Move over Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s a new lost artifact that’s hit the Jewish world.
Video footage of Paul Rudd in his most critically acclaimed performance yet…as a bar/bat mitzvah DJ circa 1992.
Paul Rudd: The Ultimate Bar/Bat Mitzvah DJ [VIDEO] Read More »
Israel’s opposition leader criticized the Netanyahu government for agreeing to cooperate with a United Nations probe of the Turkish flotilla incident.
Tzipi Livni of the Kadima Party said Israel’s participation in the international inquiry will expose the Israel Defense Forces and its soldiers.
“On the day of the flotilla, even before the international condemnations, I publicly called on the defense minister [Ehud Barak] to set up a credible and serious Israeli inquiry, in order to relieve the global pressure on the soldiers of the IDF,” Livni told the Israeli daily Haaretz on Tuesday. “[Instead] the government hesitated, stuttered, searched, prevaricated, obstructed, obfuscated and altered [its inquiry], bringing in outside observers to placate world opinion.
“Israel has painted itself into a corner through inactivity, hesitation and its inability from the outset to gather global support for the right committee of inquiry, which should be wholly Israeli,” Livni said.
Israel’s decision to participate in the investigation was made in large part to improve its relations with Turkey, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said Tuesday, the day after Israel agreed to cooperate with the international probe.
Nine Turkish citizens, including one Turkish-American dual citizen, were killed during violence on the deck of the ship the Marmara when Israeli forces intercepted it on May 31.
Livni raps Israel’s cooperation with U.N. flotilla probe Read More »
Two Israeli military helicopters made emergency landings in Romania following a technical failure.
The emergency landings Tuesday morning came a week after another Israeli helicopter crashed into the side of a mountain during a joint search-and-rescue military exercise, killing six Israeli soldiers and one Romanian soldier.
The helicopters forced to make emergency landings were returning to Israel from the 10-day exercise. They are being repaired at a Romanian air base near Bucharest, Haaretz reported.
Seven of the CH-53 Yasur helicopters participated in the exercise.
The helicopter landed, following regular protocol, after an emergency light went on in the aircraft. The second helicopter landed also following standard procedure, according to Ynet.
Israeli copters in Romania make emergency landings Read More »
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has designated 21 new entities as being controlled by the Iranian government.
Tuesday’s designations included businesses in the banking, insurance and investment, and mining and engineering industries located throughout Europe and Japan.
The Treasury identified the businesses to make it easier for American citizens, who are prohibited from doing business with the Iranian government by newly enacted sanctions, to avoid them.
“As its isolation from the international financial and commercial systems increases, the Government of Iran will continue efforts to evade sanctions, including using government-owned entities around the world that are not easily identifiable as Iranian to facilitate transactions in support of their illicit activities,” Stuart Levy, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.
According to the Treasury, many of the companies claim they are privately owned Iranian businesses but are controlled by the government.
The entities, located in Belarus, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan and Luxembourg, include four banks, two investment and trading companies, and 11 mining and engineering companies.
The designations came about two weeks after U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to make companies aware that unwittingly they may be violating the Iran sanctions law.
U.S. Treasury names Iran-owned entities Read More »
A New York City commission vote has cleared the way for the construction of a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
The City Landmarks Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to deny landmark status to the building located on the site, clearing the way for the construction project, which includes a Muslim cultural center and a mosque.
Other legal challenges could stall the construction.
The Anti-Defamation League on July 31 issued a statement opposing the construction of the 13-story Cordoba House at 45-47 Park Place, two blocks from Ground Zero.
“There are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site,” the ADL statement said. “We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel—and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001.
“The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.”
J Street, which calls itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” issued a statement Monday in favor of the building, saying that opposing it represents “anti-Muslim bigotry.”
Signs brandished at Tuesday’s vote read “This mosque celebrates our murders” and “Don’t glorify murders of 3,000.”
“To cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said following the vote.
Vote clears way for Ground Zero mosque Read More »
Is it possible that the first iconic Jewish picture of the decade is of an interfaith marriage?
Photographs taken Saturday show the Jewish groom wearing a yarmulke and a crumpled tallit staring into the eyes of his giddy bride under a traditional Jewish wedding canopy with a framed ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, in the background.
The couple is Marc Mezvinsky, the banker son of two Jewish ex-Congress members, and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former U.S. president and current secretary of state.
The images and scant details of the tightly guarded wedding—dubbed by some the “wedding of the century”—have raised a number of questions about the significance of the union for American Jews and what it says about intermarriage in America.
We should “celebrate the full acceptance of Jews by the larger society that this marriage represents,” Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion sociologist Steven Cohen told JTA via e-mail from Jerusalem.
At the same time, he noted, the fact that so few children of interfaith unions, particularly those between Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, are raised solely as Jews raises the conundrum of our age: “How do we Jewishly engage and educate the intermarried, while at the same time maintaining our time-honored commitment to inmarriage?” Cohen asked.
“In short, we should celebrate the particular marriage of these two fine individuals, but we ought not celebrate the type of marriage it constitutes and represents.”
The wedding had more than just a Jewish flair.
It was officiated by a rabbi, James Ponet, head of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University, along with a Methodist minister. The marriage took place under a chupah. Friends of the couple recited the traditional “sheva brachot,” the seven traditional Jewish blessings given to the bride and groom. The groom broke a glass with his foot, as is tradition. And according to several reports, guests danced the hora and lifted the former president and the secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton, in chairs during the dance.
Yet some of the more liberal streams of American Judaism, which accept intermarriage if the couple’s children are raised as Jews, chafed at the fact that the wedding took place on Saturday, before the Jewish Sabbath ended. The Reform movement frowns upon its rabbis conducting weddings on the Sabbath, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, told JTA.
In 1973, the Reform movement decided officially that its rabbis would be allowed to perform intermarriages, though they would be discouraged from doing so, an edict that still stands today, he said.
“She has married in,” Paul Golin, the associate director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, a nondenominational group that reaches out to unaffiliated and intermarried families, said of Chelsea. “Some will say he married out, but if he was marrying out, there wouldn’t have been anything Jewish.
“The fact that they went to the effort to have a chupah and have a rabbi and that he wore a tallis says a lot about their future direction. Otherwise, why bother?”
The marriage has pushed the internal Jewish community debate about intermarriage into the view of mainstream America.
In the days before the wedding, the Washington Post asked several rabbis in its “On Faith” column, “Is interfaith marriage good for American society? Is it good for religion? What is lost—and gained—when religious people intermarry?”
Rabbi Steven Wernick, the CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said intermarriage is certainly “not ideal,” but that the Conservative movement in 2008 decided that it must welcome interfaith families and “help their spouses along their spiritual journeys.”
Rabbi Shmuley Hecht, who is Orthodox and the rabbinical adviser at Yale University’s Eliezer Jewish Society, said intermarriage can work only if the non-Jewish spouse converts to Judaism through an Orthodox conversion and genuinely changes religions. Otherwise, he said, the marriage is doomed to fail because down the road any self-aware Jew, “however defined, will feel the call of their people and have the fullness of their being disrupted by intermarriage.”
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, also Orthodox and president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said that when marriages break down it usually has little to do with religion. All religions should stop worrying about intermarriage and start worrying about how to help couples make their relationships work, he wrote.
Ed Case, the executive director of Interfaithfamily.com, said the Clinton wedding certainly had stirred interest in intermarriage, noting that traffic to his website was up 35 percent in July compared to the same month last year. Case said that accepting this marriage and welcoming this intermarried family into the Jewish fold could help pave the way for the Jewish community to be more accepting of others.
Golin said he is skeptical that the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding does anything more than revive existing battle lines in the Jewish debate over intermarriage.
“The horse is so far out of the barn on this one,” Golin said, noting that as an intermarried person himself, he is turned off by much of the debate over intermarriage as a problem. “The folks who are fearful that my kind of Judaism is going to destroy Judaism are still going to be fearful. The folks who are fully embracing of interfaith families are going to be embracing. I don’t see a whole lot of movement.”
Contacted by JTA, the Orthodox Union declined to comment on the wedding. Separately, the head of its kashruth division, Rabbi Menachem Genack, a longtime Clinton friend and political supporter, declined to comment.
The Mezvinsky-Clinton wedding is affirmation both of the success of the Jewish community and that American Jewry must learn how to deal with intermarried families and figure out how to bring them into the Jewish fold, the Reform movement’s Yoffie said.
“The price of our reaffirmation in American society is a high rate of intermarriage,” he said. “We can’t be embraced and not expect that our young people won’t be marrying with their young people. Unless we are prepared to withdraw into a ghetto, there is no solution.”
“I look at the couple and my response is, ‘I hope they will make a choice to raise their children in a single religion and tradition and second, as a Jew and rabbi, I hope it will be Judaism. I don’t know if they have had that conversation.”
Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding raises questions about intermarriage Read More »
Few issues illustrate the fractured, contradictory and disputatious nature of the American Jewish community better than the debate over whether to build an Islamic community center at the site of Ground Zero.
This week, a New York City commission ended the landmark status of the site near the World Trade Center, clearing the way for the Islamic center to be built — and for opponents to amp up the rhetoric against it.
The organizers of Cordoba House, as it will be called, want to build a 13-story, $100 million Islamic center two blocks from the lower Manhattan site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The center would include a theater, restaurant, sports facilities and a mosque.
Opponents, spurred by the virulent opposition of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, have called the planned center insensitive to the victims of 9/11, an act of terror perpetrated by Muslim extremists.
But New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has supported the building from the get-go.
“If somebody wants to build a religious house of worship,” he said last month, “they should do it, and we shouldn’t be in the business of picking which religions can and which religions can’t.”
Bloomberg is Jewish — there’s a redundant sentence if ever there was one — and his support echoes that of many Jewish organizations that see this issue as a matter of freedom of religion and a defense against bigotry, in this case Islamophobia.
“The principle at stake in the Cordoba House controversy goes to the heart of American democracy and the value we place on freedom of religion,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami weighed in earlier this week.
JStreet used its Internet acumen to gather a group of self-described “next generation Jewish leaders” to defend the community center in an online letter. A variety of younger Jewish artists, filmmakers, academics and professionals addressed the most common criticism of the center: that it’s insensitive to the victims of terror.
“We agree with you that some victims of 9/11 are entitled to “irrational” feelings as a result of their loss,” read the letter. “But being less tolerant will not help us heal, and it is not wise for America to alienate millions of its own citizens, let alone the hundreds of millions of Muslims in countries that Americans visit around the world. Remember, there were Muslim victims on 9/11, too, Muslims that worked in the World Trade Center, or were part of the rescue crews that bravely entered the buildings that day.”
A statement from the Progressive Jewish Alliance quoted from George Washington’s famous speech on religious liberty, then concluded, “Because we believe the Jewish community has a specific responsibility to speak out against stereotyping and bigotry, the Progressive Jewish Alliance urges all Americans, including officials with authority over these projects, to reject these voices of intolerance and division.”
You’d expect as much from the left-leaning Jewish groups. Where this story gets interesting is that the two large mainstream Jewish defense organizations split on the issue. The American Jewish Committee came out in favor of the mosque-community center, providing the organizers are transparent about their funding sources and clear about their opposition to extremism.
“If these concerns can be addressed, we will join in welcoming the Cordoba Center to New York,” AJC Executive Director David Harris said. “In doing so, we would wish to reaffirm the noble values for which our country stands — the very values so detested by the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.”
But — go figure — the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman opposes the building.
“The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process,” a statement from Foxman reads. “Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.”
Foxman is the media’s go-to Jew, the putative voice of official American Jewry (the unofficial voice, FYI, is Jon Stewart). So unless non-Jews did some Internet digging, they’d be left with the idea that Jews, or at least organized Jewry, opposes the Cordoba House. There’s been no scientific poll, but my sense is we’re conflicted — and not just among our organizations, but within ourselves.
On the one hand, we want to be open-minded and accepting, because that’s best for America, for Jews as a minority, and because tolerance, “welcoming the stranger,” is a deeply Jewish value. We know the right thing to do is to support the building of the Islamic Center and to defend the right of American citizens to worship freely.
On the other hand, these people can still scare the crap out of us. They attacked New York, the countries they control scapegoat Israel and Jews, and in European countries where Islam is on the rise, so is anti-Semitism. The entire Jewish population of Malmo, Sweden, has moved away due to anti-Jewish acts. So there’s that.
But perhaps the real reason we find it hard to make peace with Cordoba House is that, as much as it will symbolize tolerance and understanding, it also reminds us of a deeply discomfiting fact of life: Terrorism works. That’s what we can’t quite accept, what we wish weren’t so.
Before 9/11, we were going about our lives, blissfully unaware of Islam. Since 9/11, Islam — hating it, understanding it, teaching it, learning about it — is a central factor of the Western consciousness. Three hijacked airplanes made sure of that. In a bizarre way, terror has also paved the way for greater awareness, understanding and acceptance.
This shouldn’t really surprise us. The Jewish terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel helped drive the British from Palestine. No one cared about the Palestinians until Yasser Arafat started killing children. The Tamil Tigers, the IRA — they have all scored political victories through bombs, kidnappings and slaughter. And now downtown New York will have a state-of-the-art Muslim community, cultural and religious center, thanks to a vicious act of Islamic terror.
It’s the right thing to do, but, man, what a way to learn.
An Islamic Center at Ground Zero Read More »
Karachi is on fire again. Body after body is being rushed in to the city’s three main hospitals, the one and only morgue has run out of space. Young men waving TT pistols are roaming the streets and picking off random targets. Buses, trucks, cars and rickshaws are being set on fire. Petrol pumps, markets and shops have all closed down. You couldn’t find a place to buy a packet of cigarettes, lamented one desk editor.
In less than 2 days, by Wednesday night 80 men were shot dead and at least 253 others were injured in the anarchic aftermath of the high-profile killing of a member of the provincial legislative house.
MPA Raza Haider was gunned down in broad daylight while he was washing up for prayers at a mosque before attending a funeral on Monday. His bodyguard Mohammad Khalid Khan was also killed as other worshippers ran helter-skelter to get away from the hail of bullets.
As the news spread, as expected, violence followed in its wake. The victims have been mostly innocent bystanders, commuters and even, in one case a speech-impaired girl whose mother had taken her to a shrine to pray for her recovery. Schools had just opened a day earlier, but were closed again. Because the petrol pumps were closed, hundred of people were stranded. And then, as happened when Benazir Bhutto was killed, traffic went into a gridlock at several important points downtown as drivers broke the rules in a panic to get home.
In a particularly sad case, a Pashto-speaking man was abducted by armed men, who forced him to take them to his house where his three friends were sleeping. They then proceeded to shoot all four of them.
It’s amazing when this kind of violence breaks out, people vanish off Karachi’s streets, that are normally packed and overflowing with humanity. The police and paramilitary rangers, who are generally unable to catch anyone in drive-by shootings, stood grimly at every corner.
We’re almost used to this violence by now. This is how it happens in Karachi. There is absolutely no rule of law and I would be hard pressed to give you even one example in which someone had been put behind bars. The killers are never caught.
A worker walks past bodies in a morgue after violence erupted in reaction to the death of a Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) member in Karachi August 3. REUTERS/Majid Hussain
WHO IS BEHIND THE KILLING?
Raza Haider was a member of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement [United National Movement or MQM], a political party that is rivaled by none in Karachi. But he was not necessarily killed just because he was from the MQM.
He was also a Shia, which is a minority sect of Muslims. There are several banned militant outfits in Karachi that don’t tolerate Shias. One of them is the Sippah-i-Sahaba (SSP). This name has surfaced in the investigations so far and the Karachi police rounded up several suspects from this organization by Tuesday night. The chief of police Waseem Ahmed wouldn’t disclose any details, but he said about 20 men had been arrested and were being interrogated.
According to media reports from SAMAA TV and Dunya TV, a Sippah man arrested in 2009 had a hit-list with the MPA’s name on it. Furthermore, the Sippah allegedly wanted to also blow up the people who turned up for the funeral with a suicide bomber. Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik urged the MQM’s top brass not to attend the funeral on Tuesday, but naturally this wasn’t going to happen.
When my reporter called up the Sippah people, they said that the man arrested in 2009 wasn’t with their outfit but belonged to the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi or LeJ. The police can even question our men if they don’t believe this, they said. The Lashkar outfit broke off from the Sippah after accusing it of failing to follow its ideology. The Lashkar men are believed to have been behind the bomb attacks on an annual Shia mourning procession last year.
Later in the day, I spoke to an intelligence man who is currently heading police operations in one of Karachi’s 18 boroughs. I asked him whether he agreed with the Sippah explanation and he said he didn’t want to comment until the investigations were complete, but his personal opinion was that they were involved.
The style of the attack was very organized and brazen, he said, while referring how the four or five men barged into the mosque with guns and then took off on motorcycles. This is classic militant style, he pointed out. Also noteworthy is the fact that the mosque was run by the Barelvi sect. The Sippah subscribe to the opposite Deoband school of thought.
The problem also was that Raza Haider was messing with the Sippah in his area. The MPA was heavily involved in opposing the Sippah in Orangi Town. In fact, as a journo buddy of mine said, Raza Haider was scheduled to meet with the police to give them information on the Sippah’s work in the town. He had even been receiving death threats from a militant outfit.
A paramilitary Rangers sepoy stands alert in a suburb of Karachi after violence fanned out across the city. EXPRESS TRIBUNE/Athar Khan
SCAPEGOATS?
Despite this, however, the MQM has been pointing the finger elsewhere. And that is where it is starting to get complicated.
For its part, the MQM has blamed a rival political party, the ANP or Awami National Party, for Raza Haider’s assassination. This is where the element of a turf war enters.
The MQM wants to run Karachi and doesn’t want any interference. The ANP recently turned up on the scene and started to make a stink. The ANP basically is a party that represents Pashto-speaking people. This is a linguistic-ethnic division. The MQM is backed by Urdu-speaking people.
The Pashto-speaking people or Pathans originally (mostly) hail from the north of the country – the North-West Frontier Province, now renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Many of them started to migrate to Karachi in the 1990s in search of better jobs.
Over the years Karachi’s Pakhtun population has swollen to several million. In fact, many people will say that the Pakhtun built Karachi as these hardy mountain men formed the majority of the construction labour force. They have also a virtual stranglehold on its public transport system of taxis, rickshaws and buses.
(When the high court wanted them to get rid of polluting two-stroke rickshaws and replace them with the more environmentally friendly four-stroke ones, they got together and blocked all of the city’s main routes downtown in a display of clout. Bumper-to-bumper buses brought life to a standstill that day in Karachi, in a previously unseen show of solidarity by the Pakhtun)
Hundreds of men attended the funeral of the MQM’s MPA Raza Haider who was gunned down on Monday. The funeral was held at Jinnah Ground in the middle-class neighbourhood of Azizabad, known as the party’s stronghold as its founder came from there. EXPRESS TRIBUNE/Athar Khan
Then the ANP started to gather steam and the Pakhtun realized that they needed a political party to represent them in Karachi, where the only other choices were the MQM and Benazir Bhutto’s PPP. They managed to have two men elected to the provincial legislative house, the Sindh Assembly, much to the chagrin and surprise of rival parties.
The problem is that the MQM and ANP are now locked in a turf war over Karachi. For its part, the MQM claims that the ANP patronizes the Taliban, who are also largely Pashto speaking and from the same northern areas. Whether this is true or not, I’m not so sure personally. But it is very convenient for the MQM to claim this and demonise the ANP. The Taliban and al Qaeda are largely believed to be using Karachi as a bank, and are probably running some element of their operations here. But the MQM would like to have the ANP kicked out with the ‘Talibanisation card’.
That said, however, the ANP is just as bad. Its men are also armed to the teeth.
The Raza Haider killing comes at the heels of a slew of target killings in drive-by shootings that had the MQM and ANP at each other’s throats. If an ANP man was killed in the morning, by afternoon the body of an MQM man was dispatched to the morgue. The tit-for-tat killings came in two waves this year and with Raza Haider’s murder, I expect more violence.
Sadly, no one will ever speak up against the MQM. No newspaper or journalist will take the risk. My own newspaper won’t. We all just sit like ducks. I don’t trust the police either because they are bought as well. We all toe the party line. And it’s not as if any of them will even squeak the truth, because they all fear Altaf Hussain sitting in London. The party discipline is tight from top to bottom. No investigative journalism there.
(Incidentally, I’ve always wondered why the British government allows the MQM’s Altaf Hussain to live there. A senior journalist told me once that the Brits allow him to stay because they think the MQM is the only liberal party that can be pulled out of the rabbit’s hat if the shit hits the fan and the mullahs take over Karachi/Pakistan. I’ve never really quite known what to make of this claim.)
Muttahida Qaumi Movement
The MQM is a party that was started to represent Urdu-speaking migrants from India who came to Pakistan in 1947 at Partition. The party was formed in the late 1980s by a charismatic, smooth-talking, urbane Altaf Hussain, who was a pharmacy studies student at the University of Karachi.
Since then it has transformed itself into a powerhouse of a political party and the only force that rules Karachi, a city of 20 million people and thus one of the world’s megacities. While it claims to be ‘national’ party, the MQM has not been able to make inroads in any other province of Pakistan.
Its leader, Altaf Hussain, by now a thick-jowled orator, whose speeches run on for hours, is living in exile in London. Every once in a while he threatens to return to Karachi but party workers beg and plead him to stay away for fear of his life. As a result, he works the strings via telephonic addresses, an obedient hierarchy and plenty of cash steadily sucked up from Karachi in the form of extortion.
Anarchy breaks loose in Karachi Read More »
A documentary on the Warsaw Ghetto has been given an “R” rating by the Motion Picture Assn. of America (MPAA), triggering concern whether historical footage on starvation and death can be shown in high schools for educational purposes.
The film’s distributor, Oscilloscope Laboratories, announced immediately that it will appeal the decision, with Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, founder and head of Oscilloscope, commenting, “MPAA has really gone too far this time. It’s bullshit.”
Story continues after the break.
A movie distributor is appealing the R rating assigned to a Holocaust documentary.
Oscilloscope Laboratories said Monday that it would appeal the rating by the Classification and Rating Administration for “A Film Unfinished,” which explores a Nazi propaganda film taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
With an R rating, viewers under the age of 17 must be accompanied by an adult. The rating board explained its decision, saying the movie contained “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity.”
“This is too important of a historical document to ban from classrooms,” Adam Yauch, an owner of Oscilloscope and a former Beastie Boy, said in a statement issued Monday.
The film, which was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival this year, is set to open nationally later this month.
Holocaust documentary rating appealed Read More »