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Castro
The timing of Jon Lee Anderson’s article in last week’s New Yorker was uncanny. The focus of Anderson’s piece is the Castro regime’s succession strategy, a campaign it calls the Battle of Ideas (hint: it’s a battle against ideas). It will be interesting to see if the repression can be maintained without the Old Man. I support full democratic freedoms
Medved responds
The film critic, outspoken Jewish neoconservative and former Mel Gibson flack Michael Medved (was he paid too?) weighs in on Gibsongate. Get ready to cringe: At a time when Israel finds herself isolated as never before, imagine the impact of Gibson announcing a supportive trip to Jerusalem in the company of selected Jewish leaders — with a reverent, remorseful stop
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