Shelby Steele: Kill 'Em All, Let the (White) God Sort 'Em Out

At least, that's what I thought I heard him say. I'm still in that tent at Aspen. David Bradley has finished speaking, and now various smart people have been invited up to the stage to share their ideas. The first one was a famous dancer of some sort, who made everyone in the audience (of a thousand, it seems) stand up and follow some dance move of his that involved extending an arm in a Nazi-like salute, which was momentarily disconcerting.

Steele is arguing for the end of white guilt, which is something legitimate to argue about, but now he's saying that America conducts itself with excessive politesse in Middle East war zones because of white guilt. And I always thought we tried to respect human rights whenever possible because it's the right thing to do, and, by the way, slaughtering people indiscriminately doesn't tend to win over the people you let live.

I'm not even sure, come to think of it, that I'm with his general notion that white people can stop worrying now about the consequences of slavery, and stop acting on those consequences. Maybe I'm a little bit freaked out because the audience here is 99.44 white. His talk gives me an idea, though: tomorrow, instead of moderating panels on Islam and on nuclear non-proliferation, I'm going to give a speech called, "Dear Christians: You Can Stop Thinking about Buchenwald Now."

Now John Holdren from Harvard is up there, telling us that climate change is a nearly-irreversible catastrophe, and he blames America for egregious fecklessness on the issue. I would note that many members of the audience at Aspen flew here on private jets.

His talk is making me thirsty. Two rows in front of me (one row in front of Jay Lauf's shirt) is Linda Resnick, the woman behind Fiji Water, who is at this moment drinking a bottle of same. I wish I could reach over and grab that bottle.

Shirt-blogging from Aspen

Yes, I know I promised, to those of you who care, to weigh in on the what’s-up-with-Joe-Klein-talking-about-the-Jews-that-way debate, and I will, as soon as I overcome my paralysis on the issue, but for now, I want to note that I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival all week, along with a bunch of other Atlantic wackadoos, and a whole mess of other idea peddlers, including my dear friend Sandra Day O’Connor, who I haven’t actually technically ever met, though I'm sure she would love to hear my ideas if she did know me.

In any case, my capo di tutti capi, David Bradley, is speaking at this very moment, so I should listen, because, after all, a recent brain-scan has shown that I empathize with him quite a bit, but I just have to say that my attention is being diverted by a shirt worn by our publisher, Jay Lauf, who is sitting directly in front of me. I will try to get a picture of the shirt if I could figure out the camera in this laptop, but it’s a checkered, Caribbean-blue number with ornate designs inside the collar, and it’s a great-looking shirt, and it might very well epitomize the style known as “Aspen Casual” (though it might actually be too nice for Aspen) which I’ll never master. I've decided that I need better shirts generally, and this just brings it into sharp relief. Anyway, if I can get a picture of it, I’ll post it.

Usher Meets the Country Bear Jamboree Knock-Offs

Because it's Friday, and because I don't feel like blogging right now about Joe Klein's assertion that Jews who supported the Iraq War are guilty of dual loyalty:

Presbyterians Gone Wild

A church that just can't help itself:

The new text, lurching to a curious and condescending finale, maintains moral neutrality in the face of suggestions by some Christians, that if the Jews may not have killed Christ some 2000 years ago, they may be doing so now.

When Christian liberation theology considers "a situation of oppression in which the oppressing power is a state that is Jewish, with a population and leadership predominantly made up of Jews," the revised report reads, "Christians suffering oppression at the hands of the Jewish state, its army or its citizens, identify with Jesus in his suffering.

"Sometimes Palestinian Christians liken their experience to the passion of Jesus, or describe themselves as being crucified as Jesus was crucified," the text continues. "The implication of such descriptions is that the state of Israel and its policies are the crucifying power."

Advice from Mark Leibovich

I'm sitting next to my pal Mark Leibovich at this McCain town hall meeting -- he's an expert at covering these sorts of things, and I haven't been on the campaign trail in eight years -- and I just asked him if there was any advice he had for me. He said, "Lots of coffee, and do everything you can do to stay off other people's blogs."

Goldberg's Gun Store, Opening Soon in Northwest DC

I can't say that I'm surprised by the Supreme Court's decision, and I can't say that I'm bothered by it. Not at all, in fact. Washington's proximity to Virginia has always meant that there would be plenty of illegal guns in the hands of evil-doers, to borrow a phrase, and as a general rule, I'm opposed to unilateral disarmament. If I weren't covering a McCain town hall meeting in Cincinnati at the moment (at which, on the stage, is a man who looks uncannily like Rob Reiner, but more on that later), I would be running down to police headquarters to get me a gun application. I'm for gun control, by the way, just not a gun ban. Maybe it's my long experience in Israel, but I believe that the average, law-abiding citizen can be trusted with a firearm. More than that -- and again, maybe this is my experience in Israel talking -- I don't like the idea of subcontracting my own defense to the police. Why should a person who is paid $40,000 a year, who doesn't know me, who doesn't live in my neighborhood, risk his life for me when, properly armed, I'm fully capable of defending myself? It never seemed fair to me.

I'm taking a guess that most of my neighbors in Northwest DC don't share this opinion, however.

You Don't Mess With The Chabon

You Don't Mess With the Zohan is the worst movie I've ever seen, though it was better than Munich.

Okay, I liked it. So what? Who doesn't like a hummus joke? Or 37 hummus jokes? It turns out that Michael Chabon also thought it was the worst movie he's ever seen, and he enjoyed it very much as well. Since we were e-mailing about it anyway, I thought I would send him a series of questions. Here are his answers:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Do you like hummus?

Michael Chabon: I would say that, in fact, I relish hummus.

JG: Isn't hummus really delicious?

MC: Yes, but what I like most about it is that, for all its deliciousness, it has managed to stay humble.

JG: Was Zohan the worst movie you've ever seen?

MC: Certainly in the last two weeks. No, wait, I forgot about Get Smart.

JG: Do you think that Zohan is a 21st century Ari Ben-Canaan? Do people in the 21st century know who Ari Ben-Canaan is?

MC: What a depressing thought. Is there anybody else who feels that it might be best if we just started the 21st century over again? No question that, in retrospect, Zohan suffered from a distinct lack of Eva-Marie Saint.

JG: Are Jews in Hollywood more comfortable now with their Jewishness than they were 30 years ago?

MC: Are there Jews in Hollywood?

JG: And if yes, is this necessarily a good thing?

MC: I am sitting here trying to think of recent Hollywood films that might be seen to reflect their Jewish creators' increased comfort with their Jewishness. What I see is an increased degree of comfort with Jewishiness. That's probably not a bad thing.

I mean, hummus toothpaste, that had me laughing. My wife (born in Israel), and me. Nobody else in the theater (Emeryville, matinee) was really laughing about the hummus toothpaste.

JG: Do you know any Israelis who are obsessed with hacky sack? Because I don't.

MC: You mean apart from Tzabar Regel, gold medalist in hacky sack at the 2005 Maccabiah?

JG: Was Zohan a Zionist movie, or a post-Zionist movie, and, does it really matter?

MC: To the degree that it appears to suggest that Jews and Arabs can never live in peace anywhere but in a mythical neighborhood of downtown New York City, I guess I would definitely be inclined to classify it as "post-Something."

JG: What do you think of tehina in your hummus?

MC: I welcome its presence, as a grace note.

The Misunderstood Ahmadinejad

James Kirchick makes some interesting points about people who go out of their way to argue that Ahmadinejad really doesn't mean it when he calls Israel a dirty microbe, or when he threatens its extinction. It's a odd phenomenon. You don't have to believe that Ahmadinejad is the most powerful person in Iran in order to grapple honestly with the fact that he'd like to see Israel to disappear from the map. To borrow a phrase.

Gourevitch's Standard Operating Procedure

Is a very fine book, and Philip is a fine young man, and I'm over at TPMCafe all week (because I'm such a liberal, I guess) talking about the book with a large collection of worthies, so have a look. I'll post more on this later, so stand by your computers.

Lee Abrams on the Future of Newspapers

I spoke yesterday with Lee Abrams, the chief innovation officer at Sam Zell's Tribune company, about his seemingly endless string of controversial statements about the future of the newspaper business, which he expresses in memos that sometime contain all-cap sentences. Abrams came to the Tribune from XM Radio, and he's never worked in newspapers before. The edited interview is below. Some highlights: When I asked him if the mission of newspapers was still to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, he said, "Probably not as much as it did." He thinks reporters should separate themselves from the past as quickly as possible, and he continues to express surprise that reporters are on the ground in Iraq.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Talk for a minute about the 21st century mission of journalism.
Lee Abrams: There’s a lot of aspects to it. One is, there’s a lot of amazingly well done content inside of newspapers, but I think a lot of it doesn’t get read because people don’t have the time to find it. I’ve always been a big newspaper fan, and since I’ve been really studying newspapers more, and really reading them cover to cover since I got here, I’ll notice fantastic stories on certain pages that I wouldn’t have read before because I just wouldn’t have gotten to them or they would have looked a little intimidating in that they looked complicated.
JG: What about the moral mission, holding government accountable?
LA: I think it’s a component in providing a daily record of news information, about what’s going on locally in the world and culturally, and I think keeping government accountable is certainly a component of it, but I think it’s bigger than that, too.
JG: Talk about story length.
LA: I think it really depends on the story. I think some are just little information news bites. Others, I think, demand a more expansive coverage. What we’re trying to do is create options for people. Quick reads, and then if they really want to get into a more complete story, there’s that option. And then, if they really want to get into tremendous depth, there’s the online option.
JG: Your boss, Randy Michaels, said that reporters should be judged in part according to how many column inches they produce. He said, “You find you eliminate a fair number of people while not eliminating very much content.” Do you understand why there was pushback on that?
LA: I think it was misinterpreted. They just wanted to make sure that everyone’s operating at maximum efficiency.
JG: Can you envision, in one of your newspapers, a reporter taking three or four months to work on a single series or on a single story?
LA: Oh, absolutely. We have to get back to that real deep investigative reporting and then let people know that we’re doing that. Newspapers have a tendency to under-promote themselves. I was talking to one paper out in Allentown, or Baltimore, or somewhere out East…and they had done this investigative story, but they were kind of burying it. I said, man, why don’t you, you know, call it exclusive, hit people over the head with it?
JG: Why were you surprised to find out that your company has reporters based in Iraq?
LA: I was in Los Angeles, sitting in this casual little meeting waiting for someone to show up, and there was this lady who had just got back from four years in Iraq, I forgot her name, I met 300 people in two days, and she was telling me about security problems, bullets in the background and all that, and it really struck me that there should be pictures of her with Iraqi children in the newspaper to show she was there. Whereas in the newspaper, it just says, “Times Staff Reporter.” I really never thought about it, that there was really a person over there going through hell to get this.
JG: It didn’t strike you that there were employees of the newspaper over there doing this work?
LA: It was just ink to me, just reading. Oh yeah, here’s what’s happening in Iraq, but then I didn’t feel the human side.
JG: So more first-person in the papers, then?
LA: I would have loved to see diaries, because what she was telling me was fascinating, living in these special secured floors of the Baghdad Hotel. It was like theater of the mind.
JG: Do you think there’s room in the world for magazines like the Atlantic and The New Yorker?
LA: Absolutely yes! I’ve seen a lot of musical equivalents. You look at the music world – if you’d just landed from Venus on Earth, you’d think we’d live in a Britney Spears world, but for every Britney fan there’s a Bob Dylan fan. So I think there absolutely room for all flavors and all depth.
JG: When I was coming up, there was an expression that the role of the newspaper is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Does that ring true anymore?
LA: Probably not as much as it did.
JG: What do you want journalists to do that wouldn’t violate their basic journalistic ethics or their reason for being in journalism in the first place?
LA: I think it’s doing everything they can to separate the past from 2008. To liberate themselves from the past.
JG: Why do you think people go into journalism?
LA: It’s an art-form, to express yourself, and also, it’s a public responsibility, actually giving something back.
JG: What’s with your all-cap memos?
LA: It’s me just going at it.

Maybe Ahmadinejad Will Sign Up for JDate

Perhaps the most ineffective propaganda message ever delivered to Iran, courtesy of the Conference of Presidents of Really Major American Jewish Organizations.

One More Thing About That Crappy Wal-Mart

Three Obama buttons, no McCains. Make of that what you will. And the three Obama buttons were worn by white people, not incidentally, West Virginia white people.

The Crappiest Wal-Mart in America

Well, maybe not the crappiest, but the Wal-Mart "supercenter" in Martinsburg, West Virginia has to be among the top 500 most crappy Wal-Marts. Last evening it was dirty and ill-kept, the bathroom was about as clean as the men's bathroom in Penn Station was in 1974 (I remember that bathroom, that's how crappy it was), and the employees appeared just as down-and-out as the customers. In places like West Virginia it's hard to avoid Wal-Mart, and so my boycott waxes and wanes situationally, and since my family visits the Panhandle quite often (a generally beautiful place, by the way), and since, being an American family, we need lots of crap, especially Chinese-made breakable crap, we find ourselves in that Wal-Mart more than I would like.

But about those down-and-out customers: If you want to see the underside of the unregulated capitalist economy, the people who can't find the non-existent escape ladder from poverty and its pathologies, visit the Martinsburg, West Virginia Wal-Mart. Morbid obesity; spontaneous, public bouts of corporal punishment directed against dirty children; ten-year girls dressed as whores; tattoos running up necks and down legs; smoking like you only see these days in Baku; it's all here. I considered myself a socialist until I was about 23 (that was when I fled my kibbutz for the final time) but a visit to the Martinsburg Wal-Mart reawakens my distaste for steroidal capitalism.

Wal-Mart has built a perfect system for the maintenance of the permanent underclass. I asked one worker last night if she ever shopped outside Wal-Mart. She said no, she could find everything she needs right here. I then asked her the relevant question: could she afford to shop at a store other than Wal-Mart? No, she said, smiling. And what a smile: Dental care is an unreachable luxury for most of the poor of West Virginia, even the poor of the Panhandle, which is the least put-upon section of the state. Stump-teeth, collapsing gums, whistling dentures, these are mouths straight out of David Shipler.

Wal-Mart has had some media success lately in its disingenuous campaign to convince liberal elites that it is not driving America into the gutter, but, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this is the most self-serving of campaigns, a way to drive costs down and convince elites that Wal-Mart is going green. But the invisible workers, hopeless and toothless, their poverty ensuring their consumer loyalty, living on what is essentially company scrip, benefit not at all.

Sermon of the Week Club

As promised, Rabbi David Wolpe's thoughts this Friday:

Tied to One Another

As powerful a bond as that which tied the Jewish people to God was the bond that tied the Jewish people to one another. Although Jews certainly quarreled -- at times viciously -- there was a depth to the care that Jews took of one another in ages past that should still touch and inspire us. In his memoirs, the great Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz expresses it by capping a sad story with one, memorable line.

He writes of his grandfather: "He had been a merchant in the city of Danzig, and the story is told that he came home one Shabbat eve, went through all the ritual devotions without a sign of agitation and, on the following evening, called his creditors together and said to them: 'Gentlemen, I have returned from my trip penniless. I am ruined. Take all the valuable belongings in my house as payment of my debts.'

"He said to my grandmother: 'Channele, give them everything,' and she stripped the jewelry from her person and placed it on the table. Then she opened the cupboard, took out the silver and the gold plates, brought in from the adjoining rooms all the other household treasures and put them on the table."
Now Peretz ends this story with a single line, without any additional comment: "But the creditors would not take them."

Pat Buchanan on Poor, Misunderstood Adolf

If I'm reading this gem of a column correctly, it was the British who caused the Holocaust.

A Pacifist's Obama Prediction

I bumped into Colman McCarthy, the legendary pacifist and sometime-anarchist, this morning, as I do many summer mornings, at Turtle Park in my Washington neighborhood. Colman's son, John, runs the best baseball camp in the history of baseball camps at Turtle Park, and my son is one of his loyal players. Coach Mac's Home Run Baseball Camp is the only one in America that combines instruction in both creative non-violence and power hitting. He begins each session with a morning meeting during which he quizzes his assistant coaches about their summer reading lists. Robert Caro's The Power Broker was on one coach's list today. Today, as well, one of the coaches made an impassioned plea for something he called "love-based baseball" in which keeping score would be banned. "Challenging idea," Mac told me later. Colman seemed more supportive.

Colman and I argue most days (I am, after all, a veteran of a certain Middle Eastern army, and Colman is opposed to armies, as well as to most everything else) but I enjoy his company, as do my children: At Halloween, he hands out vegetables to trick-or-treaters, and for some perverse reason, my kids look forward to his house most of all.

Today, the subject was Obama and public campaign financing. Colman said he wasn't overly versed on the issue, but he did have strong feelings about Obama's future, specifically as it relates to the unreasonableness of liberal expectations. "Liberals are going to turn on him, you know," he said. "He can't possibly fulfill all their wild hopes. It can't be sustained."

I don't agree with Colman on much, but I think we agree that placing too much faith in politics, or on a single politician -- any politician -- leads only to disillusion.
I myself place my faith in love-based baseball.

A Challenge to Slate Magazine

My article on brain-scanning, "My Amygdala, My Self," which appears in this month's edition of the Atlantic -- the go-out-and-buy-it-and-support-journalism version of the Atlantic -- has apparently made Daniel Engber of my home-away-from-home magazine, Slate, very unhappy, in part because Mr. Engber, though apparently quite young, is also quite humorless, and apparently because I gave FKF Applied Research free oxygen. Engber's position is that the neuroscientists over at FKF are charlatans, and he has pursued them with Moby Dick-like intensity.

Engber called me early in the week to discuss the article, and we spoke for a half-hour, and then he used none of what I told him in his article, but whatever. I asked him if he had ever visited UCLA to be scanned by these neuroscientists, and he said no. So I have to say I was pleased to find in my inbox a message from Allen Goldberg, who is the head of marketing at FKF (and not a relative of mine, though a heck of a nice guy), in which he wrote:

We read with interest the piece published by your Slate colleague Daniel Engber. We are confident that he will have a better understanding and appreciation for fMRI brain scanning and its application for commercial purposes if he were to be scanned himself. Would it be possible to pass along our offer to Daniel to be scanned (and subsequently analyzed) in Los Angeles at his convenience.

So here it is, a public challenge from FKF. I think it would smart for Engber to go out and actually see what these neuroscientists are doing firsthand, rather than simply criticize from afar. And I'm reasonably sure they won't put him in the special genital-shrinking fMRI machine.

Hezbollah in Latin America? Impossible

A few years ago, I spent time in Argentina and Paraguay, specifically in Ciudad del Este, where the Hezbollah presence seemed quite obvious and open. After I reported on this phenomenon, various and sundry Hezbollah apologists said that Hezbollah couldn't be active in Latin America, without providing many reasons why, apart from the usual reason that Hezbollah is not a terrorist group but a social service agency. So I suppose that this latest report can't be true, either.

On the Irrelevancy of Ahmadinejad

Daniel Koffler gets all Persian on my ass.

Special All-Jewish Senate Edition

Three years ago, Daniel Pipes, the (fill-in-the-blank) scholar who has become a firebrand on the subject of bias against Israel in the American academy, wrote that the golden age of American Jewry was coming to a close, in part because of the security threat posed to Jews by Islamists:

"American Jews may not have been conscious of it, but they have lived these past 60 years in one of Jewry's golden ages, arguably more brilliant than those in Andalusia, Aragon, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, and Prague. But now, in a milder form than in Europe, Jews face similar currents swirling through American life, especially the Islamist surge coddled by leftists. The golden age of American Jewry, therefore, is ending. American Jews have had the relative luxury of worrying about such matters as intermarriage, coreligionists around the world, school prayer, and abortion; if current trends continue, they increasingly will find themselves worrying about personal security, marginalization, and the other symptoms already evident in Europe."

I worry about security, of course, but I haven't been so worried about marginalization. Now comes the inestimable Shmuel Rosner, who reports that the number of Jews in Congress, already a record, might actually rise in November. Right now, there are thirty Jewish members of the House (twenty-nine of whom are Democrats), and there are thirteen Jewish senators, nine Democrats, two independents who caucus with the Democrats (Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman -- see if you can tell them apart), and two Republicans. The real surprise, of course, is that there are so many Jewish Republicans.

Rosner reports that American voters continue to be uninterested in marginalizing Jews, to the point that Alaska might actually send a Jew to Congress, which would make Michael Chabon's great book The Yiddish Policemen's Union at least a little bit prophetic. And you can count on Rosner to dig up information of interest only to obsessive Jews and web-based neo-Nazis, including the fact that Congressman Tom Udall, who is not Jewish, is nevertheless a longtime member of Temple Beth Shalom of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on account of his Jewish wife.

Contrast this picture of Jewish enfranchisement with the troubling notion that it is a "smear" to allege that a certain presidential candidate might be a Muslim, and you get the sense that we're not so terribly marginal, at least when compared to the Muslims Daniel Pipes worries about.

Mearsheimer and Walt: Apologists for Ahmadinejad

The wacky anti-Israel polemicists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were visiting Israel the other day (such is the price of democracy) and in the course of a lecture at Hebrew University, Walt said he would not condemn Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. "I don't think he is inciting to genocide," Walt said.

If only he would read the newspapers!

As a service to Walt and Mearsheimer, and to everyone else who is under the impression that Ahmadinejad is just having a little fun at the expense of the perfidious Zionist entity, I've pulled together a brief collection of some of Ahmadinejad's more colorful statements on Israel. You judge whether Walt is right or not:

October, 2005: "Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine... I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.”

July, 2006: "Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won't take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map…The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region's nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide."

August, 2006: "Our position on the Middle East is clear. We want the root of tensions to be removed. During these sixty years what was the root of massacres, crimes and conflicts?...The solution is clear and nothing has changed."

October, 2006: “This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely…"You (the Western powers) should know that any government that stands by the Zionist regime from now on will not see any result but the hatred of the people…The wrath of the region's people is boiling… You should not complain that we did not give a warning. We are saying this explicitly now…"

November, 2006: "The great powers created the Zionist regime to extend their domination in the region. Every day this regime is massacring Palestinians…As this regime goes against the path of life, we will soon see its disappearance and its destruction."

December, 2006: "The Zionist regime is on the slope of disappearance and the freedom movement and the struggles of the Palestinian people have more success every day…It is the religious duty of all Muslims to stand by the Palestines…The continued crimes of the Zionist regime will only accelerate the downfall of this fake regime.”

December, 2006: "I want to tell [Western counties] that just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and does not exist anymore, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out and humanity will be free."

June, 2007: ''God willing, in the near future we will witness the destruction of the corrupt occupier regime…”

June, 2007: ''In Lebanon, the corrupt, arrogant powers and the Zionist regime did all they could in an unfair 33-day war. But after 60 years [Israel's] greatness fell apart…The countdown to this regime's destruction started through the hands of Hezbollah's children…We will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future thanks to the endeavours of all Palestinian and Lebanese fighters.''

August, 2007: "Our support (for the Palestinian people) is unconditional. As for the Israelis, let them go find somewhere else.”

August, 2007: "The Zionist regime is the standard bearer of invasion, occupation and Satan…When the philosophy behind the establishment of a regime is in question, it is not unlikely that it will find itself on a course of decline and dissolution."

October 5, 2007: "Canada and Alaska have vast lands, why don't you relocate them over there and keep helping them over there with (aid of) 30 to 40 billion dollars per year for building a new existence over there?”

November, 2007: "It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime…”

January, 2008: "I advise you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity which has reached the end of the line… It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered."

February, 2008: "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and have unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region."

March, 2008: "Gaza is the beginning, the real issue is elsewhere. They should know that both in the prelude and in the real thing they face a defeat and this time they will be uprooted."

April, 2008: "The time has come to see the weakness and collapse of the Zionist regime and its supporters. They are doing everything in order to save it, but they will not succeed."

May, 2008: “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken... Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned and this regime is on its way to annihilation…has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese.”

June, 2008: "(Israel) has reached the end of its function and will soon disappear off the geographical domain."

A Mostly Non-Political Point about Old Age

One of my favorite rabbis is David Wolpe, from Sinai Temple in L.A. He's a genius and a mensch at the same time, which isn't easy -- all of us at the Atlantic (well, almost all) confront that tension every day. Each week, Rabbi Wolpe sends out a 200-word or so essay, grounded in Torah and in L.A. reality simultaneously. Also not an easy thing to do. You can find an archive of his writings here.

This week's entry is, as usual, fascinating, and not wholly-unrelated to one of the issues facing voters this November:

The Talmud teaches (Bava Kamma, 97b) that Abraham's coins displayed an old man and woman on one side, and a young man and woman on the other. From this we learn three things:

Abraham thought of himself and his wife as one. Similarly, when at the outset of Abraham's journey God said "Lech L'cha" — you go (in the singular) he went with Sarah.
Both youth and age are valuable. Each has its merit and its problems. It is not true, as George Bernard Shaw said, that youth is wasted on the young, any more than wisdom is wasted on the old.

Youth and age are continuous with each other. The decisions we take when young will affect our life later on. The decisions we make when older will cast retrospectively the journey we made when young. That is, if your youth led to a flourishing and kind old age, it was in retrospect better spent than if it led to a life of dissipation and emptiness.
Doubtless there is still more to be derived from the beautiful rabbinic teaching. Fortunate are all who live long enough to understand both sides of our forefather's coin.

Good News for Obama

He's lost Gaddafi's vote.

John Kerry on Loyalty

I suppose it only makes sense for John Kerry to attack John McCain (unfairly, if you bother to understand the context) for suggesting that it was not terribly important when American troops exit Iraq, and I suppose it only makes sense that Kerry would make his attack so personal by suggesting that McCain is "confused" about basic facts of Middle Eastern history. These are low blows, of course, but understandable, given the way McCain turned on Kerry during the Swift Boat attacks of 2004. Oh, wait.

The Jewish Giraffe

Larry Kaplan, an (evidently) close reader, as well as a partisan of venison, writes:

Regarding the kashrut of giraffe, remember that the method of slaughter is as critical as whether or not the beast has a cleft foot. So, in order for a giraffe to be kosher, it must be slaughtered under rabbinical supervision in a humane manner, which is essentially a quick slash with a sharp knife to the carotid artery. Therefore, a giraffe killed by a big game hunter with a high powered rifle is not kosher. Now, while this is largely irrelevant concerning giraffes, it IS germane to the kosher-ness of venison. Deer, like cows and giraffes, have cleft feet; but again, a deer shot by a hunter is not kosher. However, your observant venison lovers (and it is a tasty meat) can get farm raised and kosher-slaughtered venison here in the US at a select few high end kosher butchers in places like NY, Chicago and LA. Thought you'd wanna know.

Secrets of the Bilderbergs

Jack Shafer's report on the Bilderbergs contains many interesting pieces of information, but the most interesting to me is that this putatively powerful, highly-secretive group met in a Marriott in Chantilly, Va. Doesn't this mean rather dispositively that the Bilderbergs are not, in fact, powerful? A Marriott? Do you think that Henry Kissinger is collecting Marriott Reward Points for his stay?

When the Elders of Zion meet, it's Four Seasons or nothing. When we're not at the King David, of course.

Bad News for the Giraffe

I don't know how this escaped me, but a rabbi named Shlomo Mahfoud (which sounds like a made-up name, in the "Zohan" sense) has declared that giraffe meat is kosher. This must come as a huge relief to the vast Jewish population of the Serengeti.

Questions like this one have actually arisen in my life. On a couple of occasions I've been to a restaurant in Nairobi called Carnivore, which serves all sorts of inedible animals, including crocodile, and I've managed to avoid eating some particularly gamy-looking game by pleading Jewishness in the first-degree.

Which reminds me: I was once talking to a game scout in Tanzania who had several times eaten elephant trunk. After I got over my initial revulsion, I asked him what it tasted like. "Wildebeest," he said.

RFK on the Arabs

"I just wish they didn't have that oil."

Robert F. Kennedy, writing about the Arabs in 1948.

Five Chicago Votes

I'm back from Jordan (more on that later) and I opened up my e-mail to find this note:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

We read your article about Obama and Hamas. Our question is: Do you feel Obama is a friend of Hamas. As a Jew, are you comfortable with his responses and feel he will be a friend to Israel?
Your answer will be responsible for 5 Chicago votes.

They never told me at Blog School that I would have such awesome responsibilities foisted upon me.

But, let me give it a stab here:

No, Obama is not a friend of Hamas. As a Jew, I'm comfortable with his responses. Yes, I feel he will be a friend to Israel.

Actually, and I'm going to blog about this later, after I recover from jet-lag, which usually takes me about eight or nine weeks, I think Obama's performance at AIPAC was designed specifically to placate those Jews who believe that any criticism at all of Israel is illegitimate. I wish that Obama's speech had about ten percent more nuance in it.

Also, and I know it's none of my business, but my new friends from Chicago should consider voting on a more expansive range of issues than simply Hamas.

Memo To Todd Purdum

ZARQA, JORDAN
Though it's my official doctrine to buy magazines at newstands, rather than read them for free on-line, I just read Todd's new piece on Clinton because, weirdly, I can't find a copy of Vanity Fair anywhere in Zarqa. What's wrong with these Zarqawis, anyway?

Though I have to say my Internet connection isn't bad. I just watched John McCain's speech to AIPAC on my laptop, and it came through without bumps and stops. I could have waited, of course, to see McCain's speech, but I wanted to watch it in Zarqa just so I could say I watched it in Zarqa.

In any case, let me raise a question with Todd, per Jay Carson, Bill Clinton's spokesman, whose long memo attacks Todd floridly, though without the very bad words President Clinton apparently used himself. Carson argues that Todd ignored Clinton's notable accomplishments, instead focusing his story on some of Clinton's dubious friends, including one who allegedly collects "genitalia-shaped soaps," which is not something I will try to explain to my friends in Zarqa, or even in the more cosmopolitan Amman.

In his memo, Carson asks "Who didn't VF call?," and answers, in part: "The 200,000,000 people in 100 countries whose lives will be impacted by commitments made by Clinton Global Initiative members."

Todd, we're both reporters. In our depressing, post-shoe-leather age, we still adhere to the idea that interviews matter, that we can make our stories better by talking to actual people. So what happened? Phone out of service? No cell coverage? Why didn't you call those two hundred million people? Or at least one hundred million of those two hundred million people? I worked at Conde Nast not so long ago, and I happen to know that the company owns thousands of telephones, and has signed up for a very advantageous long-distance calling plan. So what's going on? Why did you limit yourself to calling dozens of ex-Clinton aides, as well as people with direct knowledge of the President's business and personal life?

Carson's memo is not limited to the nonsense like the nonsense outlined above. Perhaps the silliest bit of his memo concerns what Carson calls Vanity Fair's "penchant for libel, which has led to numerous lawsuits."

Magazines do commit libel on occasion, of course, and I don't believe, like some in journalism, that suing for libel is immoral, but to suggest that a publication is unethical because it is frequently sued for libel is akin to suggesting that a person is pro-crime because he has been frequently mugged.

I'd have to say, from my distant perch, that the arguments mustered against Todd are comprehensively unconvincing, though, Todd, really, it couldn't hurt to pick up the phone a million or two more times.