Moadim L'Simcha, Happy Holidays and some rants and raves

SUCCOT AND SIMHAT TORAH
We are reaching the end of the fall Jewish Holiday season with  Succot and Simhat Torah
Succot  is a holiday on which we are commanded by God to be happy and
we do our best. We eat in tabernacles, little huts designed to
remind us of how our ancestors in our mythic history lived in
huts in the desert.

This week is marked by people traveling
around, camping, enjoying nature, all very nice. Thursday we
have the holiday of the Eighth Day, which here in Israel
coincides with Simhat Torah, the rejoicing of the completion of
the annual cycle of reading the Torah in the synagogue.
Actually in our little Reform synagogue we read the Torah in
three years, a third of each weekly portion each week. In any
case, people will dance with the scrolls and children will wave
flags.

The flags have pictures of little boys carrying Torah
scrolls. My granddaughter Maya asked a rabbi why there are no girls carrying scrolls. I doubt that she got a satisfactory answer.

The strip Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to which Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy introduced me has a posting  starring him on how to debate with creationists, i.e. do not even try. One should never give them the legitimacy of sharing a platform. I get calls occasionally from local community TV stations to
appear with Gaists, astrologers or creationists and I always refuse. This is why:
you should never appear with them.



OK, enough of the fun that you can find on my nice blog.  Now we have to rant.
HUMAN RIGHTS WORLDWIDE

My first rant this time is in the area of the fundamental
rights of workers to organize and to bargain collectively with
their employers. We would like to think that this is something
that everyone understands, but unfortunately this is not the
case. I would like to introduce you again to a Web site that
deals with these issues and puts out calls for urgent actions
as matters come up. It is run from London by my friend Eric
Lee. It is called Labour Start.You
will find there many important petition actions and I strongly
suggest that you register and get on their mailing list. In any
case, I shall pass on cases to you.

A particularly egregious case is in  Cambodia and
I call upon you to click and act.

Another shameful case is in the United States where USAirways
has hired a union busting company to prevent organization by
its employees.



Capital Punishment
The USA continues to kill its citizens through the judicial
process. Here is a death penalty case that should elicit a
response from all of you.


CONCENTRATION CAMPS
The government of North Korea is one of the most odious dictatorships in the world. The people live in dire poverty while the regime develops nuclear weapons and delivery systems. All dissent is repressed and dissidents are put away in concentration camps. Please join the call to 
close them now

IMPUNITY MUST END
Human rights violators often manage to attain impunity for
their crimes by going into exile after removal from power. Such
is the case of the former president of Chad Hissene Habre who
has been indicted for crimes against humanity but has found
refuge in Senegal. Please join the call to Senegal to extradite
him to face trial for his crimes

PARANOIA IN SOCIETY

In a movie about Israel called State in Suspension (plug: my son in law Danny wrote the score) someone is asked who will be Israel's new enemy once peace with the Arabs is achieved. The woman asked replied with no hesitation "men!" Seriously, it seems that people need an enemy just as much as they need friends and maybe more. I would like to call your attention to a posting by Laura Miller in Salon in reference to  an essay from the 1960's by the late Richard Hofstadter about the paranoid nature of the American right. In general Laura Miller in Salon is worth readying regularly.

CHINA
Apparently a week cannot go by without some terrible human rights violation in China. Tian Xi
contracted HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C through a blood transfusion in 1996, when he was nine years old. He has become an activist for people who have HIV because of malpractice. He is now in prison and in severe danger of torture simply for trying to get answers from officials. Amnesty International has put out a call for support and protest. Please act on this horrible case.

BRAZIL The long term effects of the persecution and discrimination against indigenous people in the
Western Hemisphere go on. Amnesty International has issued a call for action on behalf of people who are being held hostage on their own ancestral lands. It does not seem to matter where--the expansion of European populations into the Western Hemisphere and the subsequent extirpation or suppression of the local people seems never to end. Please help out with this protest.

A STRANGE TALE
This is an odd story of a neo-Nazi couple in Poland who suddenly discovered that they
were Jews themselves. It is typical of anti semites that even in a country that has very few Jews, they
manage to get blamed for everything that goes wrong. In any case, this is a story that gives you an idea
of how the effects of the Holocaust and WWII reverberate down the down the generations.

THE LOCAL SCENE

Lest anyone think that I am only a ranter about the wider world, here come the shouting and screaming at what is happening in my back yard and is being perpetrated in my name. Before we get to that, however, I
would like to comment on something that we see too often, namely Israel bashing with human rights as the excuse and antisemitism as the real motivation. Certainly our government is deserving of criticism andit is wrong to brand critics as antisemites, especially since most Israelis have never seen nor met a
real antisemite. Recently we had an example in which the Executive Director of Amnesty Finland branded Israel a "scum state." I have never seen states that have been roundly criticized by Amnesty, such as Burma, Nigeria or China labeled as such. We also see criticism of Israel while Hamas and Hezbullah are not called to account. This phenomenon is very common in Europe and other countries with predominantly Christian populations. Apparently if you are told as a child in Sunday School that the Jews killed
Christ and then became usurious moneylenders, it sticks into adulthood. Nonetheless we should be careful about differentiating between antisemitic rants and legitimate criticism of policies and actions. I am appending a piece by Amitai Etzioni about fairness of criticism. He has been over the years a strong critic of our government and its policies, so his words have weight.

In a similar vein, Benny Morris, a once revisionist historian who has moved to the right wing raises an
issue about the competing narratives of the two sides in this dispute. I do not agree with his premises and conclusions in his debate with Hitchens, but it is a point of view to be considered.


OCHA REPORT from Judith Harel=no more encouraging than usual.  Civilians are still being abused in the Occupied Territories.

SHIPS AHOY!

In the meantime, boats continue to come towards Gaza and the Piracy 13 commandos continue to intercept them and abuse the people on board. We have a report from the Mavi Marmara that exposes the lies of the official version. The person interviewed may not be totally reliable himself, as you can gather from his profile, but his description sounds more plausible than what the army spin command told us. You can read and drawyour own   conclusions. A small boat bearing nine Jewish and Israeli activists was intercepted and brought to Ashdod. The
passengers who included a Holocaust survivor, a bereaved parent who lost a child to a suicide bomber and a former Israeli Air Force pilot offered no resistance, but this did not keep them from being abused by the gorillas who beat them and used tase guns.  The army as usual has its tissue of lies, but we all know how to relate to that. It would have been much smarter to let the symbolic aid package arrive in Gaza. Of course, we recall the scene from Good Morning
Vietnam where the general says, "military intelligence, now that is an original idea." The decision
making progress in Israel is dominated by the army and the results are uniformly catastrophic.

Our enlightened Foreign Minister Liebermann has come up with the old idea of population swap, parts of Israel with Arab population for the West Bank settlements. He did this at the UN General Assembly and basically made his own Prime Minister look like an idiot. The idea of transferring territory to a
different government without out consulting the citizens living there is racist, antidemocratic and
despicable. Naturally many leaders of the US Jewish community were as outraged as I am--something to do with growing up and being educated in a democracy, however flawed it may be.For  details click

The freeze on building in the settlements has ended and I expect that Abbas will eventually quit the
negotiations since they are a farce. They are a farce because in this country tails wag dogs and a
minority of crazy settlers are destroying our lives. They have stolen our country and are dooming it to
become eventually an Arab state, as if there were not enough Arab states. I totally agree with Bradley
Burston and he can express the outrage we share much better than I can. I will soon provide a link to
his posting, but first let me vent a bit on my own. I came here 60 years ago as a young idealist, served
in the Army, conscript, regular and reserve over a period of nearly 30 years. I did my best to educate
young scientists at Tel Aviv University in the belief that we were creating a civilized country that
could take its proper place in the family of nations. What happened was that everything was stolen from me, my religion by the Orthodox enemies of humanity, my democracy by a nefarious coalition of military fascists and settler fanatics, my desire for social justice by a swinish capitalism (phrase coined by President Peres) and a xenophobic culture that enshrines racism and calls it Zionism. We try to protest, the doctors of Physicians for Human Rights try to show a different face of Israel, Women in Black stand on street corners and are spat upon and we have small futile demonstrations that are largely ignored. As Itzhak Laor puts it the most we seem able to do is to "like" things on Facebook.
Now you can get the full blast of what this is all about from a
more accomplished blogger.

This has become very long so I shall send you off for the holiday with some good news on a human rights struggle reported by Andy Borowitz.

  Gene Weingarten has some sad words on the demise of English.

He
should come to Israel where Hebrew after being a dead language
for 2,000 years was resurrected for a while and has died again,
alas.

Yom Kippur, Sinners Repent!!

Yom Kippur is coming up and traditionally Jews go to synagogue, vid. this image and think about their actions during the past year.  This shows a 19th century synagogue in Europe, painted by Gottlieb..  There is another tradition that has grown up in Israel amongst those who do not participate in the religious aspects of the holiday.  Since no one drives on this day except for ambulance and fire truck drivers, the highways are empty and are filled with bicycle riders.  Here is a shot of the Ayalon Freeway in Tel Aviv near the crossing of the Yarkon River.

 This is also a form of introspection.
Thanks to Hadass for a very appropriate Rosh Hashana card:

  More seriously, I find Yom Kippur with the fast and the focus on things that are not usually in our immediate sphere of attention during the other days of the year to be a positive experience.  I belong to a small Reform congregation that does not even have a synagogue and we do it all ourselves without even renting a cantor.  It is fine, my friend Lev and I split the Torah reading and Haftarot (prophetic readings) between us, Reuven serves as volunteer cantor and our former Rabbi will come in to preach, although to me the sermon is not what is important.  It is the private thinking of the individual inspired to some extent by the ancient words of the liturgy.  There is lovely Hebrew poetry from the Golden Age in Spain and there is anguished lamenting from the Crusader era in England and Germany and somehow it binds together for me.  It must for others as well for over a quarter of the avowedly secular people in Israel fast on this day.  It is not a bad idea to think a bit about ourselves and our world.

This year Rosh Hashana coincided both with Eid el Fitr and the anniversary of the attacks by terrorists on the United States.  Instead of deep thinking, we saw a nut threatening to burn the Quran.politicians blathering nonsense and fascism and fanaticism on the rise all around us.  It is somewhat reassuring that there are people out there writing and blogging for rationality, decency and the hope for peace.    We have Natanyahu and Abbas sitting down to try to work out a deal.  I hope they succeed and more important that they can sell the deal to their people.  We have peace with the governments of Egypt and Jordan, but it is hard to say that we have peace with the people of these two countries.  Maybe in a generation it will evolve.
Yom Kippur is obscured this year by the silly return to standard time caused by Orthodox politicians who love to show how much power they have.  Actually religious people are upset because they now cannot raise a minyan (prayer quorum) for afternoon and evening prayers.  I suspect that with over 200 kilosignatures on a protest petition things will be different next year.

I skipped blogging last week and am debating
  whether the weekly or biweekly frequency is best.   There is much to blog about both  nice and nasty.  The nasty stuff is here.

  LABELS
I am a bit bemused by the labeling that people use to describe other people's political and religious
positions.  On Rosh Hashana we were riding home with some family members and Yosefa described certain dear friends with whom we had just shared a holiday meal as "extreme leftists" which caused our family to crack up. It seems that they apply this label to us, whereas we regard ourselves as liberal democrats while our political adversaries are of course all foaming at the mouth fascists.  
 

  One usually thinks of laws against blasphemy in connection with Muslim and Third World countries.  Yet here we have  an example of a democracy in the EU enacting such a law.  This is the country where the reigning church has compiled a record of child abuse by priests that filled up a 700 page report for Dublin alone.  Holy indeed are our Irish friends.  Indeed we also have had some cases of rabbis getting out of line and one notorious case may lead to an indictment, but we have had nothing like the pattern of abuse and cover up that has stained the escutcheon of the Catholic Church.




Let us have a bit of good news.  For the past two years we have been bombarding the Mexican government about a human rights activist who was arrested and indicted on a trumped up murder charge.  It had to do with his activity against tycoons who are dispossessing peasants and in general the human rights scene in Mexico which is dismal.  I am pleased to bring the good news that a judge has shown some courage and Raul Hernandez has been acquitted.
In China an activist has also been released, but his return to his home village was marred by the
actions of the authorities.  The case of Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-taught lawyer who drew worldwide attention to his rural neighbors' stories of forced sterilizations and late-term abortions by local authorities has also kept us busy during the past several years.  It is time that the Chinese government joined the family of enlightened civilized nations.  Of course, as an Israeli I am open to comments about pots and kettles.
Another issue on which we have spent a great deal of  postage is the commutation of a death sentence in Ohio.  Yes, there is value to sitting down and writing letters if enough people do so. 
Please click to thank the governor who has shown political courage and integrity.  These are, alas, rare commodities in our modern world.

Apropos death sentences and China, I would like to share some news from Amnesty Intermantional about reforms in the death penalty laws in China.  China  has capital punishment for no fewer than 68 offenses including white collar crimes such as fraud etc.  I append a report from the China team of Amnesty International and a link to a press release with commentary.  The question is of course whether this is real reform or just window dressing as is so often the case with China.

Good news ? Including AI's impact

China
?       The Supreme People's Procuratorate and the 

Ministry of Public 
Security jointly issued a pilot guideline on 17 August 

setting out 
procedures on how supervision could be strengthened. 

Under the new 
guideline, prosecutors and police at the same administrative 

level must 
set up an information-sharing system, where the police 

must regularly 
report to the prosecutors about cases reported to 

them and cases they are 
handling. Prosecutors must also respond to complaints 

from citizens. The 
prosecutors can also ask police to explain their 

decision to accept or 
decline a case, and can order the police to accept 

or decline a case if 
certain criteria are fulfilled. The pilot guideline will take effect on 
October 1.
?       Chinese government news agency Xinhua reported on 

23 August that 
the proposed amendments to China's criminal code may 

see the death penalty 
removed from 13 out of 68 crimes, the so-called white 

collar crimes such 
as tax fraud, and for smuggling valuables and cultural relics, that 
currently carry the punishment although are rarely used. 

It would also 
remove the death penalty as a punishment for those 

over 75 years of age. 
The draft amendments are working their way through 

numerous readings in 
China?s legislative chamber. The China team issued a press 

release 
commenting on the proposed amendments.  

Click here for the press release.

NO BURNING!

We all should be glad that the nutty pastor in Florida called off the Quran burning.  As Heine wrote, where books are burned, people will be burned.
BTW, anyone who goes to Berlin should visit the memorial to the 1933 book burning.

  It provides food for thought.  The Jewish museum there is also well
 worth a visit.

The return of Fidel Castro to the Cuban and international scene is worthy of note.  Here is an interesting interview with him.  The interview continued with a dolphin show.Both posts are  worth a read. Castro regrets his role in the missile crisis and admits that the Cuban model no longer works even for them.

In other places, the inhumanity of man to man goes on.  In Afghanistan, it is considered a crime to send a girl to school.   People say the NATO troops should get out, but it is sad to think of what will happen to women there if we all turn our backs on them.   Then we have a grave miscarriage of justice in Nigeria.  Please join the appeal.
We also should not forget environmental irresponsibility as practiced in Canada.  The tar sand oil exploitation issue is a disgrace for a country that claims to be a world leader.

@HOME

In the past fewweeks nothing has gotten much better in our neck of the woods.  The repeated destruction of the Bedouin village of    El Arakib  shows the level of depravity of our society and of
ourselves as we allow this to happen.  We go, we demonstrate and it is all futile.  The village has been razed five times.

 RESEARCHER FROM MARS
Carlo Strenger imagines an anthropologist from Mars trying to make sense out of Zionism and anti Zionism as defined in Israel.  Indeed, he make s a good point since the people who are labeled as post or anti Zionists are the people who are trying to preserve the Zionist vision of our founding fathers/mothers and in particular the ideas of Herzl, Weizmann and Ben Gurion.  It is an indication of the collapse of rational thinking that has taken over our body politic and our society in general.

Yossi Gurwitz (see his blog on my right margin) makes a good case (in Hebrew) against the "nation state of Jews" that the right wing is blathering about.  I agree with him and wish his blog were available in English.  I would, however, point out to him that  the rise of the nation state in 19th century Europe was what caused Herzl and his colleagues to conclude that the end of Jewish life in Europe was at hand.  The events of the 20th century proved them right and brought  about the rise of Israel.  The same attitudes of ethnic supremacy are bringing about the collapse of Israel as a democracy.
  A Jewish democratic state is a contradiction in terms.  The racism of the Orthodox and their xenophobia and  general hatred of humanity outside the tribe has become part of the mind set of the majority of Jews in Israel including the secular component.  It is not only in Israel that we see this.  It  is shocking to see how Jews are jumping onto the Islamophobic bandwagon in the US and in Europe..  Of course they would condemn us to perpetual warfare, but it is not their blood that would be spilled.  In any case,  the Palestinians are absolutely right in their rejection of the demand that they recognize Israel as a Jewish nation state. First, it is not their concern to define our state and secondly the racist implications, especially for non-Jews who live in Israel are something no decent human being can accept.  Let us face it--if we do not vacate the occupied territory we will have a bi-national state.  If it is democratic, then the Jewish majority will be a thing of the past.  If we are to replicate the old South Africa, we should fold up our tents and vanish into the night.

An example of our Jewish paranoia is seen in the reaction of the right wing of the US Jewish community to an article in Time about the attitudes of Israelis.  It is real chutzpa on the part of these people who have nothing to lose if we do not have peace.   I am also getting fed up with Jewish billionaires in the US or Austria who come in here with their money to play with power with no fear of consequences and buy themselves a politician or general as a pet animal.  The fact that our politicians and generals are for sale is in itself an issue of concern.

On a more positive note, a soldier is being indicted for a crime in Gaza.
It is a step forward, but the indictment of commanders is still far down the road.

Let us wind up with Andy Borowitz and Gene Weingarten
just to stay in an optimistic mood.

The Ranter is Back

Happy Holidays Rosh Hashana and Eid to all who celebrate at this time of year.
 For starters,


Welcome new Amnesty Secretary General 

Indeed I hope that we are entering a new era of the struggle for human rights.  I will let 
Sali Shetty, our new SG,  speak for himself and invite you to click on the link above

YES I AM BACK!.
I am back with my blogs after a long silence caused by a conference deadline that required some work to be done and a vacation with my family in the wilds of Canada. Anyone who is interested can read the vacation blog  YandA

  I am coming back with both blogs, the nasty one bitching about the human rights situation in the world
  and in our little corner of  it and the sweet  Pollyanna blog full of science, culture and good news
  where I can find it.
OK, now back to work after a long layoff.

As we all know a terrible genocide has been going on in the  Darfur region of
Sudan for many years.  Here in Israel we have many refugees from Darfur whose
stories are hair-raising.  Our government and army have been turning them back
at the border, interning them and treating them terribly.  Our local Amnesty International
section is part of a coalition of human rights organizations that have been making
valiant efforts to help them.
The nations of Africa who should be standing up to bring the perpetrators of these crimes
against humanity to justice have been very delinquent in this task.
Amnesty International has criticized the Kenyan government for its failure
 to arrest Sudan’s President Omar
al-Bashir during his visit to the country to join celebrations ushering in
Kenya’s new constitution, viewing the refusal to arrest President al-Bashir as an
obstruction of justice for victims in Darfur.

The President of Sudan is the subject of an arrest warrant by the International
Criminal Court for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.
For the rest of the 
Amnesty rant click here.

I would like to call upon all to make this next Hebrew year one in which we take action on behalf
of victims of persecution around the world.  We all grew up  being told how the world stood by
while our people were murdered by the Nazis.  It is not quite exact because tens of thousands of Europeans risked their lives to protect and hide Jews.  Some of them have been recognized by Yad Veshem, but not all.  There is a duty to stand up and be counted.  I suggest we start with the call to activism on the Amnesty International activism Web site, register and get to work.

Before I move on to the home front, there is an issue in Russia that calls for action.  It has been raised
by AVAAZ, another most worthy organization.  Please click
on this link and act upon its call.
 I also want to call your attention to the continued discrimination against Roma in EU countries. 
Here is an example taken from France.  The most enlightened countries can show racism and xenophobia with the worst. Note the video.

PAKISTAN FLOODS
The floods in Pakistan have killed over a thousand people and displaced millions.  Please take a minute, open your heart and pocket to help these victims.

AT HOME

Racism begins at home or maybe it is universal.  This week we witnessed a German central bank executive being
hauled before a tribunal for remarks about a "Jewish gene" 
while in Israel, Lysenko  biology is alive and well.  Our highly educated Interior Minister Eli Yishai, a deeply religious xenophobe tells us that by Orthodox conversion a person can acquire a Jewish gene.  The exact
quote by Yishai-"A convert, if he converts through the Orthodox, he has the Jewish gene. If he doesn't convert
through the Orthodox, he doesn't have the Jewish gene. As simple as that."
This quote is taken from an interview the interior minister of the Jewish State and the Shas
party leader, Eli Yishai, gave to the editor
of The Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz (August 8, 2010 ).  A detailed comment 
is given by Akiva Eldar. 
I think we need to face up to the fact that Orthodox Jews are not terribly pleasant people.  Yossi Gurvitz in his
Hebrew  blog gives us some insight about what life would be like
if we had a state governed by religious/halacha law instead of our secular legal system.   We would have capital punishment restored with one mode of execution the pouring of molten lead down the gullet of the victim.  To be fair, we also have stoning, dunghill hanging/garroting and a few other nice things.  On the
other hand, let me give some time to an Orthodox Rabbi from Los Angeles who tells us that we should not judge any group by its extremists. 
Unfortunately Rabbi Fink is, in my humble opinion, a bit too charitable.  In many cases, it is the tail
that wags the dog, such as the reactions of many people in Israel to the racist and evil statements of
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who called for a pestilence to wipe out the Palestinian people.
Our nice liberal Prime Minister dissociated the government from the statement (why? is the rabbi in the cabinet?)
but did not condemn the sentiments expressed.

DESTRUCTION OF A VILLAGE
Much has been written about the destruction of the village of El Arakeeb.  We went there to demonstrate for whatever it is worth.  I cannot add much to the outrage, but there is one aspect that has not been given much publicity.  I refer to the use of juvenile vandals by the police in carrying out the horrible task of driving people from their homes.  The legal aspects are complex, but the moral aspects of how racism is applied are clear.
The role of teen age barbarians  in this crime is frightening for our future here.

There is a flap in Israel now about artists refusing to perform in the Occupied Territories.  For details, click.
JUSTICE
Sometimes something good happens and even justice can raise its head around here.  I refer to the civil court decision in which the Army was found to be responsible for the death of the ten year old child

Abir Ibrahim who was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier while buying candy at a kiosk during a school break.  The Army has refused to investigate but now it is under High Court order to do so  The winning of the civil case is a first instance of justice here.  I recommend reading the link because it shows that we have in our judiciary people who are not afraid of uniforms and that is comforting.


There is much more to rant about such as Eden  Abergil who claims she would like to butcher all Arabs, but she is  yesterday's news..  
Let me say
farewell with a Gene Weingarten Below the Beltway.  

I will throw in an Andy Borowitz for the same price.