| 100th anniversary of a pogrom in Fez, Morocco Posted: 16 Apr 2012 11:00 PM PDT Today is the 100th anniversary of a particularly gruesome pogrom in Fez, Morocco, as a protest against the French turned into a violent rampage against the Jews who lived in a ghetto there. From the Boston Evening Transcript: From the Grey River Argus: Here is what the Jewish quarter looked like afterwards: In the end, some 60 Jews were murdered. And this was not particularly unusual for Fez. There were pogroms in 1033, and 1276, in 1465 the mellah (ghetto) was almost completely destroyed, and there were pogroms throughout Morocco in 1790 where the Fez Jews were forced out of the city for two years. This is just a small part of how well Jews were treated in Muslim countries. For the most part better than Europe, but they were always considered to be inferior and apart from the majority population, and when bad things happened the Jews were the first to be attacked. 
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| The lonely life of a Japanese expert in Yiddish Posted: 16 Apr 2012 06:10 PM PDT From NPR: A smattering of Yiddish words has crept into the American vernacular: Non-Jews go for a nosh or schmooze over cocktails. Yet the language itself, once spoken by millions of Jews, is now in retreat.
But you don't have to be Jewish to love Yiddish. In Japan, a linguist has toiled quietly for decades to compile the world's first Yiddish-Japanese dictionary — the first time the Jewish language has been translated into a non-European language other than Hebrew.
It was in the hills of Kyushu Island in southern Japan where Kazuo Ueda carried out his impressive and quixotic quest, devoting his life to a language few Jews understand, and even fewer Japanese have even heard of.
Now Japan's leading scholar of Yiddish, Ueda was originally a specialist in German. He stumbled upon the Jewish language while reading Franz Kafka, himself a fan of Yiddish theater.
Ueda was immediately smitten with the language that is written in Hebrew letters, but is a hybrid of German, Hebrew, Russian and other languages.
"Yiddish was full of puzzles for me," Ueda says. "That's what I love about it. Reading sentences in those strange letters — it's like deciphering a code."
Ueda made several trips to Israel, but most of his research was a lonely, solo affair. Isolated from actual speakers of the language, he taught himself, with the help of Yiddish newspapers and literature.
Ueda would later publish a series of books on the Jewish language and people, but he considers that a prelude to his magnum opus — the 1,300-page, 28,000-entry Idishugo Jiten, or Yiddish-Japanese dictionary, published several years ago. His publisher wouldn't release details but conceded sales are most likely tiny for the dictionary, which costs more than $700.
"I actually think $700 is pretty cheap, considering," Ueda says.
Cheap, considering it took 20 years to finish the volume — and that Ueda's doctors say the project may have shortened his life. As his dictionary neared completion, Ueda began to show signs of Parkinson's disease. Now 69, he was forced to retire from the faculty of Fukuoka University in March and struggles to walk and speak.
Ueda's wife, Kazuko, blames years of desk-bound devotion to the dictionary for aggravating his disease.
"Every day, he would sit down to work on his dictionary right after breakfast. He never took any time off," she says. "But for him, this wasn't work but sheer joy. So I thought, this is the way things had to be."
"I wrote it purely for the pursuit of learning," he says. "I don't expect a wave of people to start learning Yiddish." The Forward, which was originally a Yiddish paper, wrote about Ueda earlier this year. Ueda's target readership is small but dedicated, and while Ueda may be Japan's leading Yiddishist, he is not alone. Yoshiji Hirose, an expert on Yiddish literature at Japan's Notre Dame Seishin University, honed his Yiddish in Brooklyn's Boro Park; Chitoshi Hinoue is an art historian specializing in the work of Marc Chagall and is also a klezmer clarinetist; Sadan, who immigrated to Israel for a full-time position in Hebrew linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, is equally at home in Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, English and Esperanto.
Sadan pegs the number of Japanese proficient in Yiddish at fewer than 20, though more have partial knowledge of the language. All, he says, are driven by "healthy intellectual curiosity and interest in traditional Ashkenazic culture, which, unlike modern Israeli culture, seems to have much in common with traditional Japanese culture." Zachary Sholem Berger, an American Yiddishist who has spent time in Japan, notes that many Japanese Yiddishists are also believing Christians. Several Japanese universities (Tokyo, Fukuoka and Sapporo, among others) offer Yiddish classes, and four Yiddish study groups now exist (in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe and Okayama). Regularly there are a handful of Japanese participants at Yiddish language immersion programs, klezfests and Yiddish conferences around the world. If you want to buy this dictionary, it is available at Amazon Japan for 68,000 yen. 
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| Evening open thread Posted: 16 Apr 2012 03:51 PM PDT It was a busy day so I gotta unwind. Go ahead, call me a slacker. 
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| Interesting article on the international laws of war Posted: 16 Apr 2012 01:35 PM PDT At the Washington Post blog, Jennifer Rubin interviews Peter Berkowitz on his new book " Israel and the Struggle Over the International Laws of War." An excerpt: You write that international laws are "a vital component of a freer, more peaceful and more prosperous world order." But does Israel's experience with Goldstone and the flotilla suggest otherwise?
Israel's bitter experience with the Goldstone Report and, in the end, better experience with the Gaza flotilla controversy — both of which concerned Israel's operations against Hamas, which is the ruling authority in Gaza and which is sworn to Israel's destruction — involved the attempt by influential actors on the international stage to criminalize Israel's inherent right of self-defense. All liberal democracies must combat this abuse and corruption of the international laws of war.
At their origins and properly conceived today, the international laws of war seek to balance the legitimate claims of military necessity and humanitarian responsibility. Liberal democracies such as Israel and the United States, which are engaged in a long struggle against transnational terrorism and depend on their armed forces on a daily basis to defend their ways of life, have a special interest in the struggle over the international laws of war. That's in no small measure because soldiers and officers imbued with the principles of freedom and equality justly take pride in honoring laws of war rightly understood. The laws of war rightly understood take seriously both combatants' obligation to defend their nation and their obligation to minimize harm to noncombatants.
Is the proper application of international law possible without a majority of liberal democracies in the international community?
Yes and no. It is certainly possible for the liberal democracies such as the United States and Israel to operate in accordance with the international laws of war, in part because the international laws of war accord states with competent judicial systems considerable responsibility for investigating and punishing war crimes. However, to the extent that the international laws of war are coopted by authoritarian states and transnational elites with their own political agendas, liberal democracies will be compelled to assume even greater responsibility for interpreting, upholding, and defending the international laws of war. The recognition of laws of war that are binding on all nations should not be confused with the obligation to vest in some mythical international community the authority for defining and punishing violations of the laws of war. Nearly half the book can be read here. (h/t Noah) 
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| Follow-up on CJR's absurd article saying Israel jails more journalists "per capita" Posted: 16 Apr 2012 12:10 PM PDT Columbia Journalism Review has an article by Sohrab Ahmari that discusses the disgraceful manipulation and misuse of statistics that Justin Martin used at CJR two weeks ago to make it look like Israel treats journalists worse than almost every country on Earth. ( I was the first to point out the falsehood of Martin's statistics.) In recent years, the Columbia Journalism Review has devoted special attention to the use and misuse of statistics in American journalism, taking reporters to task when they have fallen for unreliable statistics or failed to seek the human stories behind data. The cover essay in the March/April 2011 issue, for example, harshly criticized the Los Angeles Times for publishing the names of thousands of public school teachers next to their "value-added" performance data without giving readers sufficient context to interpret these numbers. In its next issue, CJR lauded an alternative weekly reporter for exposing the faulty methodology behind wildly alarming sex trafficking statistics that were uncritically picked up by a number of regional broadsheets. Such instances of statistical credulity and probity on the part of journalists regularly earn "darts" and "laurels" in the pages of CJR.
Such efforts are admirable. But they also require CJR to be doubly cautious in its own use of statistics. On April 2, columnist Justin Martin posted an article on the CJR website purporting to spotlight the twelve countries with the most number of journalists jailed "per capita." Save for the conspicuous absence of China, the resulting list of authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian states was mostly predictable. But one country stood out from the rest: Israel. The Jewish state, according to Mr. Martin, jails more journalists per capita than the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ba'athist regime in Syria, and the Burmese junta, among others. Only Eritrea, Mr. Martin claimed, jails more reporters per capita.
....Mr. Martin's findings soon sparked a firestorm of controversy, with supporters of Israel crying foul at the latest instance of Israel-bashing in the prestige press. ...The outrage was justified. Mr. Martin's conclusion would not have passed professional muster under the standards CJR imposes on other outlets. Indeed, his methodology was a classic example of the sort of statistical recklessness that CJR scolds other journalists for.
To reach his per capita number, Mr. Martin merely divided the number of journalists detained—a number that, in the case of Israel, was debatable to begin with—by each country's population in millions. As Commentary's Omri Ceren pointed out, however, "If you want a 'per capita' number describing which countries disproportionately target journalists, you divide the jailed journalists in each country by the total number of journalists in each country, not by the total number of people." Otherwise, tiny Israel—home to a huge press corps and where commentators in the Arab and leftist presses regularly question the state's very right to exist—ends up appearing more repressive than, say, North Korea, where a totalitarian regime does not permit journalism as such to exist.
Allowing Mr. Martin to skewer the Jewish state using faulty statistics undermines CJR's role as professional watchdog. But the harm done extends beyond journalistic standards. The ultimate impact of pieces like Mr. Martin's is a softening of the reading public's moral intuitions and sensitivities. By placing Israel on the same plane as the likes of Iran and Syria, Mr. Martin minimized the threats faced by journalists working under genuine authoritarianisms—not to mention the broader human rights catastrophes underway in these societies.
In Iran, where I was born and spent the first half of my life, journalists and writers are persecuted on a nearly industrial scale; dozens of outlets are shuttered every year. Just last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported, Nazanin Khosravani, a reformist writer, began serving a six-year sentence in Tehran's nightmarish Evin prison for the crime of "propagating against the system"—a charge unheard of in Israel. But why should Western audiences care about these very real injustices when seemingly authoritative "statistics" show the West—including Israel and the U.S.—to be equally authoritarian? Mr. Martin thus challenged the common moral sense of his readers, distorting conclusions they would otherwise draw from straightforward reporting on the realities of practicing journalism in free and unfree societies. Will he earn a dart from CJR anytime soon? Martin's response is more than lame: I fully agree with this criticism. Unfortunately, we don't yet have reliable data on national tallies for working reporters in many of the countries—Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia—that jail journalists. And even if such data were available, we would want counts of how many newsmakers in each country were working for regime-owned news sources versus private organizations. For now, although the data are a bit large and cumbersome, ratios of imprisoned reporters to countries' population still deliver some meaning. No, they don't. They obscure meaning. It is as worthwhile as comparing the number of jailed journalists to the number of registered dogs in the same country. Martin then gets even more ridiculous, trying to take credit for spending 30 seconds to subtract the journalists jailed by Hamas in the original survey, and helping Israel look better. Wow - we should praise him for doing something that any high-school reporter would be expected to do? Martin proved himself to be anything but a serious journalist with this episode. He has now proven that he has no credibility in criticizing other journalists, at all. (h/t David G) 
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| Hamas terrorists tweet about morality Posted: 16 Apr 2012 10:35 AM PDT All you need to know about Hamas - and, in many ways, mainstream Palestinian Arab thought - can be seen in this tweet from the Al Qassam Brigades, their terrorist wing: They are claiming that the IDF is inhumane, presumably because of the incident yesterday where an IDF soldier whose fingers were broken during a "peaceful protest" hit a protester with his rifle. Obviously, to the Qassam Brigades, use of force by an army against protesters is a terrible thing. Then, in the very next sentence, we are informed that "resistance" - which to the Qassam Brigades means suicide bombings at pizza shops, shooting rockets at civilians, and stealing bulldozers to run over people - is the "only way" for them. The rules are simple. Anything Israel does, no matter how justified, is inherently immoral - and anything Hamas does, no matter how heinous, is justified. If it was only Hamas that felt this way, it wouldn't be so bad. But there are tens of millions of Arabs, hundreds of millions of Muslims and tens of thousands of Westerners who believe the exact same thing. In this case, Hamas is not anomalous - it is mainstream. 
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| Iranian arms ship to Syria intercepted Posted: 16 Apr 2012 09:25 AM PDT From Der Spiegel on Saturday: A German-owned freighter loaded with weapons from Iran was stopped on Friday near the Syrian port of Tartus in the Mediterranean Sea, SPIEGEL has learned.
A few days prior, the Atlantic Cruiser, owned by the Emden carrier Bockstiegel, had allegedly picked up heavy military equipment and munitions meant for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's regime from an Iranian freighter at the Djibouti port. The cargo, desperately needed reinforcements for Assad's crackdown on dissidents, was supposed to be unloaded on Friday.
But defectors from inside the Syrian government had learned of the delivery and warned the shipping company. On Friday the Atlantic Cruiser suddenly changed course, heading for the Turkish harbor of Iskenderun instead. Then the ship stopped some 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Tartus, sailing in circles for the next few hours.
"We stopped the ship after getting information on the weapons cargo," shipping agent Torsten Lüddeke of Hamburg-based C.E.G. Bulk Chartering told SPIEGEL.
According to Lüddeke, the ship had been chartered by an Odessa, Ukraine-based company called White Whale Shipping. "They declared to us as cargo mainly pumps and similar things," he said. "We never would have allowed weapons on board." For now, the 6,200-ton ship will "stay where it is," he added.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian shipping company has insisted that the Atlantic Cruiser is not carrying weapons and that it be allowed to dock in Tartus.
However, SPIEGEL has learned that the ship's crew had attempted to refuel in the Cypriot port of Limassol, but was turned away after reporting its cargo as "weapons and munitions."
The German Economics Ministry told the Associated Press on Saturday that it was looking into the matter, but provided no further details.
The route between Djibouti and Tartus is known as a path for transporting weapons, according to intelligence experts. In January another ship out of Russia was halted with munitions in Cyprus, but later continued its journey with the cargo to Syria after the captain declared he would head to a different port than initially planned. And today: Officials in Germany are still seeking information about a German-owned ship believed to be carrying a load of weapons and military equipment that had been destined for the despotic regime of Syrian leader Bashar Assad. Since the revelation on Friday, it appears that transponder used to broadcast the ship's whereabouts has been turned off repeatedly. On Monday, though, it appeared to be on again, with the 6,200 ton freighter ship apparently on a course towards Turkey.
...But many questions still persist about the ship -- and the shipping company's version of events has been filled with contradictions for some days now. On Sunday, officials with Bockstiegel would not comment to SPIEGEL ONLINE on the events. Initially, the German freighter was supposed to call at the Syrian port of Tartus at the end of last week. Earlier, the ship had reportedly loaded heavy military equipment and munitions from an Iranian cargo ship in Djibouti that had been intended for Assad's henchmen.
...The behavior of those in charge raises a number of questions. It remains a mystery why the shipping company didn't immediately order the ship to head to a port so that the cargo could be swiftly investigated. The shipping company also could have ordered the ship's captain to make a closer inspection of the freight it is carrying. A quick check of the freight could have quickly answered some of the most pressing questions and also might have exonerated all parties involved. But it appears they didn't want to do that.
Instead, it appears the captain was instead prompted to turn off the ship's transponder so that the Atlantic Cruiser's location could no longer be traced. For 24 hours, the ship could no longer be tracked as it traveled on the high seas. It will also be difficult to determine what happened on the ship during that time. The same applies to Sunday night, when the transponder was yet again turned off. What has been happening on the ship since then?
The shipping company has said off the record that it is normal for the transponder to shut down as soon as the freighter ship stops moving. But ship brokers claim the move is extremely unusual. Experts said that even when a freight ship is at port or in open seas, the transponder is usually in operation, making it possible to track the vessel's whereabouts. (h/t Yoel) 
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| Former Hamas leader kidnapped in Damascus Posted: 16 Apr 2012 08:30 AM PDT  Arabic media is reporting that a former leader of Hamas, Mustafa Leddawi, was kidnapped in Damascus by unknown assailants who took him to an unknown destination. Sources told Al Hayat that Leddawi, who had held several leadership positions in Hamas including being its representative in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, was captured early Sunday morning while driving his own car. Hamas leadership is in contact with Syrian authorities and received a promise that they will make efforts in order to know where he is. Hmmmm. 
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| Arabic book: "Zionists conspired with Iraqi government to expel Jews" Posted: 16 Apr 2012 07:15 AM PDT A new Arabic book attempts to prove that Iraqi Jews were forced out of the country by Israel working together with the Iraqi government. Written by Egyptian Mohamed Ahmed Saleh Hussein, the book claims that Jews in Iraq lived a wonderful existence. It bases most of its conclusions based on an autobiography by Israel Prize winner Sasson Somekh, a secular Jew who lived in Iraq and whose family immigrated to Israel in 1951. He quotes Somekh, who was eighteen at the time, as saying that he felt not that he was immigrating to Israel but that he was being uprooted from his country, Iraq. This proves, according to Hussein, that Jews in Arab countries were unwilling to move to Israel. Of course, if there hadn't been rampant anti-semitism and governmental discrimination against Jews in Iraq, the Jewish community would not have been entirely uprooted to begin with. Hussein rehashes the old discredited claims that it was a Zionist campaign of terror that forced the Jews to leave. Beyond that, he says that Iraqi authorities colluded with "Zionists" to expel the Jews from the country. As the book reviewer summarizes it: The authorities of that era conspired with Zionism, and began to put pressure on Iraqi Jews, forcing them to leave. Thus, they were forced to drop their Iraqi nationality, and [Iraqi authorities] showed deliberate discrimination against them is in the "sacking of dozens of Jewish civil servants, and limiting the number of students admitted to schools and universities, and forcing Jews to show trials that would usually end with their execution.". This gave the Zionist media rich material to serve their interests... This pushed the Jews of Iraq to immigration, especially after the Farhood [pogrom in Baghdad] that led to the process called "Ezra and Nehemia" [airlift to Israel.] From here, it is clear that the Iraqi Jewish community was the victim of a big conspiracy involving states and many systems, forcing themm to leave their country. Hussein seems to admit that there was state-sponsored discrimination against Jews - but he bizarrely blames "Zionists" for it. Not only that, he mentions the Farhud massacre, but seems to imply that this was no big deal and not a factor. The author also notes that Iraqis Jews started an "Anti-Zionist" committee in 1945, which he uses as proof that they were not interested in moving to Israel. The fact that this committee was meant to distance the Jews from the coming anti-semitism that they could anticipate coming down the pike doesn't seem to occur to Hussein. Based on this review, it appears that the book ends up proving what it is meant to disprove. Of course most people will not willingly uproot their homes and communities where they lived for millennia - it takes a big push to get people to want to do that. Iraq provided that push with its increased anti-semitism of the 1940s and 1950s, official state-sanctioned Jew hatred that Hussein seems to admit. But he is forced to create a convoluted conspiracy theory - based, as always, on the evil Zionist entity - to explain the rampant anti-semitism that is well-documented throughout the entire Arab world in those days. 
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| Tunisian president tries to reassure Jews Posted: 16 Apr 2012 05:45 AM PDT From Tunisia Live April 11: Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki marked the ten year anniversary of the 2002 Al-Qaeda truck bombing attack on the El Ghriba synagogue with a visit to the Djerba landmark today.
In a solemn ceremony commemorating the 21 victims who were killed in the attack, President Marzouki reiterated that Tunisian Jews were equal citizens under the law to all other Tunisians and that the Tunisian government was committed to the security of the small 2,600 year-old community. Marzouki called the attacks "cowardly," and expressed deep sympathy for the families of the victims who died.
Victims' families came from France and Germany to meet with the new Tunisian President and share their grief for the loss of their their loved ones. In his speech, Marzouki said, "Tunisia is a peaceful country and the Tunisian people refuse all forms of violence against civilians."
Marzouki also declared that, "any vandalism or violence against the Tunisian Jewish people, their property or their holy sites is totally unacceptable." He also condemned the recent attack which killed four Jewish children in Toulouse, France.
The Tunisian president also announced that he has invited a group of Jewish school children to visit his Carthage Presidential Palace office. Marzouki has recently brought school groups to visit his office as a way of opening the Tunisian Presidency to the public after the revolution.
Recent demonstrations by ultra-conservative Islamist groups have seen public chants calling for Muslims to kill or wage war against Jews on three occasions in the past three months in Tunisia. Individual Tunisian followers of the Salafist movement have been known to have had ties to Al-Qaeda in the past.
Local Jewish community leaders expressed great pleasure with the visit of Marzouki and optimism for the future of the Jewish community.
"It is a blessing to live together, as Tunisians: Muslims and Jews, our bonds challenge the hatred of the Salafists," said Perez Trabelsi, president of the El Ghriba Synagogue and the Jewish community of Hara Segira, Djerba.
"The day-to-day living situation for Jews has not changed since the revolution, and we hope it will never change; we don't live in fear," Perez Trabelsi added.
Perez Trabelsi's son, Rene, owns a Kosher hotel and resort in nearby Sidi Mansour, Djerba as well as a Paris-based travel agency that organizes Jewish religious tours of Tunisia. "I am sure the government will put an end to these hateful speeches that we have seen in videos," said Rene Trabelsi. "The tourism season is coming soon and many Jews are interested in visiting Tunisia," he added. The Jewish students visited the presidential palace yesterday, although they did not meet with Marzouki. Last month, thousands of Islamists at a rally in Tunisia called to "fight the Jews" in order to "enter Paradise." 
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| Egypt, Hamas to establish free trade zone? Posted: 16 Apr 2012 03:02 AM PDT The Hamas-based Palestine Times newspaper is reporting that Egypt and Hamas are close to agreeing to create a free-trade zone on the border in Rafah. The article makes it sound like the Gaza and Egyptian chambers of commerce agreed to the deal, which would set aside areas of Rafah in both Gaza and Egypt for the zone. It also says that eventually Gaza businessmen would be able to import and export goods through the Egyptian port at El Arish. What the article was thin on was any sense that the agreement was approved by the Egyptian government. It sounds more than a bit nebulous right now, but it is worth following. At the moment, there is no mechanism for Gaza manufacturers to export goods through Egypt, and no such initiative had been discussed. The Rafah crossing is meant only for people, not goods, and Egypt has shown no desire to rebuild it. Hamas tried to pressure Egypt to retool Rafah to allow fuel imports and Egyptian authorities adamantly refused, insisting that any fuel from Egypt go through the Kerem Shalom crossing near the Egyptian/Israeli/Gaza border. 
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Arabic media is reporting that a former leader of Hamas, Mustafa Leddawi, was kidnapped in Damascus by unknown assailants who took him to an unknown destination.
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