Snyder's Dream

I imagined the Governor declared Big Rapids in crisis and hired a corporation to manage the city for profit. The Mayor and city counsel were fired, all public employee contracts were abrogated. Everyone was impoverished and the housing stock continued to deteriorated, but the good news was that corporate profits were up.

The Akedah

Israel Diary, 1996.
In 1996, I took my son Isaac to Israel for his Bar Mitzah. The following is from my diary.
"Take now your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and get yourself to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as a burn offering." Genesis 22:2

Sunday February 25, three days before our departure for Jerusalem, the number 18 bus is blown up by a person wrapped in explosives who got on the bus and detonated the explosives. We arrive in Jerusalem four days later.

Sunday morning, March 3rd, the number 18 bus was again blown up, only this time we are close enough to hear the explosion. Have I taken my son, my only son, that I love, Isaac, to this holy place to offer him up as a burnt offering?

The bombing did not change our plans for the day. Isaac and his mom joined the tour group, I went off to visit an old friend who lives in Bayit Vegan. He made calls for me to find out where Isaac and I could go to hear the Megillah reading for Purim, which began on Monday evening outside of Jerusalem, but would not be celebrated in Jerusalem until Tuesday and by that time we would have been moved along by our tour group. He wrote down the name of a synagogue in Ramot Daled - a suburb of Jerusalem, not considered part of the city itself and thus they celebrated Purim on Monday, not Tuesday.

I took the bus back to the city center during rush hour. Standing in the packed bus, we passed the bombed out shell of the number 18 bus that had been blown up that morning. Workers on cherry-pickers were still scraping pieces of human flesh from the side of the building next to the explosion. All human remains, identifiable or not, had to be collected for burial. In this crowded bus, no imagination was necessary. We would all die together and our bodies would become one mass of torn flesh.

Monday March 4th - Isaac and I left Jerusalem just as the news of yet another bombing - this time by Islamic Jihad in Tel Aviv. I told Isaac that we could take a cab to the suburbs, but we would have to take a bus back into the city. I needed to know if that was ok with him, since we had been witness now to three bus bombings. His mother didn't want him to go. "As long as it's not the number 18," was his reply. I have a sense of great pride in my son, Isaac, who is not afraid to live his life. That he would trustingly come with his father and enter a bus that might turn into his own funeral pyre, moved me and filled me with love for my son. He is the perfect gentle warrior.

We witnessed a remarkable transformation in Israeli society. Just a few weeks ago, Labor was sure to win the elections scheduled for May 29th, but as each day passes it becomes more and more clear that Hamas may actually sway the vote toward Likud! It is strange that Hamas should so easily manipulate Israeli politics and that they would want to push the Israeli government to the right. Of course, the last thing anyone wants is peace, not when you have the attractions of endless conflict.

Tuesday March 5th - Road to Jericho.

Our tour was scheduled to visit Jericho, a city considerably older than Jerusalem, which is under Palestinian Authority control. Our bus was stopped by Israeli border guards on the old Roman road to Jericho, and ordered to turn around. Jericho had was being closed off from Israeli society.

The vise tightens and each day more and more soldiers appear. Now there will be a complete separation of Israelis and Palestinians. What a tragedy. When we arrived, even after the first bombing, the Arab shuk in Jerusalem was open and jammed with tourists and Israelis. Isaac insisted on going into a small shop that carried Casio watches. I couldn't believe that Isaac had come to Jerusalem and wanted to spend his money on a Casio watch that he could buy at Walmart, but it was his money, so I sat myself down and wallowed in my disapproval and disappointment. Isaac bargained the price down from $190 to $100. Much later, after we were back home in America, I asked Isaac what the highlight of the trip was for him and without hesitation he said, "buying the Casio watch in the shuk."

Outside of Jericho, our bus, having turned around, stopped at a dusty roadside rest stop. It was nothing but bathrooms and vending machines, but there was also a tent set up where an Palestinian from Jericho had set out cheap trinkets before the curfew had been imposed. He was waiting for orders from the border police to pack his stuff up and get back to Jericho.

Isaac saw something that he had been looking for since the shuk and he called to the man in the tent to ask how much it was. A Canadian tourist who was with us on the tour started screaming at Isaac, "We are at war with these people. You cannot buy from them." I was livid with anger and bellowed back at the man, "You may be at war, but my son and I are not. How dare you raise you voice at my son." Seeing the commotion, the Palestinian merchant retreated further to the back of his tent. I turned to Isaac with tears in my eyes and said, "Isaac, I wish we could buy what you want, but you see how tense the situation has become. We are surrounded by warriors - some of the them foolish tourists and others serious soldiers. I would gladly buy you what you want, but we can't jeopardize the man in the tent. Believe me, I am sorry."

Looking back on it, I realized that Isaac was right. The high point of our trip to Israel was watching my son buy that Casio watch. There, in the Arab market of Jerusalem, my son and a young Palestinian merchant negotiated a deal. Both left satisfied.
If only it were that simple.

Max Kantar's Statement

Max Kantar graduated Cum Laude from Ferris State University in 2009. In August 2010 he was arrested after reading this statement. He was not arrested for reading the statement, he was arrested for the apple pie that was pushed into Senator Levin's face after he read the statement.

Max faces eight years in federal prison. The story has gone national, but the story is all about the pie. It seems to me, the story ought to include his reason for putting his freedom at risk.

Below is the statement Max read. This is Max's opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the blogger.

Senator Levin,

There's no doubt that you are one of the most respected senators in the United States. Coupled with three decades of senatorial experience and your role as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, this respect translates into great influence in policy making, especially in regard to US foreign policy.

Despite your relative popularity, I sincerely doubt that many of your constituents know the extent of your contributions to increasing human suffering around the world.

How many people know that you were an enthusiastic supporter of the primarily Clinton-era US-led sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s--sanctions which likely killed over one million innocent people by way of starvation, disease, and denial of medicines? Who were these victims? Certainly not Saddam Hussein and his regime--their grip on the besieged population was strengthened as a result. The victims were poor people, children, the sick, and the elderly. Publicly available declassified government documents now reveal the murderous (and ultimately successful) intentions of the US government to destroy Iraq's water system and then to systematically ban the importation of crucial items such as chlorine-- the effects of which were designed, according to top officials, to unleash "disease epidemics" which were predicted to affect "children in particular." The result? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were deliberately murdered, perhaps up to half a million, according to mainstream estimates. Their blood is on your hands.

For three decades you have been the strongest supporter of Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people. While the record is far too long to run through here, it is worth mentioning that just two winters ago, the Israeli military slaughtered some 1,400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Over 1,000 were civilians according to leading Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups. Over 300 were children. Israel used F-16 fighter jets paid for by us; they used guns and ammunition, paid for by us; according to Human Rights Watch, Israel dropped white phosphorus--a chemical weapon supplied by US taxpayers which burns the flesh at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit--on Palestinian schools and incinerated children and noncombatants alive. Your response to these atrocities was to co-sponsor a Senate resolution praising the US-organized bloodbath. In fact, for years you have worked diligently to make sure that US taxpayers subsidize these campaigns of murder and oppression against the Palestinian people. Perhaps this is why you receive more pro-Israel lobby money than any other senator aside from Joe Lieberman. The blood of thousands of Palestinians living under military occupation and apartheid is on your hands.

You have repeatedly voted to allocate billions of dollars in funding for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq; an occupation and invasion which has killed, according to conservative British estimates, well over one million human beings. It might behoove you to remember that according to the ruling at the Nuremberg Tribunals following World War Two, an aggressive war is "the supreme international crime" because it encompasses and is ultimately responsible for all of the crimes and suffering that comes about as a result of the aggression. This funding--our money--is the lifeblood of a brutal military occupation which has killed, maimed, caged, tortured, humiliated, devastated, impoverished, and otherwise destroyed the lives of millions and millions of people. But you don't care how many Iraqi mothers bury their sons; you don't care how many tears are shed over the unfathomable amounts of death, destruction, degradation, and humiliation suffered at the hands of the US and its surrogates. This blood, too, is on your hands.

And power learns no lessons about human suffering. Today you urge more taxpayer support for the war in Afghanistan and for a so-called government in Afghanistan which is run by, in the words of Human Rights Watch, some of the "most notorious warlords in the country,"; warlords and criminals who killed some 50,000 Afghans during the early 1990s after the US and Russia had systematically destroyed Afghanistan in a nasty game of imperial Cold War politics. The blood spilled in every house raid and every air strike on civilians is on your hands.

Today, you continue to call for more murderous attacks in the region. You have prominently called for increasing US drone strikes in Pakistan. These cowardly bombings--which are carried out by robot planes guided by Americans sitting at computers on an Air Force Base in Nevada--have killed several hundred civilians, including women and children. Not only are these bombings wildly immoral because of this, but they also inflame and incite, quite understandably, hatred against the United States. Pakistani blood will continue to drip from your hands as long as the bombings continue.

You remain hawkish and aggressive in your posture towards other sovereign nations as well. For example, your position on Iran--a country that, in stark contrast to Israel, hasn't attacked its neighbors for centuries--is that "all options, including military options, should be on the table." In plain terms, this is a threat to bomb Iran, maybe even with nuclear weapons. Such threats are flagrant violations of the UN Charter, if anybody cares. If and when the US or its Israeli client attacks Iran, that blood, too, will be on your hands.

Senator Levin, reasonable people can disagree on policy and politics. BUT, reasonable people CANNOT disagree on basic human principles of justice and decency. It is both perverse and shameful that you claim to uphold values like freedom and justice while actively taking part in the murder, mutilation, repression, and infliction of suffering on millions of Iraqis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Afghans, Pakistanis, and many more peoples living under the whip of US imperialism, from Latin America to Africa, to Asia and the Middle East.

And back home in Michigan, you treat the people you purport to serve with equal contempt. While you go to sleep in your Detroit mansion as a millionaire each night, nearly 20,000 human beings in the same city go to bed homeless, on the streets. Do you have even the slightest idea what being homeless entails? These people could be housed with money you prefer to spend on war, or money you prefer to spend on yourself. While you sit self-righteously in Washington making laws to protect power and privilege, the police systematically brutalize and imprison our state's African-American population at rate nearly THREE TIMES that of South Africa during the years of apartheid.

The truth is that, on principle, you are no different than every other senator in the U.S. and I don't respect you. And I'm not the slightest bit interested in hearing your entirely predictable response, replete with the same old lies and apologetics for heinous crimes against humanity. If there was any justice in this country or in this world, you would be in prison and I am going to say it straight to your face.

Zechariah Fendel (1929-2011): A Remembrance

Arutz Sheva, the Israel National News service English language edition carried this brief obituary notice on Friday January 14th (9 Sh’vat 5771):

Rabbi Zechariah Fendel, prolific author and founding principal of the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva High School in Forest Hills, New York, passed away last night at the age of 82.
He is survived by his wife Chava, 12 children, some 100 grandchildren, and brother Rabbi Meyer Fendel of Jerusalem. His funeral will be held in Flatbush, New York, at 10:30 Friday morning.
The late Rabbi Fendel authored some 15 books, as well as several other works, on Jewish thought, ethics, history, holidays, and more, many of them geared specifically to those who are taking their first steps in Judaism.
One Yeshiva head called him "the Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch of our generation.”

Twelve children, some 100 granchildren and 15 books, and before all that, he was my rebbe at Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva High School in Forest Hills, New York. The year was 1962, I remember because one Friday, erev Shabbos, I stared out the window, at Chofetz Chaim thinking, “Monday may not come.” On the previous Monday, President John F. Kennedy delivered a televised speech announcing the crisis and the quarantine. By Friday, it was clear that we were at the brink of a nuclear war that would annihilate Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim, along with everything else. It would be the end. Not the end of the United States, just the end, the end of everything for humanity. Monday might never come.

Jerry Hirsch (1923-2008) was my last great teacher, “a pioneer in the field of behavior genetics and crusader for social justice.” Rabbi Fendel was my first great teacher and between them were clusters of great teachers, but none touched me the way my rebbe did. Without him, I would not exist as I am today. Certainly, nothing of what is essential to my being is my own creation. Without my teachers, I would be a shell of human being without consciousness. My teachers awoke in me my consciousness and their character and integrity always drove me to feelings of shame and inadequacy. Twelve children and fifteen books! And what books, the scholarship, the command of the literature is astonishing, but what is breathtaking was his command of the moment. He created the Yeshiva that existed for a short moment in time. The Yeshiva High school he created no longer exists.

My father brought me to meet Rabbi Fendel for the first time to determine if I would be admitted to his Yeshiva. It was a very small school with only ten or fifteen boys in each grade. It was known for its intensive Talmudic training and its focus on mussar. His office was small and chaotic. We sat in two wooden chairs in front of a wooden desk. My father was explaining to Rabbi Fendel that my IQ scores were below normal and he was concerned that I might not be able to keep up, especially since I was inadequately prepared for Yeshiva High School. Most of the boys had come up through the Yeshiva system and were already proficient in Hebrew, Aramaic and Talmud study. I had only the pathetic synagogue after school training. I could barely read Hebrew.

My father had studied psychology and IQ testing with Edward L. Thorndike, one of the pioneers of the field, at Columbia University in the 1930s. I had been told that my IQ test scores said something about my abilities; limited what I could achieve. My older brother Marty called me a dummy and, in fact, I believed it was true. My older brother Edward was "quick" and I was "slow". But sitting with Rabbi Fendel and my Dad in his office that day I heard my dad explain my limited intellectual abilities to Rabbi Fendel who looked at me and then to my father and said, "Mr. Mehler, I do not believe in IQ. I believe in God." Rabbi Fendel lifted something from off my shoulders. He gave me faith to challenge the limitations of arbitrary definitions. And then he looked at me and asked me, directly, in a way no ever had before, “is this what you want, Binyamin? Do you want to study Torah all day long?”

That was it, that was all that mattered. If I wanted to study Torah all day long, then that was enough for Rabbi Fendel, who turned to my father and explained that only God knows the potential of any child and that it was faith and desire, not any fixed IQ or abilities that determined ones intellect. Intelligence and humanity are things inculcated. We are not born with the ability to think. We are not born with moral character. These are things we learn if we are lucky enough to have teachers. There is today a Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva High School. In fact, there are several of them, but the Yeshiva that was open to one such as I with no training and a father with no money, that Yeshiva no longer exists.

In his masterful book, The Ethical Personality (New York: Hashkafah,1986), he wrote an An Urgent Message for Our Times in which he spoke of “an insidious problem of great magnitude, which threatens to destroy the entire cohesive fabric of the Jewish community.” It was not the strife of factionalism, but a deeper underlying current that went beyond “religious and political differences.” There is, he said, an underlying current of sinat chinam - gratuitous hatred of Jew for Jew. That is, we do not hate because of ideological difference; we do not hate black people because they are lazy and criminal or Jews because they are the killers of Christ - hatred is a gratuitous gift - an expression of our own poverty and self-loathing. It was his hope that by “ethical sensitivity” we might replace this gratuitous hatred with peace, brotherhood and friendship. Furthermore, it is our lifelong responsibility “to engage actively in the quest for character improvement.” For Rabbi Fendel, Torah was essentially “a perpetual dynamic growth process, which makes no allowance for spiritual smugness or complacency, or for ethical or moral stagnation.” For Jerry Hirsch, the same could be said of science, the pursuit of truth. For Jerry Hirsch, the pursuit of science required the highest ethical standards.

In many ways my first great teacher and my last great teacher were similar. They were men of ethical sensitivity and integrity who believed that education could foster brotherhood and peace. Born during the Depression and raised during World War II, it is hard for me to understand where their faith came from.

A Lethal Obsession

A Lethal Obsession: Robert S. Wistrich's New History of
Anti-Semitism.

Robert S. Wistrich has come out with his twentieth volume, a one-thousand page tome, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, (New York: Random House, 2010). The title is a little misleading, this is not a majestic survey of the history of anti-Semitism from antiquity to the present. The focus is on post-Nazi exterminatory anti-Semitism and the bulk of the book is focused on anti-Semitism in the Islamic world.

Wistrich's 30,000 word introduction is entitled, "The Return of Anti-Semitism," but it is clear from his history that anti-Semitism never went away. Certainly, the shocking revelations of the Holocaust reverberated through many parts of the world, creating a good deal of sympathy for Jews which was translated into sympathetic movies and books about the Jews in the West. It also sustained political support for Zionism for a brief period. And, of course, after the Holocaust Jews were no longer being actively exterminated, but the ideology of exterminatory anti-Semitism that justified Auschwitz was still evolving and spreading to new cultural environments especially the post-war communist block and the Muslim world. Anti-Semitism never went away. It didn't even go into retreat. Wistrich argues that after World War II the baton was passed from the Right to the Left and from Christians to Muslims. This is a humanitarian anti-Semitism aimed at saving the Palestinian people from the hands of the last white-supremacist colonial state practicing apartheid.

The argument that Israeli aggression and occupation is to blame for this situation is itself an anti-Semitic argument. This does not mean that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite, but the core claim of modern anti-Semites from David Duke to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by the Jews to justify their aggression in the Middle East. At the same time that they deny the Holocaust reality, they claim that Zionism is the moral equivalent of Nazism and that the Zionist state is engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. When these people call for an end to the "Zionist entity" they are really calling for the extermination of the Jews. And for the first time since World War II, anti-Semitism is part of a major state's [Iran] core ideology. This is the modern face of exterminatory anti-Semitism and Wistrich believes it is pervasive throughout the Muslim world. His goal is to expose the intensity of the "culture of hatred" that permeates "books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, videocassettes, the Internet, television, and radio in the Middle East on a scale unprecedented since the heyday of Nazi Germany." The demonic images of Jews circulating in much of the Islamic world today "constitute a new warrant for genocide." They combine the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jewish drive for world domination and dehumanizing Islamic quotations about Jews as the "sons of apes and donkeys."

Wistrich presents us with a history of the evolution of a murderous ideology. This is not the history of progress towards a more tolerant world. The three major culprits in the spread of this ideology are Hitlerism, Stalinism and Islamism. In all three cases anti-Jewish demonology has been manipulated in the cause of conspiracy theories which have at their heart the oldest and darkest of ideological obsessions: hatred of the Jews. Anti-Semitism is the hatred that keeps on giving. Wistrich believes the past seven decades have been a golden age for exterminatory anti-Semitism and at no time in the past have the core beliefs of this ideology been as widely disseminated and as widely accepted. He calls the world-wide campaign against Zionism, "a warrant for Genocide." And he believes we are entering a very dangerous period. Specifically, he believes the next two years are going to be among the most dangerous since World War II.

Wistrich four minute clip from the Wilson Center Q&A on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A42dnIuf5I0
The Daily Show clip on Hamas children's cartoons: http://www.hulu.com/watch/125615/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-story-hole-childrens-cartoons-from-hamas

Call for Papers - "The Other Among Us"

Call for Papers and Submission Guidelines

The Institute for Action Against Hate is soliciting submissions for the eighth volume of the interdisciplinary Journal of Hate Studies.

We are interested in articles from various disciplines that address the topic of "The Other Among Us." We are particularly interested in articles that focus on immigration, refugees, or second-generation peoples who may have been born in one country but are still seen as being representatives of another, tourists, and others who cross national borders. However, articles are also encouraged from a range of perspectives on engagement or disengagement with "the other" in our society, culture, and lives. A special invitation is extended to scholars from disciplines such as history, psychology, philosophy, women's studies, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, social psychology, economics, literature, rhetoric, and religious studies.

Submissions are due by February 1, 2010 and should be between 5000-10,000 words. Submissions should include one hard copy and an electronic copy in MS Word format. Please do not submit PDF files. Submissions should be presented in APA format and, if necessary, contain endnotes rather than footnotes.

Address submissions and questions to the Gonzaga University Institute for Action Against Hate, AD Box 43, 502 E. Boone Avenue, Spokane WA 99258-0043; email address: againsthate@gonzaga.edu; phone: (509) 313-3665.

Dancing around the black hole

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History, 1940

There was once a Lutheran who was arrested by the Nazis and put into a holding cell with a bunch of Jews headed for Auschwitz. The man protested that he was not a Jew, he hated Jews, in fact. He was a Lutheran. He was born a Lutheran. The Nazis replied that his mother was a Jew and so he was a Jew. No, he replied with passion, my mother converted to Christianity long before I was born and she married a Lutheran and she raised me a Lutheran and she was a Lutheran. No, the Nazis replied, she was a Jew. And so the man found himself in the gas chamber with a chamber load of Jews as the gas was being dropped into the chamber. As he drew his last breath it finally dawned on him, "oh, my God, I'm a Jew!"

All his life he thought that he knew who he was. He was a German and a Lutheran and he hated Jews. At the very last moment of his life he discovers that he is a Jew. He realizes that on some level this fact was fundamental to who he was and what his destiny was to be. He cannot now go back and live his life over and he has no future, so what benefit is his final insight?
Binyamin Mehler, Meditation on Benjamin, (2009)