Saudi Iqra TV: “Would You Shake Hands With A Jew”? November 29, 2007

I never do this.

I never, ever quote Little Green Footballs. LGF and I rarely agree on any issues — LGF being a neo-con platform and me being, well, me. But my boy Nick posted something from LGF on MySpace Jews that I felt compelled to write about.

This is lamentable for a number of reasons. First of all — it is not as if there are absolutely no suras and no ahadeeth which allude to interfaith coexistence, on the contrary. But bigger than this, this shows what happens when people are raised inside of an abject lack of dialogue with any member of a certain group.

How many of these people had ever had a conversation with a Jew? How many of them ever met a Jew — for more than 5 seconds, and not in an airport check-in line?

Chat the Planet, a project from NextNextEntertainment, is an example of interactive dialogue-building that is sorely needed in Saudi Arabia. Chat the Planet produces things like Hometown Baghdad, a “look into the everyday lives of students in war-torn Iraq.” For the Jerusalem Project, they set up laptops and webcams — and kids on two sides of the world sat and talked and gave their opinions, perhaps the first times in the participants’ lives ever having heard such points of view.

Saudi Arabia needs this. Someone — because there may not be an internal awakening to do so — has to have the courage to say, “let’s see if this is correct, if the ‘Jews’ of today are the people referred to negatively in the Qur’an, or if they are really respectable ‘People of the Book’ who worship All-h”. These Saudi young adults need someone to initiate dialogue and build a bridge leading to them.

Because, if you listened to that last guy, he’s not really planning for peaceful idea exchange at this poiint.

Bridges — and not walls — must be built if humanity is going to survive and prosper.

So a hat tip to LGF. G-d willing, in a few years, Saudi TV will have Jews and Imams shaking hands in peace.

Just Wondering: Why is the NY Nazi Party… November 28, 2007

Could someone tell me why, of all places, the headquarters of the New York Nazi Party is in Brooklyn?

Brooklyn, of all places? One of the most diverse places in the nation? One of the largest, most vibrant Jewish communities where the borough president and mayor are both Jewish? While statistically, more people means more chances of finding a Nazi, wouldn’t we expect this ilk to be relegated to some backwoods cesspool or “white bread…mountain town” (a la South Park)?

Take a good look at these NY Nazi Party delegates. While, yes, we see bomber jackets and shaved heads and all those things we have been trained to look for — would one be able to easily peg that white-haired older man for a fascist? What about the well-dressed businessman-type in the button-down shirt and blazer?

The Brooklyn office of the Nazi party can be reached via phone at 1-718-252-2247, an “unlisted land line” with Verizon.

So apparently Brooklyn does have a Nazi presence.

Who are these people? And how do we stop children from next to — or inside — our own communities from joining up with filthy ideologies like this?

A Word of Torah: Jail And Genesis 40 November 27, 2007

Reuters reported today the release of the findings of Unlocking America, a new US Prison System study from the JFA Institute, a Washington-based criminal justice think tank.

The study (PDF), according to Reuters, is a damning indictment:

The number of people in U.S. prisons has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul…It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs. It said the steps would cut the prison population in half, save $20 billion a year and ease social inequality without endangering the public.

More than 1.5 million people are now in U.S. state and federal prisons, up from 196,429 in 1970, the report said. Another 750,000 people are in local jails. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world’s highest, followed by Russia, according to 2006 figures compiled by Kings College in London.

One of the key concepts the study comes to confront is a long-held foundation of the American criminal justice system: certain individuals are “career criminals” we can identify and whose imprisonment will reduce crime. On Page 12 of Unlocking America (PDF page 17), the authors quote a 2006 study, however, which showed almost exactly the opposite:

More recent research, nearly twenty years after the first studies on the topic, continues to discredit the claim that career criminals can be identified early by a profiling system. John Laub and Robert Sampson have re-examined data from Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck’s 1930s seminal publication following the life careers of 500 Boston delinquents. Although the vast majority desisted from crime after the age of 25, a small minority persisted in
committing crime into their later years. Using all available criteria, Laub and Samson could not distinguish these “persisters” at the beginning of their delinquent careers from the others who had followed the normal pattern of criminal involvement in adolescence and desistance after their early twenties….

Laub and Sampson were able to find a different set of predictive factors, none of which could be observed when the young people first committed crimes. Instead, they found there were major “turning points” in a person’s life—such as getting and holding a good job, enlisting in the military, marrying, and establishing contacts with conventional institutions and groups—rather than personality characteristics or early childhood experiences that distinguished
the careers of “desisters” from “persisters”.

Laub and Sampson also found that delinquents who had been incarcerated were more likely to commit crimes later in life than those who had been sentenced to probation or local jail time. The implication was that imprisonment itself can encourage criminality.

A similar contention exists in Genesis 40, at the end of this week’s parsha, Parshat Vayeshev.
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No Poking in Damascus: Syria Bans Facebook November 26, 2007

Syria’s government has taken the audacious step of banning all access to Facebook.com from inside Syria, the Washington Post reported Friday:

Syrian users of Facebook said on Friday the authorities had blocked access to the social network Web site as part of a crackdown on political activism on the Internet…There was no comment form the government, which has intensified a campaign against bloggers, virtual opinion forums and independent media sites in recent months.

Why would the Syrian government take such a drastic step towards Internet censorship? (MSN’s Hotmail also is blocked regularly.)

Ammar al-Qurabi, head of the National Association for Human Rights, said little independent political content published by Syrians on the Internet is now tolerated.

“We have asked officials and they said Facebook could become a conduit for Israeli penetration of our youth, but the real reason for blocking the forum because it provides for criticism of the authorities,” Qurabi said.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was head of the Syrian Computer Society before becoming president, and Syria’s internet presence is largely attributed to him. As of the banning, the official Syria network had 28,350 users.

The official reason given to bloggers about the Facebook ban was because it could become an “Israeli penetration” flashpoint? That’s the LIE? That’s what you cover UP with?

Not surprisingly, Facebook is also banned in Iran.

And what’s the upshot of all this? Facebook tourism in Lebanon is through the roof, with Syrians flocking to Beirut’s Internet cafe’s for unimpeded access to their Super Walls and Friends Lists. And don’t think PC and software manufacturers aren’t capitalizing as well, like Joshua Landis says:

However, don’t worry about the Syrian Facebook users. Syrian online content have become “un-censorable” in Syria. Tens of Syrian home-grown anti-censorship “cracking and Hacking” tools come pre-installed on any laptop/desktop PC bought in Syria. Most of the 28 thousand users will continue to access Facebook (same case with YouTube and BlogSpot).

These are the most technically savvy of Syrians anyway. In the last few days, I started receiving emails including lists of tens of methods for overcoming censorship of Facebook, sent from Syrian email addresses I do not recognize.

And now a whole new group of bloggers and Internet users either goes underground or goes to Lebanon.

Rare Music Video Post: Y-Love, Idan Raichel, and Matisyahu November 20, 2007

Shemspeed.com — already positioning itself as the fixture for Jewish music entertainment — comes through in spades on this one.

It was a privilege to be on this stage, and I am happy to be able to share the video with everyone.

Links to the Flickr photo album are available at Shemspeed.com.

Y-LOVE, the Idan Raichel Project, and Matisyahu, on one stage. History in the making.

Punks and Skinheads: Good for the Jews? November 13, 2007

In Prague this past weekend, a pro-Nazi rally was scheduled to take place in the Jewish Quarter of the Czech capital. The parade, called for the day after the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht, was organized by the Young Nationalist Democrats (MND), a far-right extremist group led by Erik Sedlacek, and had as its official pretense the protest of the Czech military presence in Iraq. The event was banned almost as soon as it was called, and despite the MND’s giving “eight alternate routes” and a backup date, after a number of court judgments (one of which said that “city hall was not empowered to judge the veracity of the pretext behind a march”) the ban remained.

The parade of some 400 right-wing extremists from the Czech Republic (backed up by “two busloads” of supporters from Germany) was squashed initially by police, who sealed off the neo-Nazis’ meeting point, making numerous arrests and seizing weapons there. A few straggling fascists did manage to make their way into the city and were met by a sight that the head of Prague’s Jewish Museum, Leo Pavlat, called a “very nice picture of the [Czech] nation”, more than 1,000 activists protesting the march:

More than 1,000 people rallied in the Czech capital’s old Jewish quarter to try to stop the march by members of the Young Nationalist Democrats….Police managed to keep most of the 400 right-wing marchers and the anti-Nazi demonstrators away from those commemorating the event.

The head of Prague’s Jewish Museum, Leo Pavlat, was among those gathering to protest against the neo-Nazi rally. “This street was to be the scene of the neo-Nazi provocation - actually we see huge gathering of people coming to protest against neo-Nazis,” he said.

“This is something that deserves appreciation and it’s also very nice picture of this nation and of this country.”

Who were these activists? (more…)

Top Intel Exec: Expect Less Privacy November 11, 2007

Here’s a wonderful little harbinger of things to come, courtesy of the Associated Press. As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, “a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy”:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act….The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies. About 40 wiretapping suits are pending.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action suit, claims there are as many as 20 such sites in the U.S.

My problem with this is, in their “safeguarding my private conversations”, they give themselves access to said “private conversations”, making these conversations, in effect, no longer private.

Every call. Every e-mail. Copied onto a “government supercomputer”.

Welcome to the future of “privacy”.

Rare Music Post: Amy Martin’s “All About Oil” November 8, 2007

As I do not know who this woman is, for me, there is, according to all opinions, no issue of kol ishah, but this song is a very potent synopsis of why we’re in Iraq, why our national debt has hit an unprecedented $9 trillion, why the US dollar is in the toilet, why social programs get the ax while Iraq spending is set to increase, why Bush can screw over the S-CHIP program while simultaneously not providing medical coverage for hundreds of thousands of veterans.

Allow Amy to state the reasoning simply for you. It’s about oil, greed, and old-boy systems.

Lyrics to the song are available here.

More Veterans On the Streets

A disturbing story from the New York Times today, “Surge Seen in Number of Homeless Veterans”, highlights some of the plight of post-9/11 veterans, who have been turning up homeless or in need of assistance in greater numbers:

More than 400 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have turned up homeless, and the Veterans Affairs Department and aid groups say they are bracing for a new surge in homeless veterans in the years ahead.

[…]

The National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington will release a report on Thursday saying that among one million veterans who served after the Sept. 11 attacks, 72,000 are paying more than half their incomes for rent, leaving them highly vulnerable.

Mr. Dougherty of the V.A. said outreach officers, who visit shelters, soup kitchens and parks, had located about 1,500 returnees from Iraq or Afghanistan who seemed at high risk, though many had jobs. More than 400 have entered agency-supported residential programs around the country. No one knows how many others have not made contact with aid agencies.

More than 11 percent of the newly homeless veterans are women, Mr. Dougherty said, compared with 4 percent enrolled in such programs over all.

Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation’s homeless. Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day, the National Alliance report calculated.

While veterans are returning, by and large, to more private welcomes than Vietnam veterans received during the 70s, 72% of Americans believe that the government should be doing more for its veterans, according to a March 2007 survey from the Pew Research Center. The founder of New Directions, a treatment center for veterans in Los Angeles, says that he foresees a bleak future for Iraq and Afghanistan vets:

“When the Vietnam War ended, that was part of the problem. The war was over, it was off TV, nobody wanted to hear about it,” said John Keaveney, a Vietnam veteran and a founder of New Directions in Los Angeles, which provides substance abuse help, job training and shelter to veterans.

“I think they’ll be forgotten,” Keaveney said of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “People get tired of it. It’s not glitzy that these are young, honorable, patriotic Americans. They’ll just be veterans, and that happens after every war.”

The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be women, less likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to have mental illness — mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said Pete Dougherty, director of homeless veterans programs at the VA.

Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA’s homeless programs have a diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a substance abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.

Iraq veterans have a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress than their counterparts from previous wars. The VA has been slow to respond to cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a fact which came to light after one veteran seeking treatment for the disorder was found hanging from an electrical cord at his Minnesota home after being put on a waiting list at a VA hospital.

Aid agencies expect a “tsunami” of new cases as time goes on. Indeed, as David W. Gorman, Executive Director of the Washington Headquarters of Disabled American Veterans (DAV) attests, while the media is touting a “30,000 injured veterans” number, the real number of injured vets is much higher:

On Veterans Day, politicians will praise the 30,000 troops “officially wounded” in action in Iraq and Afghanistan as if this “statistic” were some kind of “fact.” In doing so, they’ll harm the men and women who carry the burden of our nation’s defense in today’s very dangerous world.

That 30,000 number is a fantasy.

Here’s the truth about the human cost borne by the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as shown by data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Of the 1.5 million troops who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 720,000 (48%) are now veterans in the civilian population.

Of these, 202,000 have filed claims for VA disability benefits. The VA granted benefits in more than 90% of the cases processed so far, and will grant more upon appeal or presentation of additional evidence.

In other words, real statistics show that one out of four veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan is disabled in military service. This should shock no one as troops return to the war zones for their third, fourth, and now fifth tours of combat duty.

Of the 720,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, a quarter million have turned to the VA for treatment - more than one out of every three veterans of the combat theaters.

Gorman’s piece also highlights perhaps the crux of this entire issue — why are so many veterans being screwed by the very country we went out defend, and why is it happening at such a higher incidence lately?

Our government tried to do war on the cheap, failing to recognize the back-end cost of veterans with disabilities. True, it increased funding for VA programs each year - by amounts far below the rapidly increasing needs of our disabled heroes.

And it is these “back-end costs” which are going to continue to haunt us. Yet another example of the short-sightedness of starting a war with no foreseeable end, in a conflict where no one knows what constitutes “winning” anymore.

‘Halal Pork’? Pranksters Under Investigation November 5, 2007

What in the hell is this?

NTUC FairPrice said it will make a police report over “a deliberate and wilful act of mischief” to tamper with its packaging of “Pasar Fresh Pork”. It said it takes such matters seriously. A photo by a MediaCorp viewer showed a pack of NTUC’s Pasar pork with a halal sticker from the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore. FairPrice clarified the original packaging has no halal sticker.

OK - after seeing the debacles in Monsey, NY where nonkosher meat was mislabeled as kosher (intentionally) and Brooklyn where “glatt kosher” labels were placed on kosher meat of lesser standard, two words jump to my mind: inside job. Either someone who had access to these Islamic Religious Council labels did this, or the person who did this has some connection to Islamic Religious Council stationery, etc.

Not to mention, we are not talking about a minor infraction of sharia here. We’re talking about pork. No store employee would have inadvertently done something like this.

How does this benefit anyone? One is not “wrestling power” into the hands of a “secular majority” by attaching these labels — one advances no cause by attempting to screw with the heads of innocent shoppers simply looking for halal food to prepare for their families. NTUC FairPrice is completely justified in seeking criminal redress (and, in Singapore, that could equal a physically painful price), and I pray that no sincere All-h-fearing Muslim person got caught up in this oh-it’s-so-funny act of anti-religious prejudice.

Silly Neo-Cons, Scripture’s for Libs

Ann Coulter, not content with resting on the laurels of her already uber-ignorant statements, has upped the ante in her war of words with Jewish organizations. The JTA reports that Coulter “escalated” her remarks, blasting the ADL by saying not only do they not “represent” Jews, but that in general, liberal Jews have issues:

“Liberal Jews are on a collision course with themselves. They can’t reconcile the survival of Israel with their conception of themselves as liberals. The liberal coalition has turned against them. Jews are out; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in. The new king knows not Joseph.”

Oh touché! Way to throw in a verse and name drop Biblical righteous figures!

Ostensibly, the way that Coulter throws around words like “godless” and “atheistic” (chas v’shalom), one would think that she assumes that those who know G-d, are on the right wing, and knowing that “knowing” in Biblical Hebrew implies connection (usu. typified by sex, as we see from Genesis on down), ostensibly then, those in the GOP should be more connected to the Creator.

So then explain this:
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With the GOP, You Git Mo’ Gitmo November 4, 2007

The eyesore on America’s moral landscape known as Guantanamo may be about to close its doors for the last time. Defense Secretary Robert Gates instructed advisors this week to develop a proposal detailing how to accomplish the closing of the prison, thus finalizing discussions begun in recent weeks on Gitmo’s future.

Hearings on the status of many inmates — some of whom are entering their sixth year of incarceration at the hands of the US military — have already begun, and now talks of closing the prison are centering on how to move forward, as the New York Times reports:

Administration officials are considering granting Guantánamo detainees substantially greater rights as part of an effort to close the detention center and possibly move much of its population to the United States, according to officials involved in the discussions.

One proposal that is being widely discussed in the administration would overhaul the procedure for determining whether detainees are properly held by granting them legal representation at detention hearings and by giving federal judges, not military officers, the power to decide whether suspects should be held…

The administration has insisted for more than five years that a legal pillar of the war on terror is that the military alone has the power to decide which foreign terrorism suspects should be held and for how long, and backing away from that would be a sharp change of course.

Yet some officials say that enhancing detainees’ rights could also help the administration strategically, by undercutting a case brought by suspects at Guantánamo that is now before the Supreme Court, which could wind up winning them even more power to challenge their detention.

Access to legal counsel and actually knowing why they are being detained. Bringing the inmates to American soil where a thing called “due process” actually exists. A huge overhaul which is long overdue. Even done for the wrong reasons, closing Guantanamo can only be a good thing for this country’s image, and would deliver a much-needed face lift to the Presidential (dis)approval ratings we’ve been seeing as of late.

The front-running GOP presidential candidates, however, do not share the same sentiments as those being voiced by the administration and new Defense Secretary, and instead would like to see Guantanamo’s continued operation. Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson have all “embraced some of the more controversial policies on the treatment of those suspected of supporting terrorism, backing harsh interrogation methods and refusing to rule out the use of waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, on detainees” according to the New York Times:

Not only do the three candidates refuse to rule out waterboarding and other techniques that have been condemned, but they also believe the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, needs to remain open, and they back the practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects are sent for questioning to other countries, including some accused of torture.

The only one to speak out against torture was the only candidate for the GOP who has himself been a victim of wartime capture: John McCain.

Mitt Romney wants to double the size of Guantanamo, and “praises” the Patriot Act. Thompson has offered implicit support for Guantanamo. The human rights violations extant at Gitmo have only begun to crack the surface of public attention, and Gitmo is not taking place in a vacuum. From Bagram to Abu Ghraib to Gitmo to insert-secret-rendition-location-here, the US has gone from being the policeman for human rights in the world to one of the worst violators in a matter of under a decade.

For this to be seen as a positive progression in American civilization is idiotic. Obviously this must be at least on the agenda for the presidential candidates and by either omitting Gitmo from the agenda and placing human rights on the backburner — or worse, praising it and calling it a useful tool which needs to be expanded — these GOP candidates have shown precisely what type of America they stand for creating.