יום שבת, 31 במרץ 2012

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Elder of Ziyon Daily News

Link to Elder of Ziyon

Weekend open thread

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 03:46 PM PDT

Go for it.


Latest Latma

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 01:00 PM PDT

Nice bedtime story.

Dog mascot chases real cat during Maccabi Tel Aviv game

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 11:30 AM PDT

From The Daily Mail:
A basketball team's canine mascot needed no help getting into character when a cat strayed onto the court during a televised match.

In a curious take on the age-old pursuit, Maccabi Tel Aviv mascot Donny the Dog sprang into action after the feline appeared during a match against Bnei Hasharon in Israel.

As Maccabi's players attacked their oppponents' end at the Zisman Arena in the city Ramat Gan, eastern Israel, the furry intruder was spotted in the middle of the court.

The skittish cat, no doubt startled by the size 11s of the ball players thundering around him, tried to sprint towards cheerleaders gathered at the Bnei Hasharon end.

But Donny, feeling the spirit of his canine alter-ego, decided to give chase.

Sensing the chase was on, the cat skidded across the court, changing direction to avoid Donny's lunging attempt at a tackle.


(h/t Ian)

Five year old girl forced to marry - in England

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 10:15 AM PDT

From BBC:
A five-year-old girl is thought to have become the UK's youngest victim of forced marriage.

She was one of 400 children to receive assistance from the government's Forced Marriage Unit in the last year.

The figures have emerged as the public consultation into criminalising forced marriage in England, Wales and Northern Ireland comes to an end.

Amy Cumming, joint head of the Forced Marriage Unit, said 29% of the cases it dealt with last year involved minors.

"The youngest of these was actually five years old, so there are children involved in the practice across the school age range," she said.

To protect the child, the authorities have not disclosed details of the case or where the marriage took place.

But the case comes as no surprise to the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO), which deals with more than 100 cases of forced marriage a year.

"We have had clients who are in their very early teens, 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, the youngest case we had was nine years old," said IKWRO campaigns officer Fionnuala Murphy.

Now the consultation on forced marriage has come to an end, IKWROs hope it will become a criminal offence.

"Our organisation is pro-criminalisation because we believe that it will empower victims to know that this is a crime, to stand up to their parents and to stand up for their own rights and it will enable them to come forward and seek help and say what's happening to me is wrong."

In 2011 the Forced Marriage Unit helped deal with around 1,500 cases, but many more are thought to go unreported.
While it is true that the phenomenon is not limited strictly to Muslims, it is interesting that the entire article does not mention the word "Islam" or "Muslim" once.

(h/t John W.)

972mag attacks Judaism

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 09:01 AM PDT

Yossi Gurvitz of 972mag has written two screeds this week where he claims that an IDF rabbi allows troops to rape enemy women.

In the first article he publishes a query to Rabbi Eyal Qarim, a colonel in the IDF who was not answering in any official IDF capacity, and the rabbi's answer, which makes it look like Qarim is saying that rape is permissible nowadays during wartime. In his second, he ridicules the rabbi's denial, all the while clucking about how he knows how terrible Jewish law is and most of his critics don't know enough Hebrew to be horrified.

What he doesn't tell you is that he completely  and purposefully misrepresents the question that is being asked, and the actual question changes how the answer can be understood.

According to Gurwitz, the question was:
Is it allowed in our days [sic] for an IDF soldier, for example, to rape girls during a fight, or is such a thing forbidden?

And the answer was:
The wars of Israel […] are mitzvah wars, in which they differ from the rest of the wars the nations wage among themselves. Since, essentially, a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the personality of the individual is "erased" for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army's fighting ability […]

As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut. Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime. Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations (gilui arayot in the original – YZG), and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it was permitted during wartime (under the specific terms) out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge (yetzer ha'ra in the original -YZG), under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.

His translation of the answer is accurate - but he knowingly deleted the part of the question that was being answered.

Here is the full question:
I read on this website about the "beautiful woman captive," as well as the laws in the Torah [about her], and my question still remains - in various wars between nations, as the First World War, for example, different nations fought each other, and neither was particularly good for Jews or bad for Jews in particular...but if the [combatants would] conquer a village with Jews and Jewish girls were raped, it is considered, rightly, a disaster and tragedy for the girl and family.

If so, rape in war is considered a horrific thing. How then, as I was told by a rabbi, could a beautiful woman captive be permitted, according to some authorities, even before the process described in the Torah? Do you mean that you surrender to your desire and sleep with her, and only then take her to his house, etc.? This seems contradictory.

After all, if rape of civilians in war is considered shocking, why, apparently, are Jews allowed?

And is it permissible in our times for an IDF soldier, for example, to rape women in warfare, or is that forbidden?
The question was not a soldier asking for permission to rape, as Gurwitz implies. Exactly the opposite.

Now look at Rabbi Qarim's answer. He was answering the question of how the Torah can permit such an act, and Qarim answered that it falls under the category of things that are normally forbidden that are allowed in wartime because victory is a necessity in wartime which subsumes both individual rights and individual responsibilities. He makes clear, twice, that there are very specific conditions and laws that guide a soldier's conduct even when he is overcome with desire in the heat of war.

The point is that Rabbi Qarim was answering the question of how one can justify that the Torah can allow this to happen to begin with. He never answered the question of whether it was allowed today, because the answer is obviously no.

And this is exactly what Rabbi Qarim wrote this week in his clarification that Gurwitz disparages
It is obvious that the Torah never permitted raping a woman. The Comely Woman ruling is intended to make the soldier retract his intention of marrying the prisoner, by a series of actions which diminish her beauty and put the emphasis on her personality and grief. If, by the end of the process, he still wishes to marry her, he is obligated to do so by the usual legal manner.

In addition, the whole essence of the ruling was to soften the situation in the barbaric war world of the time, when a soldier might have done what he wished with a captive, and the goal of the ruling is to prevent the soldier from taking the captive as wife during the storm of battle. It is clear that in our times, when the world has progressed to a level of morality when captives are not taken as wives, this ruling is certainly not to be acted on, particularly as it is completely contrary to the ethics and the orders of the military."

Gurwitz is purposefully twisting the question to make Judaism look monstrous (or, as he says, "Those texts were written mostly in a barbaric period by ignorant people, fuelled by the hatred of mankind which is endemic to Judaism." Is this considered unbiased by 972mag and its funders?) [The article has since been silently changed to tone down that language a little. Original screenshots are available.]

He hypocritically says that "the rabbis did not want their texts to be available for everyone. Control over jargon also grants you some measure of power." And yet he purposefully refused to translate the entire query so his Hebrew-challenged readers could not check his own twisting of the truth to make it look like a rabbi today was supporting raping women captives!

It is possible to question ancient legal rulings in context of today's sensibilities. In fact, such questions should be welcomed. This is exactly what the questioner was doing.  There are even widely divergent views within traditional Judaism of exactly how to interpret this passage of the Torah. But Gurwitz is not interested in finding out how Judaism evolves - even Orthodox Judaism, even today - to deal with issues like this. He does not want to know what Jewish law says about contemporary matters. No, he "knows" that it is a sick belief system. He wants to demonize Judaism to as wide an audience as possible, and he is not above resorting to gross deception to accomplish his goal.

And he relies on his audience's unfamiliarity with Hebrew to accomplish his sickening, and truly anti-semitic, agenda.

Neturei Karta "rabbis" insulted and beaten in Jordan "Global March"

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 07:54 AM PDT

YNet says:
Jordanian news sites have reported Friday afternoon that some 20,000 people are participating in a mass procession in Jordan. The protesters gathered at Jesus's baptism site, and are planning to march towards the border with Israel. Increased security presence was reported in the area.

According to reports, participants were yelling "where is the Arab League on Jerusalem?" and waving Jordanian and Palestinian flags alongside signs with anti-Israeli slogans.

Four rabbis from the extremist anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect were also taking part in the march and carried signs reading: "Judaism demands the liberation of Jerusalem and all of Palestine."

Several rally participants expressed anger over the presence of Neturei Karta members, and a verbal altercation erupted between the two groups.

A Google search shows several articles that seem to indicate that the Neturei Karta nuts were actually beaten, quoting the official Petra news agency - but those articles have been updated and scrubbed without any mention of the NK members at all!

One comment remains on the Jordanzad site which scrubbed mention of the group. The commenter said "We Arabs will always calculate wrong .. there are rabbis involved with us against the occupation and we beat them and abuse them, how long will we be this stupid?

Similarly, I found a cache of another article, now scrubbed, that had said "Before the start of ceremonial events were four rabbis of the movement of American Jews 'Neturei Karta' who reject the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the State of Israel from the ground up, beaten and insulted by a group of young participants in the march, before the organizers intervened and expelled the rabbis."

Poor, poor NKidiots. Don't you feel sorry for them, being beaten by the people they love so much?

Anti-Israel gay conference on "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing" at CUNY

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 06:45 AM PDT

From Times of Israel:

An academic conference planned for next year in New York will use Israel's largely positive record on gay rights to denounce its treatment of Palestinians.

City University of New York last week announced Homonationalism and Pinkwashing, a gathering that will provide "an opportunity to examine Queer Resistance and Complicity globally" — but with a special emphasis on Israel. Hosted by CUNY's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the conference will take Israel to task for "pinkwashing," a term that accuses the country of promoting its progressive treatment of sexual minorities as a way of diverting attention from its conflict with the Palestinians. "Faced with intensifying criticism and the threat of economic boycott," the conference website states, "the Israeli government expanded their marketing plan by harnessing Homonationalism to reposition its global image."

Based on the list of proposed topics, conference organizers don't plan to examine the persecution of gays in the Muslim world, except as it pertains to generating Islamophobia and to "justify military assault" in Iraq and Iran.

Coordinating the gathering is Sarah Schulman, a humanities professor at CUNY's College of Staten Island. Schulman raised the profile of the "pinkwashing" accusation last fall in a controversial New York Times op-ed, in which she argued that Israel's "gay soldiers and the relative openness of Tel Aviv" shouldn't be used to distract attention from "the Palestinians' insistence on a land to call home."

Scheduled speakers include Berkeley professor Judith Butler, a veteran of Israeli Apartheid Week, and Haneen Maikey, the director of Palestinian LGBT group alQaws.

AlQaws, which appears to hold its recurring "Palestinian queer party" in Israel, is headquartered in Jerusalem Open House, a gay center in the Jewish-majority part of the city.
The official description of the conference is a must-read for its pretentious tone and sheer vacuity.
The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies is pleased to announce a conference "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing" to be held April 10-11, 2013 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in all configurations around the world have always experienced dramatic differences in representation and power. Today, after generations of sacrifice and organization, some LGBT people have won full legal rights with different degrees of implementation. Once hard to imagine, protection from discrimination, full relationship recognition, and inclusion in representation are now daily possibilities for some. In the United States, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have been invited into an equality defined, not by rights, but by the ability to participate openly in immoral wars. The co-opting of some LGBT people by anti-immigrant and in particular anti-Muslim political forces is widespread and growing. Rutgers Professor Jasbir Puar has coined the term "Homonationalism" to define collusion between LGBT people and identification with the nation state, re-enforcement of racial and national boundary, and systems of supremacy ideology no longer interrupted by homophobia. Homonationalism has spread far from its roots in European xenophobia and US militarism to become an increasingly potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Faced with intensifying criticism and the threat of economic boycott, the Israeli government expanded their marketing plan by harnessing Homonationalism to reposition its global image. The campaign intended "to improve Israel's image through the gay community in Israel," The Jerusalem Post quoted one government supporter of the campaign. This deliberate and highly funded program is what anti-occupation activists have named "Pinkwashing."The campaign not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel's gay rights movement, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. These groups rightly note that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, a keynote speaker at our conference and the director of Al Qaws:For Gender and Sexual Diversity in Palestinian Society, said in a recent lecture tour in the United States, "When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is."

Homonationalism and Pinkwashing mark a crucial turning point for Queer Scholars and Activists. This conference provides an opportunity to examine Queer Resistance and Complicity globally, in all of their complexities, with a political maturity that acknowledges the responsibility of access, the activism of necessity, the potential and impossible communities, identifications, solidarities, unities and consequential calls for action. Acknowledging these conditions make it imperative for Activists and Scholars to convene and bring together the theoretical and the applied, repositioning our resources to focus on a rejuvenated Queer future, movement, movements, efforts, actions, organizing and focus towards a vision of freedom that finally includes us all.

Do you get that? Do you see how a nation that doesn't discriminate against gays is to be held accountable by gays because some of its soldiers are gay? Do you understand how the entire concept of national boundaries is inherently immoral? Finally, do you understand that when Activists and Scholars capitalize certain Words, they show how vitally Critical their pretentious and self-contradictory Ideas are?

But wait - it gets better!

Possible topics we would love to include but are not limited to:

-Expanding our understandings of Queer Resistance and Complicity
-Hindus, Islamaphobia and Queer Emergence [apparently some Queer Adacemics cannot Spell]
-Arab Jews (Mizrachis) and Occupation/Pinkwashing/Diaspora
-Iran, Iraq and the Use of anti-LGBT Persecution to Justify Military Assault
-Transfeminism and the Global LGBT
-Race, Sexuality and the US Military
-Queer and The Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Movement
-Christian Evangelicals: Differing strategies for Uganda and Israel
-The rise of LGBT wings of European Right Wing Movements
-HRC, GLAAD, and the Gay Corporate Auxilliaries [Again!]
-AIDS, NGO's and Partnering With Global Pharma
-Homonationalism, Hollywood and Popular Culture
-Pinkwashing and Israeli Queer Cinema

"Pinkwashing" and "homonationalism" as such catchy terms. We need to create a new term to describe people who want to use their sexual orientation as a means to bash states that support them and to support states that bash them.

Homocrites?

(h/t Ian)

British BDSers: "We have no problem with Hebrew, just Israel"

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 05:30 AM PDT

From The Guardian letters section:
We notice with dismay and regret that Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London has invited Israel's National Theatre, Habima, to perform The Merchant of Venice in its Globe to Globe festival this coming May. The general manager of Habima has declared the invitation "an honourable accomplishment for the State of Israel". But Habima has a shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory. Last year, two large Israeli settlements established "halls of culture" and asked Israeli theatre groups to perform there. A number of Israeli theatre professionals – actors, stage directors, playwrights – declared they would not take part.

Habima, however, accepted the invitation with alacrity, and promised the Israeli minister of culture that it would "deal with any problems hindering such performances". By inviting Habima, Shakespeare's Globe is undermining the conscientious Israeli actors and playwrights who have refused to break international law.

The Globe says it wants to "include" the Hebrew language in its festival – we have no problem with that. "Inclusiveness" is a core value of arts policy in Britain, and we support it. But by inviting Habima, the Globe is associating itself with policies of exclusion practised by the Israeli state and endorsed by its national theatre company. We ask the Globe to withdraw the invitation so that the festival is not complicit with human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land.
David Aukin producer  Poppy Burton-Morgan artistic director, Metta Theatre Leo Butler playwright Niall Buggy actor David Calder actor Jonathan Chadwick director Caryl Churchill playwright Michael Darlow writer, director John Graham Davies actor, writer Trevor Griffiths playwright Annie Firbank actor Paul Freeman actor Matyelok Gibbs actor Tony Graham director Janet Henfrey actor James Ivens artistic director, Flood Theatre Andrew Jarvis actor, director, teacher Neville Jason actor Ursula Jones actor Professor Adah Kay academic, playwright Mike Leigh film-maker, dramatist Sonja Linden playwright, iceandfire theatre Roger Lloyd Pack actor Cherie Lunghi actor Miriam Margolyes actor Kika Markham actor Jonathan Miller director, author and broadcaster Frances Rifkin director Mark Rylance actor Alexei Sayle comedian, writer Farhana Sheikh writer Emma Thompson actor, screenwriter Andy de la Tour actor, director Harriet Walter actor Hilary Westlake director Richard Wilson actor, director Susan Wooldridge actor, writer
So by Habima being willing to perform in front of a group of people - Jews living in their historic homeland -who are vilified and discriminated against worldwide, they are using a "policy of exclusion." But by asking them to be boycotted, that is "inclusiveness."

I was also unaware that performing in a theater in Ariel is a violation of international law. I'd love to see the legal citation for that one.

Especially interesting is their assertion that they have no problem with performances in Hebrew, only from Israel's national theater.

And who are they trying to kid? If the troupe was called the "Anti-Settlement National Theatre" the exact same self-righteous gasbags would write an identical letter decrying the fast that some actors served in the IDF, or don't support boycotting Israel, or something.

Here's a thought experiment. What would happen if a Palestinian Arab theatre in Ramallah would invite Habimah to perform? Would Habimah, those "excluders," accept? Would Palestinian Arabs, those "moderates," allow the performance? Would the director of the theatre get killed? Perhaps then these blowhards can figure out what "politics of exclusion" actually means. Or have they forgotten that it wasn't exactly an Israeli who killed Juliano Mer-Khamis?

There are some known actors  and filmmakers there. Perhaps people might want to visit their Facebook pages and let them know that boycotts can go both ways.

(h/t O)

Weeds, the video

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 03:24 AM PDT

How much have Muslims venerated the Temple Mount throughout history?

Here's a video I made in 2008 that seems appropriate to repost on this day that so many are pretending to love Jerusalem.
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