Later On

Very nice column by Roger Cohen in the NY Times:

Few people vacation on the West Bank, but if they did they might head for Taybeh, a hilltop village clustered around a church whose charm trumps the Israeli checkpoints that have to be negotiated to get there. The air is good, the stones smooth, the light brilliant — and the beer excellent.

I was there last month visiting David Khoury, who, in 1995, mortgaged a house and sold property in Brookline, Massachusetts, in order to found the first microbrewery in nascent Palestine. That was a time of Oslo-induced optimism. But of course Palestine, to the world’s frustration and cost, is still waiting, 15 years later, to be born.

The Khoury family had done all right in Brookline running a liquor store called Foley’s in what was an Irish-American neighborhood. The store had been there for decades. They saw no reason to change its name. Who in the United States cares if a store with an Irish name is in fact run by Palestinian Christians from a state-in-waiting somewhere in the Middle East?

It’s not easy to trade that sort of buck-is-a-buck agnosticism for the ferocious identity politics of the Holy Land, where blood trumps money. But that’s what David and his master-brewer brother Nadim Khoury did to help a Palestinian state get on its feet. When brains and cash move in rather than out, they figured, good things start happening.

That was theory. Practice proved near disastrous. After a strong start — with their Taybeh beer selling well in Israel, ingredients coming in smoothly from Israel, sales growing in Gaza and a franchise established in Germany — their company almost fell victim to yet another sterile spasm of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The second intifada of 2000 cut Taybeh staff from 15 to zero by 2002. Hops, yeast and barley no longer reached them from the port of Ashdod. Sales in Israel collapsed. Jordan, to the east, became inaccessible. Soon the Israeli wall-fence started going up, cutting off Jerusalem to the west. Hamas in Gaza meant an end to sales of alcohol there.

Not the sort of stuff that happens in Brookline.

“Fortunately, we didn’t owe much to banks because they never thought investing in a beer company in a mainly Muslim environment made sense,” David Khoury told me. “We would not have survived.”

Now the Taybeh beer company is coming back. There are things to celebrate again — weddings, homecomings, nonviolence. Some 70 percent of sales are made in the West Bank — nearly that much used to be in Israel — and profit has returned.

The company is not a bad barometer of the fast-growing West Bank economy and how, quietly, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is building the elements and institutions of statehood. Khoury knows that, as he put it, “We could wake up one day and all this will be under siege again,” but he’s placing his faith in Fayyad’s “wise leadership.”

I asked Khoury what he would say to an Israeli general if he had the chance. “I would tell him that Israel is a reality and the Palestinian people are ready to live in peace,” he said. “We are not terrorists but we have the right to resist occupation. I would say that you are greedy. You have to give up the West Bank and go back to the 1967 borders, for the sake of Israeli women and children and Palestinian women and children. Enough is enough.” …

Continue reading.

Very interesting story in the LA Times by a guy who was curious about his surname and traced it back. The story begins:

My father’s family landed in 1942 Los Angeles as if by immaculate conception, unburdened by any past.

Growing up, I knew all about how my mother’s grandparents came to California from southern France and Sweden. But my dad’s side was a mystery.

All I heard were a few stories about my grandfather as a youth in Hannibal, Mo., how he found a tarantula in a shipment of bananas at his dad’s corner store, how he and a friend once rode motorcycles out west. But no one talked about Mozingos further back, or where they came from.

I might never have given the subject any thought except for a strange word: our name. All my life, people had asked me about it.

I began to look into it, and the more I learned, the more I realized our history had been buried. My curiosity turned to compulsion. I had to unearth the truth about our origins and the forces that had obscured them for centuries. I wanted to know my forebears and feel myself among them, to see if their forgotten personalities and struggles and secrets somehow still lived within us.

I set out last year to learn our story, traveling from the Tidewater of Virginia to the hollows of Kentucky and southeastern Indiana and beyond. At times, I struggled to absorb what I was finding, and I met Mozingos who were skeptical of it, or ambivalent, or fiercely resistant.

I learned that our early ancestry reflected not so much a quirk of American history as the messy start of it, seeding a furious internal conflict that continues today.

With us, the whole battle was embodied in a family — and a name.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting:

Interesting:

Source: Denver Post/New York Times, May 16, 2010

The U.S. military is continuing to operate a secret network of private spies deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, even though the military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan, and is not permitted to hire contractors for spying.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted the military had been sending former CIA officers and retired special-operations troops into both countries to collect information used to track and kill suspected militants.

Many portrayed it as a rogue operation, and it was hastily shut down once an investigation was started — or so people thought.

But not only are the networks still operating, but they are submitting detailed reports daily to top commanders about the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movement of enemy fighters in Afghanistan.

A review by the New York Times found that contractors are being paid under a $22 million contract managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon’s office in charge of special operations policy.

The contract expires at the end of May.

The Pentagon‘s press secretary, Geoff Morrell, declined to answer questions about who approved the contract spy operation or why it continues, but said, "[W]e are committed to determining if any laws were broken or policies violated."

And if any laws were broken, we’ll keep everything secret and continue operations as we want, because we know now that the Obama Administration is only intermittently interested in investigating wrong-doing, and the military in particular gets a pass.

Interesting idea.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Last week, the National Mediation Board (NMB) — which is tasked with overseeing labor-management relations under the Railway Labor Act (RLA) — issued a ruling making elections for union representation more democratic. Previously, under the RLA (which governs railroads and airlines), workers who did not cast votes in an election were counted as having voted against unionization. Now, however, they will simply not be counted at all, like non-voters in any election for political office. The change brings the RLA’s process into line with elections held under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which covers most workplaces. The NMB said that the change "will provide a more reliable measure/indicator of employee sentiment in representation disputes and provide employees with clear choices in representation matters." "The board will no longer presume that the failure or refusal of an eligible employee to vote is a vote against representation," it added. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA said that the NMB’s ruling represents "a new era of democracy." "For far too long, flight attendants and other aviation and railway employees have faced significant obstacles in their quest for collective bargaining rights," it said. However, since the ruling came down, the affected companies and their pro-corporate allies have been in an uproar, defending the antiquated previous rule, which unfairly tilted the playing field against workers trying to organize.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I pointed out an exceptional issue of New Scientist and listed the articles that seemed most fascinating to me.

While all the articles are excellent, I wanted to point out one in particular:

Pyramids are the best shape for packing — Tetrahedra – objects with four triangular faces – are the most efficient shape for randomly filling a container

The reason this one is so interesting is not the finding itself, though it has major implications for materials science, but the simplicity of the experiment, which so far as I can tell could have been done anytime in the last 300 years. It just required that someone think of it and do it.

Take a look.

I received a comment via email that the blog contains too many political posts for one reader, who wants more in the way of recipes, cats, and lighter topics. So I thought I’d get a sense of the readership with a little poll, which I understand will not sample those who have dropped the blog, so will be biased toward those who like the current mix. Still:

I really should use QED’s Special 218 more frequently, given how much I enjoy the fragrance and the lather. A very fine lather this morning, using the Simpson Emperor 3 Super, and a very smooth shave with the Progress and its Swedish Gillette blade. A splash of Acqua di Parma, and I’m good to go.

Click photo to enlarge, and click again to read the label.

Alex Seitz-Wald at ThinkProgress:

Transocean, Ltd., the giant oil contractor that leased its Deepwater Horizon rig to BP, held a “closed-door meeting” with shareholders Friday, “just days after” executives appeared before Congress to explain the company’s role in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

As ThinkProgress noted, the meeting took place at the company’s headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, where Transocean relocated two years ago to avoid paying taxes.

Though CEO Steven Newman “ignored questions from reporters,” the company said in a statement that it would distribute $1 billion in dividends to shareholders:

The revelation that Transocean is distributing a $1 billion profit to shareholders as one of its drill sites leaks millions of gallons of oil into the sea is sure to inflame an already smarting debate over offshore drilling and the company’s role.[...]

To put the distribution in perspective, the amount of profit that Transocean plans to pay out in the next year is half of what Exxon ultimately paid for the Exxon Valdez disaster off the Alaska Coast.

It’s also more than double what BP has said they’ve spent on the cleanup to date.

Meanwhile, Transocean has “passionately argued” to limit its financial responsibility for the disaster. The company filed a court request last week to cap its liability under $27 million, a paltry sum considering BP has already spent over $450 million on cleanup, and analysts estimate the effort could ultimately cost up to $8 billion.

As Raw Story notes, Transocean has actually made money from the disaster, collecting over $400 million from insurers, leaving it with a profit of $270 million after the costs of the rig are subtracted.

As maritime attorney Jeff Seely told NPR, “They are the only people who have been compensated for this tragedy. The decedents [of the 11 workers killed in an explosion on the rig] haven’t been the compensated. The injured people who still are suffering, all the fishermen out in the Gulf that can no longer work haven’t been compensated.”

They distract themselves with idiotic ideas. For example, Rachel Slajda reports for TPM LiveWire:

A new Miss USA was crowned last night, the first time a Muslim, Arab-American woman won the honor. But for Daniel Pipes, a neocon pundit who writes for the National Review and was a Bush appointee to the Peace Institute, that’s one too many.

On his blog yesterday, Pipes pointed out five other Muslim women who’ve won beauty contests in the U.S., Britain and France over the last five years. [Average: 1 per year. Outrageous!!!! - LG]

“They are all attractive, but this surprising frequency of Muslims winning beauty pageants makes me suspect an odd form of affirmative action,” he wrote.

That “suspicion is borne out,” he wrote, because of one pageant winner at North Carolina A&T University who wore a hijab under her crown.

Pipes does not explain why Miss A&T’s hijab proves his suspicion that a handful of Muslim beauty pageant winners are the result of some “odd form of affirmative action.”

Photo shows Daniel Pipes and the new Miss USA, Rima Fakih, who seems eminently qualified to win the contest without any “affirmative action.” Mr. Pipes, on the other hand, …

UPDATE: Here’s a better photo of the winner. I think she probably won on her merits (click to enlarge):

Noticeable lack of burqa in this photo.

Viktor Frankl is notably the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, which tells of his own search for meaning in uncertain circumstances. (He was a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi deathcamp.) It’s well worth reading, and I read it because for a time I was reading some good self-improvement books, and I noticed that every single one of them referenced Frankl’s book.

Dan Colman at Open Culture:

Viktor Frankl, a trained Austrian psychiatrist, spent five long years in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, eventually ending up in Auschwitz. During this time, he helped fellow prisoners cope with their ordeal and worked out a new approach to psychology called Logotherapy. This theory turned on Frankl’s belief that we’re all fundamentally driven by a “search for meaning.” It’s what makes us human, and we can continue this search even in the worst of situations. Not even the Nazis could take that away.  This belief sustained Frankl during his imprisonment, something he wrote about in his epic work of survival literature called Man’s Search for Meaning. (It’s a must-read.) The grainy footage above was recorded at a conference held in Toronto (probably during the 1960s). It gives you a quick introduction to a man who, despite personally confronting the worst humanity had to offer, still believed in our core goodness and possibilities.

via TED Best of the Web

I am amazed at the lack of outrage in this country as we gradually lose our civil rights. For example, Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of stripping citizenship from people if they should ever be suspected of being terrorists. Great: no due process, the very right that citizens have under the constitution, and no presumption of innocence that requires the state to prove guilt in open court, with the accused allowed to face and question the accusers—all that is gone, because you stop being a citizen as soon as you’re suspected.

And, of course, even if you are a citizen, Obama has now established a new precedent whereby you can be murdered by the government using secret evidence and no due process. Great! That should not result in any problems—except that the government’s record on identifying terrorists correctly is pretty bad. Quite a few at Guantánamo have been found to be innocent of any terrorist connection and ordered by the courts to be released.

Don’t worry, though! Obama is refusing to release them anyway—who cares about stupid old courts, anyway? Certainly not Obama and Holder.

At least twice, the US has kidnapped people, tortured the be-Jesus out of them, only to realize that they were the wrong people and completely innocent. Oops, says the US, our bad—and no, you have no legal recourse to sue the government for damages because we’re the government and we can do what we like to you and even kill you if we want, so you had better just shut up. And, of course, the US has tortured some to death, so we’ll never know whether those people were guilty of anything other than falling into the hands of the US.

That’s a bad direction to go. Kevin Drum:

I should have linked to this a couple of days ago, but better late than never. Here is Glenn Greenwald noting that recent anti-terrorist measures — some directly from President Obama and others not, but mostly with bipartisan support in Congress in either case — go well beyond what the Bush/Cheney administration ever proposed. Instead of merely targeting foreign nationals, these new proposal are aimed directly at American citizens:

A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations. Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind. The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow "public safety" exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts.

….There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment. But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government’s own population. The ultimate check on any government is its own citizenry; vesting political leaders with oppressive domestic authority uniquely empowers them to avoid accountability and deter dissent.

Aside from war and occupation, governments have far more coercive power against their own citizens than they do against residents of other countries. There are natural limits to what the U.S. government can do, say, to Chinese or French nationals in their own countries. But within the United States itself, the only restrictions on state power are largely legal, and without those legal limitations the federal government has an almost unlimited ability to exercise its coercive authority over anyone it chooses to. This is why the distinction between citizens and non-citizens is so important.

I am, fundamentally, an admirer of Barack Obama. I like his temperament, I like his worldview, and I like his management style. As I’ve said before, he has a habit of disappointing me just a little bit on an almost routine basis, but most of the time that doesn’t interfere with my basic admiration. The one exception has been his attitude toward civil liberties and terrorism. His early ban on torture was profoundly welcome, but aside from that he’s mostly continued Bush-era policies with only minor changes and then added to them things that Bush and Cheney could only have dreamed of. In this one area, I feel betrayed.

For a couple of reasons it’s funny that I feel this way. First, this is really nothing new. Democrats have been only marginally better than Republicans on these issues for years. The Clinton era was hardly a golden age of civil liberties, after all, and after 9/11 most of Bush’s infringements on civil liberties were supported — sometimes publicly, sometimes merely implicitly — by plenty of Democrats. Obama was one of those Democrats while he was a senator, and he’s still one of them now.

Second, unlike Glenn, I’m not a hardcore defender of civil liberties in every conceivable circumstance. Global terrorism really does blur the lines between traditional battlefields and domestic policing in ways that are tricky to resolve. Guantanamo and the broader issue of enemy combatants is, as I said several times while Bush was still in office, an excruciatingly difficult one. Even the operation of broad surveillance networks poses some genuinely complicated problems thanks to the technical architecture of modern communications systems.

But as difficult as a lot of these problems are generally, once the U.S. government starts targeting U.S. citizens without warrants or due process, we’ve crossed a bright line that’s dangerously corrosive. That includes the warrantless wiretapping and non-appealable no-fly lists of the Bush administration, and it includes assassinating Americans and removing Miranda protections under the Obama administration. They’re outrageous and dangerous transgressions no matter who’s doing them, and Obama needs to take a long, deep breath and reconsider how he’s handling these issues. In most things, Obama is famous for taking the long view and not letting day-to-day political considerations force his hand. He needs to start doing the same thing here.

I’ve been following the on-going posts on Andrew Sullivan’s blog (written by his readers) on whether atheists are at a particular disadvantage with respect to mortality—e.g., fearing death more than the religious, etc.

So far it’s come out just as you would expect:  atheists and others who disbelieve in an afterlife (including quite a few Jews) don’t find death any more scary than the religious, so far as I can tell. Indeed, Sullivan seems much more obsessed and upset with his own death than I am with mine—and Woody Allen! My god!

From a pretty early age we learn various facts about the world—e.g., everybody poops, and everybody eventually dies. In fact, all that poop must die (eventually). This fact is easy to understand and, generally speaking, people don’t give it a lot of thought, in part because it doesn’t deserve a lot of thought (any more than our pooping). But for some few, the idea that they will die is overwhelming, and it’s hard to help them. You can’t simply say, "Get a life," even if you’re thinking it, because they will say that is exactly the problem.

But consider: you’ll die anyway, whether you worry about it or not, and all the time spent worrying is time not devoted to enjoying the life you have. So get a grip: enjoy life while you have it.

Here’s Kevin Drum bringing up an interesting idea on the topic:

I promise not to blather forever on the death and atheism meme, but I think I’ll do one more post on the subject just to finish things up. I wrote a few days ago that although knowledge of our inevitable death is unique to humans, it doesn’t define what it means to be human any more than a hundred other things that are unique to humans. Andrew Sullivan disagrees:

I find Kevin’s final statement unpersuasive. To be human is to be aware of our own finitude, and to wonder at that. Montaigne argued that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Camus put it differently: men die and they are not happy. For me, this last thing is our first thing as humans. It is our defining characteristic, even though some animals may experience this in a different way.

And our ability to think about this casts us between angels and beasts. It is our reality. Facing it is our life’s task.

I think I hardly have to say that this subject is light years outside my usual wheelhouse. So I don’t have a lot to say about it. But this attitude toward death surely sums up a vast chasm between the religious and the nonreligious. "Facing it is our life’s task"? I can’t even conceive of that. I think about death sometimes, just like everyone, and sometimes these thoughts bother me more than other times. But thinking about it all the time? Casting it as uniquely central to the human condition? That’s almost incomprehensible to me. Wondering about our own finitude is one thing — I imagine we all do that from time to time — but why should this be elevated above the human ability to create art, science, mathematics, love, war, poetry, trade, government, or ethics — or the ability to wonder in the first place? Why is learning how to deal with our eventual death the defining characteristic of being human? Not just because Montaigne said so, certainly.

There’s no answer, of course. Andrew thinks it is and I don’t. But I confess that even on an intellectual basis I have a hard time grasping this. Still, we can’t just let things rest there, can we? So instead, in an audacious effort to wrest this question away from the high-minded philosophers and transform it back into the kind of research and policy drudgery this blog excels at, here’s an odd and seemingly unrelated thought: are autistics less religious than the rest of us? In general, as you go further along the Asperger’s/autism spectrum are you less likely to believe in God and be concerned about death? And vice versa for those at the other end of the spectrum? I’m not sure why this conversation caused this particular question to pop into my head, but it did. Does anyone know if there’s any research on this subject?

Sullivan: "Facing death is our life’s task." I would love to see a proof of that. I suspect that it’s just an empty statement, and certainly doesn’t apply universally. Our "life’s task" varies enormously by age and situation, anyway: first, it’s to get fed; then (in succession, not especially rapid) to learn to walk, to learn to talk, to find friends and a mate, to find a way to continue to be fed and sheltered, etc. I think for most people, facing death is an extremely low priority, as it should be. Much more interesting things to deal with.

It shouldn’t be difficult:

It looks an awful lot as though the US could comfortably cut its military expenditures in half and still be away ahead of other countries (for example, we’d still spend around 3.5 times as much as China, instead of 7 times as much as we do now.

And it’s not as though we don’t need the money: we could immediately put it to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, strengthening education from pre-school through graduate studies, subsidize a superb national railway system, and so on.

But Congress is in thrall to military contractors, a source of a steady stream of bribes contributions, and so no action will be taken. Congress spends an amazing amount of effort working AGAINST what is in the country’s interest in favor of working FOR the interests of big businesses (which give Representatives and Senators lots of nice money).

Steve Benen:

It’s not common to find cabinet secretaries calling for less money for their department, which helps make Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ recent efforts are the more admirable.

There has been a feeding frenzy at the Pentagon budget trough since the 9/11 attacks. Pretty much anything the military chiefs and industry lobbyists pitched, Congress approved — no matter the cost and no matter if the weapons or programs were over budget, underperforming or no longer needed in a post-cold-war world.

Annual defense spending has nearly doubled in the last decade to $549 billion. That does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, which this year will add $159 billion.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has now vowed to do things differently. In two recent speeches, he declared that the nation cannot keep spending at this rate and that the defense budget "gusher" has been "turned off and will stay off for a good period of time." He vowed that going forward all current programs and future spending requests will receive "unsparing" scrutiny.

Gates hasn’t recommended cuts to the Pentagon budget, but he has suggested slowing its growth, trimming the bureaucracy, and eliminating specific ineffective and/or unnecessary weapons systems. Given the nation’s larger budget challenges, the Defense Secretary believes existing military spending is simply unsustainable — and he’s right.

Congress, however, doesn’t quite see it that way.

Lawmakers from both parties are poised to override Gates and fund the C-17 cargo plane and an alternative engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — two weapons systems the defense secretary has been trying to cut from next year’s budget. They have also made clear they will ignore Gates’s pleas to hold the line on military pay raises and health-care costs, arguing that now is no time to skimp on pay and benefits for troops who have been fighting two drawn-out wars.

The competing agendas could lead to a major clash between Congress and the Obama administration this summer. Gates has repeatedly said he will urge President Obama to veto any defense spending bills that include money for the F-35′s extra engine or the C-17, both of which he tried unsuccessfully to eliminate last year.

Members of Congress, rhetoric about spending cuts and eliminating waste notwithstanding, recognize the political benefits associated with more spending on Defense programs. The Pentagon, then, is the only part of the government that asks Congress for less money, and gets more than it requested.

Gates, to his enormous credit, had considerable success on this front last year, getting the kind of spending cuts the Bush/Cheney administration couldn’t. This year may prove more difficult, but I’m glad the administration, and the Pentagon in particular, is tackling this effort.

I notice that in the War on Drugs, those injured and killed are people, not drugs. Maybe we should negotiate a peace with drugs so that so many people don’t get wounded or killed. John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Assholes:

Preliminary information indicates that members of the Detroit Police Special Response Team approached the house and announced themselves as police, Godbee said, citing the officers and at least one independent witness.

“As is common in these types of situations, the officers deployed a distractionary device commonly known as a flash bang,” he said in the statement. “The purpose of the device is to temporarily disorient occupants of the house to make it easier for officers to safely gain control of anyone inside and secure the premise.”

Upon entering the home, the officer encountered a 46-year-old female inside the front room, Godbee said. “Exactly what happened next is a matter still under investigation, but it appears the officer and the woman had some level of physical contact.

“At about this time, the officer’s weapon discharged one round which, tragically, struck 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones in the neck/head area.”

Yes, this was a murder investigation, but why is it COMMON for police to be throwing god damned grenades into people’s houses? You think that might be the problem? Did they have somewhere else to be? Couldn’t they wait until the morning? Are stake-outs just in the movies these days?

I’m surprised they didn’t charge the family with child endangerment like they did in Missouri.

Justin Elliott at TPMMuckraker:

With the long-running Texas history textbooks standards fight scheduled to end with a final vote by the State Board of Education Friday, arch-conservative board member Don McLeroy is proposing a new set of changes that read like a tea party manifesto.

The new amendment (.pdf), which is expected to get a vote on Thursday, would require high school history students to "discuss alternatives regarding long term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, given the decreasing worker to retiree ratio" and also "evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U. S. sovereignty."

McLeroy, who will leave the board at the end of the year after a primary election loss, says the first provision "is a critical thinking skills item, and it is also relevant to assessing the policies of the various ideologies that have shaped where we are as Americans."

As justification for that second item, McLeroy writes: "Threats of global government to individual freedom and liberty include the votes of the U. N. General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, the U. N. Gun Ban proposal, forced redistribution of American wealth to third world countries, and global environmental initiatives."

Check out all the proposed changes here (.pdf).

And stay tuned, TPMmuckraker will have more coverage later this week.

Israel takes steps to keep dangerous ideas out of their country. Associated Press:

An Israeli official says academic and polemicist Noam Chomsky, who is a fierce critic of Israel, has been denied entry to the country.

Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said Chomsky was turned away for "various reasons" but declined to elaborate. Chomsky was trying to cross the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. He was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.

Haddad said her ministry was looking into allowing him to enter only the West Bank.

Chomsky told Channel 10 TV from Jordan Sunday: "I’ve often spoken at Israeli universities."

Chomsky is one of Israel’s harshest academic critics. After Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza, he was quoted as saying, "supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration."

Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books:

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.

As Ezrahi and others have noted, …

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It’s astonishing to me the lengths to which the Catholic church will go to protect its wealth. It’s as if God had appeared on earth—well, I guess they think He did—and said, “Job number 1: Preserve your wealth!” In fact, God’s comments about wealth were all quite negative, including an injunction to give it all away. I guess the Catholic church feels that it can ignore God.

Serge Kovaleski in the NY Times:

In 2002, at the height of the sexual abuse crisis confronting the Roman Catholic Church in America, Timothy M. Dolan arrived in Milwaukee as the new archbishop, succeeding a prelate who had been caught up in scandal. To abuse victims who had felt rebuffed by the church, Archbishop Dolan — warm, down to earth — seemed a bright beam of hope.

He listened to them, wept with them and vowed to change the way the archdiocese dealt with the molestation of children by priests. But just months later, he handwrote a letter to Peter Isely, a victim and an advocate whose wife worried that the new archbishop would let him down.

“Listen to her,” Archbishop Dolan wrote. “Do not put your trust in me. You often speak eloquently about your own imperfection and sin. I’m in the same boat. I am imperfect, sinful, struggling, clumsy.”

His message was to trust only in God. And his warning proved accurate: He would disappoint many victims.

Days before the letter, they learned that Archbishop Dolan had instructed lawyers to seek the dismissal of five lawsuits against the church. Over the next six years, advocates would lament that he resisted many of their appeals for change, from opening church records on predatory priests to offering victims more comprehensive help.

Archbishop Dolan of Milwaukee is now Archbishop Dolan of New York, one of the church’s most visible leaders. As the scandal has reignited in recent months, focusing scrutiny on bishops from Ireland to India, he has used his influential post to defend Pope Benedict XVI from criticism that he was slow to move against priests.

The archbishop himself has struggled with the crisis during the decade since it struck the church in America with startling force. While sexual abuse has not confronted him as a major issue in New York, it loomed large in Milwaukee and in his previous assignment as a bishop in St. Louis. And a close look at his record there, largely unexamined since his arrival in New York about a year ago, shows how he tried — not always successfully — to accommodate competing demands.

One of a generation of bishops who came to the job after many of their predecessors were discredited, Archbishop Dolan faced a daunting set of challenges: assuaging not only abuse victims but also a church hierarchy worried about ruinous damages awards, parishioners angry over payments to victims, and his own priests, some perhaps falsely accused. It was a diplomatic gantlet many recent bishops have had to walk, and Archbishop Dolan trod it with particular care.

A genial conciliator, he consoled victims and created a fund to pay for compensation and counseling. He helped remove a dozen priests from ministry and disclosed the names of dozens more.

“He changed our experience in Milwaukee,” said Ralph Leese, 58, who received a financial settlement for his repeated abuse by a priest. “He made you feel like he knew where you were coming from, almost like the abuse had happened to him.”

But like bishops before him, the archbishop was also a tough defender of the church’s interests, clergy and bank balances. In Milwaukee, he worked in an unusually public and personal way to limit lawsuits and settlements. He declined to post the names of abusive priests who belonged to religious orders, though some other bishops have done so…

Continue reading. That’s the ticket! As Jesus said, “Follow the money! And when you get money, protect it at all costs! That’s the essence of my teaching.”