shylock's "Hath Not A Jew Eyes" speech to be spoken by a BDS activist, but I don't have the talent, or the heart to do that to Shakespeare. I'll settle for just popping in to mention that, amazingly, the London BDS crowd didn't take being told by the Globe Theatre to shove off lying down. Nope, they showed up with signs, flags, and band-aids over their mouths.

One man was arrested for assaulting a security guard outside.

Please note the message of the Band-Aids: "Allowing Israelis to perform in the same festival with Palestinians means that I am being silenced. Me, me, it's all about me!!!"

Cultural Boycott Fails, Israeli Shakespeare Performance Sold Out

I almost want to scold Habimah, Israel's national theater group, for choosing The Merchant of Venice to stage at the Globe Theate as part of an international Shakespeare festival. Merchant? Really? It's an edgy choice, but edgy in a sort of dated way. I would, honestly, rather have seen an Israeli-nuanced King Lear, or The Winter's Tale. But I'm not in London anyway, and nobody asked me.

However, any criticism of Habimah's choice has to be overshadowed by the cheerfulness with which I report that, yet again, the forces of BDS have produced great Sturm und Drang, and two sold-out performances for Habimah in London.

In the end, it all came down to a protest outside, a counterprotest, a lot of police checking bags, and then,

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

Israel wins, Shakespeare wins, London, strutting her cultural stuff for the Olympics, wins, and the Palestinian company who performed Richard II wins. BDS loses.

In nosing around for information on the event, I happened to run across this piece by Harry Glass at Worker's Liberty. They're a Trotskyite group, which raises my hackles to begin with, and I am not thrilled by Glass's light use of the term 'atrocity' toward the end of this piece. (So basically, this is a reading suggestion, not an endorsement) It is a well-written, well-reasoned, far-left critique of BDS, thorough and coming from a clear worldview that extends beyond the irrational self-congratulation of BDS supporters. I found myself impressed.

Glass writes: BDS needs to be fought politically, because it stands in the path of two states, the only consistently democratic solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But BDS is ultimately a pessimistic approach. It put the agency for change outside of the region.

Read it in full.

Arabic Translation of the Talmud Now Out--The ADL Reports

Translating the Talmud into a new language is no light matter. It's a long shelf full of books, made up not of a single text, but of interlocking commentaries, and written in a terse, legal Aramaic in which lengthy arguments are reduced to a sort of telegraphic shorthand, and then unfolded by generations of scholars to lengthy arguments once more. This is not the latest Harry Potter book, or a set of directions for an IKEA desk, this is a challenge for a translator on a par with Finnegans Wake, but more of it. Much more.

So the news that the entire Bavli has been translated and published in Arabic was fairly big news in the scholarly world. It does raise some questions though. Who actually needs a Talmud in Arabic? English, sure, I myself have learned a little using Adin Steinsaltz's spectacular life's work of a translation. Hebrew translations are available, and French, Russian, and Spanish. But more than sixty years after the founding of the State of Israel triggered the expulsion of the ancient Jewish communities of the Arabic-speaking world, you have to wonder how many potential learners are out there who cannot read Aramaic, Hebrew, English or French, and must have an Arabic translation.

Don't ponder that question for too long. The translation is not for us.

As the ADL reports, the purpose of this translation, made explicit in its introduction, is to present the Talmud as a deeply racist text, which reveals the deep racism of Jews, and has formed the deeply racist State of Israel. Racist all the way down, and therefore completely illegitimate as a nation.

The ADL quotes the introduction: “These texts confirm the racist and hostile perception toward the non-Jews, especially those who threaten the ‘chosen nation’ and stand in the way of its ambitions and hopes. There is no doubt that Israel is the best example of this racist position, both in the level of its daily crimes against the Palestinians and the level of its rejection and contempt for international resolutions and laws. For what applies to other countries in the world does not apply to contemporary Israel, as it is unique...Jews, according to this racist position [of the Talmud], are permitted to do what is not permitted for non-Jews.”

The ADL article concludes: The conclusion of the introduction neatly merges the publishers’ anti-Semitic and anti-Israel proclivities: “The Talmudic heritage has a significant impact on the formulation of Jewish identity based on holy [principles of] racial isolation…It [the Talmud] also established the extreme positions that advocate hatred toward non-Jews, the violation of their rights and looting of their lands and property.” The publisher then refers to the Zionist movement’s alleged “crimes” against the Palestinian people as an example of the Talmud’s validation of racist policies.

So, who commissioned this?

MESC, established in 1991, is a Jordan-based political think tank that focuses on the Middle East and North Africa. The Center has a special unit on Israeli affairs, which monitors Israel, Zionist organizations and Hebrew-language media. MESC is highly critical of Israel, and organized a conference last year on the Palestinian unilateral declaration efforts to which they invited senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders as well as Hamas officials.

Al-Jazeera has specifically promoted this book as a contribution to the “establishment of Arabic language Jewish studies” as well as claiming that the translation “identifies the features of the Jewish character that blend elements of racial superiority with Mosaic teachings.”


Nicholas Donin's legacy lives on. This is an old tactic, relatively newly adapted to a new political goal, the delegitimization of Israel. Anyone who has spent much time dealing with hard-core Israel-haters has probably encountered this already, the desperate attempt to take Jews out of time and space--out of history--and reduce them, against any rational interpretation, to a people driven to conquest and oppression by a scattering of quotations taken out of context from a thirty-seven volume legal code.

It's a sickening tactic, but clearly, seen as effective enough for MESC to invest the time and the money to commision this translation, and that worries me.

This Bird Controls the Media

State Bird of Israel. This is what a Zionist with wings looks like.

This is a hoopoe, called in Hebrew a dukhifat. It is the national bird of the State of Israel. They are insectivores, also sunbathers. According to the good folks at Wikipedia "hoopoes sunbathe by spreading out their wings and tail low against the ground and tilting their head up; they often fold their wings and preen halfway through. The hoopoe also enjoys taking dust and sand baths."

I am, of late, developing an interest in Israeli wildlife, having realized at some point that many of the animals referred to again and again in Torah were things I really didn't know very much about. I am rather embarassed to say that well into my thirties, I believed that a hyrax was a kind of gazelle or something, when it turns out that they are actually "fairly small, thickset, herbivorous mammals in the order Hyracoidea"*. Apparently they are sort of the raccoons of the Middle East, and have been known to raid trash cans. I think they're adorable. They also get Biblical mentions, and not only in terms of being trayf, which they are, but also poetically in the Psalms; The high mountains belong to the wild goats; the crags are a refuge for the hyrax."



But enough about the hyraxes for now. Today we're talking about the hoopoe, which is also not kosher**, and which has also inspired Manchester’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign to be critical of the socialist British daily newspaper the Morning Star.


What the heck could the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have against the humble, bug-eating, dust-bath-taking hoopoe, you ask? And how did the Morning Star get involved in this? Well, I'm glad you asked. The Morning Star has a daily quiz, in which one of the questions recently made reference to the fact that the hoopoe is Israel's national bird. This is a fact suitable for a trivia quiz, right up there with the fact that the national animal of Belize is the Baird's tapir, or that the bangus is the national fish of the Philippines. And yet, there was an element in town that objected.

In a letter to the newspaper, Linda Claire, the chairwoman of Manchester’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign, asked why it had referred to the bird after it has “always been the newspaper you could rely on to support the cause of the Palestinians.”

“Maybe you don’t support the methods chosen by the international solidarity movement of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel] to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and justice,” she said, adding that this included any reference to Israel’s wildlife.

No, no, you didn't misread that. She considers BDS to apply to free-range wildlife. Her husband also seems to consider the hoopoe, an indigenous bird that has never been known to harm anyone who wasn't a beetle, to be a wedge fowl.

“Despite its condemnation of zionists [sic] it yet finds space to include an item in its daily quiz about Israel’s national bird. Is the Star not aware there’s a cultural boycott going on?” Claire’s husband, George Abendstern, asked in another letter.

 (George, a tip here...the Israelis did not INVENT the hoopoe. They are not MARKETING it. Its inclusion in the quiz does not indicate any sort of policy statement.) This may just leave you scratching your head in puzzlement, or, if you're a hoopoe, off to take another dust bath and take it easy, but this nutty couple underline something very real about BDS: it's not about policy, it's not about any positive goal, it's about the blind hatred of Israel, and the desire to reject anything connected to Israel--hoopoes included.

 After being criticized for being really weird, the PSC clarified. “It was not the bird we object to but what this bird represents – the racist and apartheid State of Israel.”

It's not racism they want to get rid of, folks, or the imagined apartheid...it's Israel.


*'Thickset?' say the hyraxes. 'Thanks.'

**Just as well for the hoopoe, one might point out.

Hypocrisy at Muzzlewatch: AIPAC, PennBDS, and Mitchell Plitnick

Over at MuzzleWatch, Mitchell Plitnick is upset that AIPAC has taken back his press credentials, and will not give him media access at their Annual Policy Conference.

Now, AIPAC does not consult me about these things, so I don't know why his press credentials were either granted or revoked.  However, I would like to note that JVP, which produces MuzzleWatch, and of which Plitnick is a former co-director, did not protest or comment when, a month ago, the National BDS Conference at the Univerity of Pennsylvania, which JVP officially endorsed, revoked the press credentials of one local Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Exponent, and refused press access outright to the Philadelphia Jewish Voice.

MuzzleWatch's newfound concern about censorship rings hollow. They are happy to complain when AIPAC withholds press credentials, but the barring of the local Jewish press from a major anti-Israel conference (which JVP endorsed, did I mention that?) rates not even a yawn.

It's convenient to be the eternal victim over at MuzzleWatch, proudly wearing tape over your mouth for all to see. It's less convenient to hold all conferences to one standard, especially when one conference is being run by a group you want to please, and another by a group you despise. But that's the only way to avoid being rightly identified as a whiner and a hypocrite.

(I also hate to point this out, but AIPAC has had some trouble with JVP activists, which Plitnick certainly is, in the past. To the best of my knowledge, the Philadelphia Jewish Voice has no record of disrupting BDS conferences.)