| The bureaucracy of censorship in Kuwait Posted: 18 May 2012 12:30 PM PDT From the Kuwait Times:  | | Proud of her job to keep others ignorant | Different professions have different tastes. Sometimes we wonder how the work of some people goes on, especially if it is not very common. The censors who are responsible for censoring books and other publications do an interesting job, which becomes harder during some periods of the year, yet it seems they enjoy it. In Kuwait, freedoms are respected yet within certain limits. "The limits of freedom in the press, TV, radio or other media is organized by law no. 3/2006 concerning Press and Publications, law no. 61/2007 concerning Visual and Audio Media, and related by-laws," Dalal Al-Mutairi, head of the Foreign Books Department at the Ministry of Information told Kuwait Times.
These laws set the basic rules to deal with right and wrong acts announced or published in the media. "This is also related to books, electronic publications and games and many other things. There are certain red lines that should not be crossed by the publishers, writers, authors and others. In order to check the application of the laws and that it's not violated, there are inspectors and censors working at the Ministry of Information," she added.
Dalal started her career as a censor at the Foreign Books Department and became the head of the department after a few years. "Many people consider the censor to be a fanatic and uneducated person, but this isn't true. We are the most literate people as we have read much, almost every day. We receive a lot of information from different fields. We read books for children, religious books, political, philosophical, scientific ones and many others," she pointed out.
"As a censor, I read a book from beginning to the end, word by word. In case the censor makes a mistake, the head of the department will be responsible for this mistake, as they should also read the book. The time to finish censoring a book depends on the kind of the book. For instance, a philosophical book needs about four days to read," Dalal added.
...According to the law, if there is a violation, the censor writes a report about it. "Nobody can distribute any book unless he has a license to do so. The distributor should bring a copy of the book to our department. Sometimes we receive complaints from people regarding some books. Then we investigate with the printing press that published and printed this book. The printing house is responsible for the material and books printed by it and they should inform the Ministry of Information that they are printing a book, and then the book is not distributed without a license. There are some censors and inspectors from our department who inspect different printing presses to check their license," Dalal stated.
...The greatest load on the department is during the Book Fair. "We start censoring the books in this fair about three months before it is held. We receive about 7,000 to 8,000 books to read. There are about 15 censors working on this fair. These censors take the books home with them to finish their reading. If we find a book containing restrictions, we write a report that is passed to a committee which decides that certain books will be banned from the fair," she highlighted.
...Working as a censor is interesting. "I like this work. It gives us experience, information and we always learn something new. It takes about a year or a year and a half to become a censor, as the person is first employed as a censor assistant. The employee first starts slow in reading and it takes him a week or days to finish a book. Also, beginners are not given political or religious books in the beginning as these are difficult. Instead we give them children's books or some scientific books, which are easy," said Dalal.
In some religious books, the censorship department cooperates with the Ministry of Endowments. "Religious opinions may differ and that's why we demand a professional explanation, although we have some censors who are graduates of the Faculty of Islamic Law. Some religious issues are transferred to the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs. The banned books include publications printed in Israel, Christian missionary and Jewish books and other similar books," she noted.
(h/t @georgehale) 
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| Latest Latma Posted: 18 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT Didn't get a chance to watch it yet.... 
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| "The End of the Jewish Left" (Tablet) Posted: 18 May 2012 10:03 AM PDT A very interesting article: [T]he softening mainstream liberalism of American Jews can be seen as the feeble remnant of what was once a fiery and uncompromising leftism. Indeed, as historian Tony Michels said at the YIVO conference, the history of American Communism "cannot be understood without Jews." But the mood of the conference was best summed up in the title of the keynote address, by the political philosopher Michael Walzer: "The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism." What was once a proud inheritance now seems like a problem in need of a solution. For many Jews, it remains axiomatic that Judaism is a religion of social justice and progress; the phrase "tikkun olam" has become a convenient shorthand for the idea that Judaism is best expressed in "repair of the world."
In his speech, and in his new book In God's Shadow: Politics and the Hebrew Bible, Walzer offers a contrary vision of traditional Judaism, which he argues "offers precious little support to left politics"—a truth that he recognized would surprise those who, like himself, "grew up believing that Judaism and socialism were pretty much the same thing." If a leftist political message cannot readily be found in the traditions of Judaism, it follows that the explosion of Jewish leftism in the late 19th century was actually a rupture with Jewish history, and potentially a traumatic one.
Walzer's reluctance to associate Judaism too simply with leftist politics, or indeed with any politics, represents a break from his earlier thinking. In his influential 1985 book Exodus and Revolution, for instance, Walzer argued that the Exodus narrative had provided a template for generations of revolutionaries and progressives in Western society, offering a model of how to escape an oppressive past and create a better future. The contrast with his new book could not be sharper. In this work, Walzer reads the Bible with an eye to its explicit and implicit teachings about politics and finds that its most eloquent message on the subject is silence. "The political activity of ordinary people is not a Biblical subject," he writes, "nor is there any explicit recognition of political space, an agora or forum, where people congregate to argue about and decide on the policies of the community."
Coming from Walzer, who co-edited a multivolume treatise on "The Jewish Political Tradition," and who has been one of the leading theorists of mainstream left-liberalism for decades, this emphasis on the antipolitical nature of the Bible is striking. In his YIVO speech, he listed six central features of traditional Judaism that made it a conservative force, including the very idea of Jews as a chosen people—an idea that cannot easily be made to harmonize with universalism and egalitarianism.
...The left's rejection of Judaism, Walzer concluded in his speech at YIVO, was both "necessary and profoundly wrong." Necessary, because traditional Judaism did not offer a basis for a social justice movement; but also wrong, because the severance with tradition rendered the Jewish left culturally disoriented and spiritually impoverished.
While a number of speakers at the YIVO conference invoked Isaac Deutscher's concept of the "non-Jewish Jew"—figures like Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg, who rejected on principle any definition of themselves or their goals in Jewish terms—both Walzer and Ezra Mendelsohn warned against the idea that identity could be so abstract and universalized. Walzer called instead for a renewed critical engagement with Jewish tradition, including a return to the Jewish calendar and Jewish lifecycle events.
If this represents a kind of retrenchment on the part of the left, it is partly because the Jewish left has lost any certainty that the future is on its side. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is the strongest and most popular leader in decades; in both Israel and America, the fastest-growing section of the Jewish population is the Orthodox, a right-leaning group who 50 years ago, Mendelsohn recalled, seemed headed for extinction. Still, political fortunes can always change, and Mendelsohn concluded his speech, and the conference, with a wan prophecy that the Jewish left would return: "Maybe I won't see it, but my grandchildren will."
...The problem for the left today is that it has gone over largely—but not, Geras and others insisted, wholly—to the negative view of Judaism as an obstacle to human progress. Israel, Geras held, "has been an alibi for a new climate of anti-Semitism on the left," a development whose full venomousness can only be seen in Europe. ("I don't think people here realize," he said mournfully, "what it's like to be a Jewish leftist in Britain today," comparing it to living in a sea of poison.) This is the atmosphere that the Anglo-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson evoked so powerfully in his recent novel The Finkler Question: one in which hostility to Israel is a reflex and insinuations about Jewish power and the "Jewish lobby" go unchallenged. (h/t @WarpedMirrorPMB) 
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| Bahrain and Saudi Arabia discovered to be Zionist Posted: 18 May 2012 08:56 AM PDT As if you needed any more evidence after my post this morning about a Saudi company buying software from Israel, we have this from Hezbollah's Al Manar: Thousands of people demonstrated in Tehran on Friday to protest a proposed union of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
The authorities had urged citizens to protest the American plan to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia and express their anger against the "lackey regimes of Al-Khalifa and Al-Saud".
Media reports said demonstrators in the capital, many brandishing the Bahraini flag, shouted "death" to America, Israel, the "traitors" Al-Saud and Al-Khalifa. Official media also reported protests in other cities.
This week's Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said the "US-Zionist plot" to create a union between will fail. "Recently ... (Riyadh and Manama) came up with this plot to annex Bahrain to Saudi Arabia ... They call it a union but they want Bahrain to lose its identity instead of giving in to its people's demands," the cleric said on state radio.
"This is US-Zionist conspiracy and they should know that the Muslim people of the world and the Iranians will not tolerate this plot ... Saudi Arabia did not prevail by its military presence there, and will gain nothing in this plot except disgrace," he added. The plan, floated last December, was Saudi Arabia's idea, not America's. And the smaller Gulf states are not too keen about it anyway. But this hysterical reaction by Iran (and its Lebanese proxies) is interesting, mostly because of Iran's own territorial designs on Bahraini territory. 
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| Muslims create a myth to claim Joseph's Tomb Posted: 18 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT Ma'an reports: Israeli soldiers escorted hundreds of Jewish worshipers to Joseph's Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday, witnesses said.
Clashes broke out as locals threw stones and soldiers fired tear gas, witnesses told Ma'an.
Jews believe that the tomb is the final resting place of the biblical figure Joseph. Muslims believe that an Islamic cleric, Sheikh Yussef (Joseph) Dawiqat, was buried there. So who was the fortunately named Sheikh Yusuf Dawiqat? Well, either he is fictional or he is incredibly obscure. There is no entry for him in Wikipedia Arabic. Apparently, this sheikh was made up as the inhabitant of the tomb only in recent decades, specifically to weaken the Jewish religious claim to the site. Jews have identified the site at that location since at least the fourth century CE. In the past, Muslims were known to refer to the site as "Qabr en-Nabi Yūsuf", the Tomb of the Prophet Joseph, not any obscure sheikh from the 18th century. This sounds a bit familiar. This is exactly what the Muslims are trying to do with Rachel's Tomb by claiming it is an ancient mosque, when it never was. 
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| Israel haters freak out over the hoopoe bird Posted: 18 May 2012 05:25 AM PDT From JPost: Anti-Israel activists sharply criticized the socialist British daily the Morning Star for referring to Israel's national bird the hoopoe in its daily quiz.
In a letter to the newspaper, Linda Claire, the chairwoman of Manchester's Palestine Solidarity Campaign, asked why it had referred to the bird after it has "always been the newspaper you could rely on to support the cause of the Palestinians."
"Maybe you don't support the methods chosen by the international solidarity movement of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel] to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and justice," she said, adding that this included any reference to Israel's wildlife.
"Despite its condemnation of zionists [sic] it yet finds space to include an item in its daily quiz about Israel's national bird. Is the Star not aware there's a cultural boycott going on?" Claire's husband, George Abendstern, asked in another letter.
"And then, despite it's [sic] condemnation of the Bahrain Grand Prix and rightly so, it then goes on to tell us who won. For goodness sake comrades, get your act together," Abendstern continued.
After a letter appeared condemning the couple's stance, the anti-Israel activists said, "It was not the bird we object to but what this bird represents – the racist and apartheid State of Israel." CiFWatch has the actual two letters written - by a husband and wife using different last names to try to make it look like there was a groundswell of concern over this important issue: The Morning Star has always been the newspaper you could rely on to support the cause of the Palestinians, so why of all the birds in the world did you choose the Israeli national bird to include in your quiz?
Maybe you don't support the methods chosen by the International Solidarity Movement of BDS to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and justice – a demand that came from them originally.
This includes any reference to their wildlife.
Linda Clair
Rochdale I had no idea that BDS includes a ban on mentioning Israel's wildlife! Maybe they shouldn't say the word "Israel" at all, as that is a form of normalization. So is the word "Zionist." It would make their campaigns a little more difficult, but its the principle of the thing. (h/t Zvi and Ian) 
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| Saudi oil company buys Israeli software Posted: 18 May 2012 03:05 AM PDT  Arutz-7 (Hebrew) reports that a Saudi oil products company, Yanar, recently purchased an online tool for managing large business organizations - that was developed in Israel. The software, called TBM, was developed by the Israeli Daronet company, and is said to be unique among cloud management platforms. Yanar purchased the software through a branch in Australia after Daronet exhibited it in a Melbourne software show. The Saudis insisted that their men will complete training on the software in order to avoid the using Israeli support services it normally provides its customers. The support center is in Elad, a religious Jewish community, and is mostly staffed by women. The Daronet CEO stated that the entire transaction value is estimated at 700 thousand shekels. The BDS movement was unavailable for comment. 
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Arutz-7 (Hebrew) reports that a Saudi oil products company, Yanar, recently purchased an online tool for managing large business organizations - that was developed in Israel.
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