David Adler
Gibson paid Lapin
During the Mel Gibson “Passion” controversy, the right-wing rabbi and family values campaigner Daniel Lapin argued that Gibson “has made it ‘cool’ to be religious.” Lapin has now released a statement. Andrew Sullivan draws our attention to a very important disclosure. Lapin says: It is all too easy to join the circling hyenas and denounce [Mel] Gibson while he is
Pilger weighs in
In June I took a fond look back at veteran radical journalist John Pilger’s “we cannot afford to be choosy” remark, in regard to the so-called Iraqi resistance. That was 2004, it is now 2006, Iraq is in civil war and Pilger is still spouting the same sentimental clichés, this time in a recent piece on the Guardian’s Comment Is
Deeb’s dishonesty
Lara Deeb, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine, has penned a primer on Hezbollah for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). She complains of misleading reports about Hezbollah in the mainstream media. But her own analysis, which is quite detailed, makes no mention whatsoever of Hezbollah’s judeophobic worldview or the antisemitic statements of senior Hezbollah leaders, including Hassan
Mel Gibson: “How’d that happen?”
Editor, political commentator and sex advice columnist Dan Savage loves to take apart what he calls the HTH defense: “How’d that happen?” As in, “I wound up in bed with my wife’s best friend, how’d that happen?” Savage always retorts: It happened because you wanted it to happen and you allowed it to happen, so stop pretending otherwise. Mel Gibson
Demonizing Israel’s children
I regret not commenting on this until now. On July 23 I received an email from someone in the jazz community rightly expressing dismay at the unfolding events in Lebanon. I have no reason to doubt this person’s good intentions. But one of the enclosed links directed the email recipients to this page. [Warning: the images are extremely graphic.] The
Chavez in Iran
Excuse my tardiness, but since I commented on Hugo Chavez’s visit to Belarus the other day, I’d be remiss not to mention his uncritical embrace of the president of Iran, a Holocaust denier and antisemite. [Update: Excuse me again, but I missed this account, wherein Chavez is quoted as follows: “Israel is perpetrating the same acts against the Lebanese that
A note from Shalom Lappin
I received this communication from Shalom Lappin in regard to a post from July 20: “Several of the comments on your blog cast doubt on the chronology of events that I give in my post on Normblog concerning the current conflict in Lebanon. In particular, they insist that Hizbollah did not initiate large scale shelling of Israeli towns and villages
Qana
There’s nothing I can say about the horror in Qana, other than it’s the indirect and direct result of U.S. policy — indirect in that the U.S. continues to frustrate efforts toward a ceasefire, direct in that the bomb that fell on the building on Qana was in all likelihood American. To the U.S., immediate ceasefires are worthless, but immediate