... had to deal with some unfortunate family issues - thanks to all who wrote. I'll be playing catch-up most of the week.

... will be back some time in the middle of June.

As soon as I finally finish with school stuff, I'm need to write a rant about the pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist bloggers who unquestionably bought into the media-induced hysterics regarding Pope Benedict XVI's "religious intolerance". Not to give away the ending, but it's going to have a lot to do with how the media's new definition of "intolerant" seems eerily similar to "opposing violent, unassimilated, and primitive populations of immigrants in the heartland of Old Europe". More closely than many of the rest of us, Pope Benedict has been watching his native country descending into this for years now, and identifying the source of the problem as a religious one (rather than an ethnic, or social, or educational one) is why he's been branded intolerant:

Even those on the far right of the political spectrum will tsk tsk about how primitive and violent this brand of Islam is. But Medieval Europe was both primitive and violent, and the idea that a father would murder his own teenage daughter with his own hands would have brought horror (and, although this is beside the point, religious sanction). This is a death cult that goes above and beyond religion to mass social psychosis (although it certainly might be mass social psychosis that has so completely taken over a religion as to make one indistinguishable from other) - and it's spreading all over Europe. Saying so is the farthest thing from intolerance.

Ancient Greeks contrasted the pleasures of the mind with the pleasures of the body. I don't know when this went up or how far behind on the story I am, but seriously - how evil is this:

Those are Ayatollah Sistani’s religious rulings. They hate creativity, they hate independent thought, and they especially hate people who enjoy either of those things.

Judith Shulevitz has an article up on Slate that concludes, among other things, that strict religions are the ones most likely to survive. The first article I ever wrote for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle was entitled "Where Are Our Stadiums". From the awkward title to its plodding pace, it sucked (editorial comment on my next submission: "good job - this actually sounds like an article!" I'm not kidding). Nonetheless, the argument it made was sound: American Judaism has effectively failed in the essential task of any religion - to instill commitment in the next generation, and thus continuity for the faith. Since then, I've blogged about the topic several times:

Teenagers are not energized by painting the inside of food co-ops (although of course there's a place for Tikkun Olam). They're energized by being told that religion is hard, and that if they follow God they will be part of an elite. There's an absolutely critical element of exceptionalism - whether it's giving up oneself in submission to Allah's will or separating oneself from the rest of the high school by staying a virgin till marriage, Islam and Christianity are filling up stadiums by telling teenagers that they have a higher calling that makes them better than their peers. It's not like Judaism can't tell the same narrative - Jews survived for 4000 years precisely by instilling in every generation the conviction that they are a Chosen Light upon the Nations, a light which evil will try to destroy. Yet American Judaism seems to want nothing more than to erase that sense of distinction - I'm trying to wrap my mind around the following idea: if synagogues mimic Catholic ceremonies like confirmation, it will makes kids more Jewish.
Judaism is the only one of the major Abrahamic religions that doesn't proselytize - it's supposed to be a fairly exclusive club. Those other religions have a built-in tension: they are supposed to be open to anyone, but they still need to promise members something exclusive. They resolve that tension by making their exclusivity the basis of their proselytization: they promise their converts access to an exclusive group that has unique access to truth. Judaism has a built-in advantage in that Jews are supposed to be a nation separate from other nations, a built-in way to establish the kind of exceptionalism that youth thrives on.
And while there are a myriad of new and relatively dull ways to be Jewish, the list of things that disqualify one from Judaism has become vanishingly small. Believe what you want, behave how you want, marry anyone you want - and still consider yourself Jewish. No wonder assimilation is at 50%! If anyone who wants to can call themselves Jewish, what's the point of going to shul on Saturday, marrying Jews to have Jewish children, or keeping kosher? If you don't have to do anything specific to be Jewish (or rather, you can do anything in general and still be Jewish), then it's both very easy and totally beside the point to do Jewish things. Might as well join a book club - at least there you have to do the readings before anyone will take your opinion seriously. You can't just show up and say that Chapter 3 doesn't matter to you because you've established your own, personal relationship with the author that makes it irrelevant to being a book club member.
I don't always stay kosher outside the house or keep Shabbat (as is evidenced by the fact that I'm blogging this morning). On the other hand, when I don't do those things, I don't pretend that I'm still being religious. Modern civilization has distractions and toys and wonders, and a return to shtetl life is both impossible and undesirable. And even more so, no one is claiming that there's only one way to be Jewish - Judaism is about philosophical disputation. Jews don't have stable doctrine, let alone Inquisitors. And Jews don't issue fatwahs ordering death for other Jews who aren’t being Jewish enough. But just because Jews don't kill apostates doesn't mean that Judaism as social Judaism is good for the faith - not because what has effectively become relativism is bad doctrine, but because it makes for an unsustainable religion. American Judaism has in many cases lost even the pretense of doctrinal rigor - it has become a way of life divorced from a set of beliefs. Most those beliefs are readily available in the Barnes and Noble New Age section - and since the chairs there are a lot more comfortable than synagogue benches, Judaism needs something more.

Scout's honor, complete with the question mark in the search terms, we got a hit from the following search at 11:30 last night: "Ha'aretz credible?" Hmmm...
Not so much.
More no than yes.
No.
Hope that clears things up.

Two of the best minds in the debate world are having a nuanced, public debate on the college debate listserv about the Bolton nomination. Former National champion Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (who's now at FrontPageMag and confirmbolton.com) and former National championships top speaker Prof. Gordon Mitchell (who's now at the University of Pittsburgh and is my old coach) are posting back and forth:

Prof. Mitchell is affirming and Gartenstein-Ross is negating. The third post in the debate is here, and it has links to the previous posts. If you're looking for nuanced, reasonable debate about the Bolton nomination, this is the place to go.
A word of warning: the debate community is a strange place, filled with beasts both frightening and wonderful. Please resist the urge to wander around alone, and under no circumstances should you feed the animals. Remember Margaret Mead: "The natives are superficially agreeable, but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth".

It's the snarky combination of academic self-righteousness mixed with poor grammar that really makes this a treat:

"I'd explain myself, but you make me so angry I just don't know how I'd react so we best not talk". I don't know which is worse: that these moral exhibitionists use vague, thuggish innuendo as a pretext for avoiding discussion because they know they can't rationally justify their behavior; or that they're so psychotically committed to their fragile, myopic ideology that they really would lose it if someone systematically pointed out how stupid and hypocritical it is.

Yom Hashoah is most properly a time for defiance:

It is the ony Jewish memorial day that doesn't involve fasting precisely because its purpose is not to remind Jews of the role that their own sins play in their ruin - it is the blind sins of other nations that turn out to be the most dangerous. Every nation of any significance, and many that have none at all, has at one point or another fallen somewhere between silent aquiesence or open abetting when people organize to murder Jews.
It is neither a rational dislike for the practices of Judaism, nor is it any kind of intellectualized anti-Semitism, that lies at the root of anti-Jewish hatred. The tired observation that Japan has no Jews but that the Japanese are viciously anti-Semitic bears repeating. Visceral loathing, the desire for scapegoating, the need to blame personal failures - all of these play a part, in different proportions for different people, in spurring the oldest hate. People don’t hold hate Jews because they believe anti-Semitic myths. They believe anti-Semitic myths because they hate Jews.
And yet, an air of suffocating, feel-good political correctness surrounds modern efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Since at least the 1970s, organizations dedicated to fighting anti-Jewish hatred have focused on education and inter-faith dialogue - as if just telling people that Jews don't control global banking can debunk conpiracy theories born of the confusion and fear of an increasingly complicated world. The glaring exceptiosn to the politics of patronizing, arms-length tolerance have been Holocaust memorials - places that, given their manifest purpose, had to focus on the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. Even that's changed:

The results are predictable:

They don't think anti-Semitism is a problem because for over a decade, the very institutions dedicated to showing the consequences of anti-Semitism have been telling them that the Holocaust "didn't just target Jews," it targeted all people who were "morally inferior" or all people the Nazis thought were "unfit". Holcaust memorials have ceased to be places where people are reminded that for 10 years, the civilized world consumated millenia-old hatreds in the form of systematic extermination. Now they're meant to educate the public of the importance of tolerance towards all, whether it be religious, nationality, race, sex or creed. The problem is that anti-Semitism is a unique form of hatred - unique historically in origin and propogation and singularly horrifying in consequence. It can't be universalized and it certainly shouldn't be used to instill banal object-lessons about the degradation of Jim Crow laws.
Nonetheless, there's a subtle political purpose behind the universalization of the Holocaust. If one walks away from a Holocaust memorial struck by the inevitable persistence and ferociousness of anti-Semitism, then one will be inclined to agree that Jews must have the ability to defend themselves because the rest of the world won't. If one walks away from a Holocaust memorial sighing heavily about the ubiquity of prejudice, then one will be able to dismiss the experience by mouthing homilies about interfaith dialogue. It's tempting enough take away the latter without Holocaust museums telling you to do so.
Part of the horror of the Holocaust is its utter emptiness. Six million men, women, and children were shot, gassed, and burned to death not for any purpose, but simply because they were Jewish. Nothing compares to it - not civil wars that become genocidal, not agrarian societies built on slavery, not terrorist acts meant to affect political decision-making. It was not undergirded by an ideology, it was done in fulfillment of an ideology. It's an ideology that can't be educated or shamed, let alone wished, away. It can only be physically fought to a standstill, and even then only temporarily. That's the lesson of the Holocaust, and that's the lesson that the people charged with preserving the memory of the six million are increasingly loath to disclose.

I'm in the middle of finals paper writing, so a post on the academy isn't that out of line.
A lot of people spend a lot of energy complaining about that pathetic recipe - petulant resentment as faux bravado and intellectualized banality as daring insight - that passes for liberal campus activism. I don't really mind all that much. Sure, it's kind of annoying to walk by men in greasy dreadlocks and women sporting strategically untoned bellies on my way to lunch. But then I consider that they could be doing something important - like preparing my delicious Carls Jr. Famous Star - and I'm thankful that they're safely ensconced in the cocoon of academia rather than, you know, playing with crayons or other such sharp objects. Basically, I'm just happy that they're not in any position to hurt themselves or others.
That said, I'm reminded of a high-ranking Pitt campus police officer who, watching a typical "oh look at us we're taking a stand" traffic jam marching down Forbes Ave, commented that he had no idea what "those hippies" stood for. In fairness to the hippies, this police officer has missed the memo that redefined campus activism as "making sure your friends see you when you defiantly pump your fist into the air as if you were actually, you know, defying someone". But in fairness to the police officer, the hodgepodge of anti-globalization hysterics, anti-Iraq War nutballs, pro-Islamist screechers, and identity racist lunatics aren't exactly clear about what unites them or why they march together (psst - rhymes with "anti-Semitism").
On the ground, what's mostly going on is that these people all talk to and hang out with each other (and seriously, who else is going to). They - and especially their smaller, student versions - spend not inconsiderable mental and physical energy convincing each other that they're really making a difference. Which pretty much amounts to "hey, I'm bringing a lunatic to campus this weekend - do you want to help sponsor it so that you too can feel like you've taken on the man this week? We can stand in solidarity against the man together! How sweet is that!" So it was great to get this email:

And then it gives dates, times, and places - basically: one facile, crowd pleasing diatribe on the CMU campus and then a repeat on the Pitt campus. The only thing you need to know about Jeff Halper is that just this week he was a bit player in yet another Campus Watch anti-Columbia expose (incidentally, while I'm on the subject of that expose, Campus Watch needs to hire someone who actually knows something about the Left side of the academy - or actual, real-life Leftists. Otherwise, they end up publishing asinine things like "Herbert Marcuse's... sole loyalty was to Western democracy". Or they could just hire a fact-checker who knows how to use Google).
But anyway, Jeff Halper is "the Coordinator of... a coalition of Israeli peace and human rights groups that resist the Israeli occupation on the ground" and enjoys long walks on the beach coupled with "advocacy within Israel and abroad for an approach that considers a just peace and respect for human rights". That's academic-ese for "he's a moonbat who's really glad that he's a moonbat, otherwise someone might actually try to implement one of his moonbat ideas and get people killed."
Which brings us back to our main point. Check out who's sponsoring him:

You can agree or disagree with punitive house demolitions (although you can't really disagree with the fact that they get less people dead), but that's not why most of these groups are sponsoring Halper. They're sponsoring Halper because he comes from the ideological and political community that they support. So you end up with the spectacle of an anti-death penalty coalition (and an "uncompromising" one at that - like anyone but their doting parents and their stoner friends really thinks that the government is about to open up negotiations with these little brats) sponsoring someone who would see the country with no death penalty overrun by thugs from the organization that uses it all the time. As to a woman's group supporting someone who would give these sickos leeway - there's just no way women's rights is actually the motivating factor here.
No one will take a women's rights group seriously when its obvious that they support whatever celebratory cause is chi-chi that week. No one will take a peace group supporting that cop killer group seriously... well, ever. But these people really aren't in it to be taken seriously. They just want each other to see them pretending to take each other seriously. It's activism as political exhibitionism, mixed with an anti-authoritarian high. But hey, as long as they're more concerned with that than actually getting something done, I'm all for letting them have their little diversions. Think of it as letting little kids draw on the walls with non-toxic crayons. Fine as long as they don't chew on the crayons too much and upset their stomachs.
Back to paper writing. Mere Rhetoric will be back soon…