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Calling foul
Hawks, the birds of prey, are known for their extraordinarily keen vision. Hawks of the human variety, not so much. Oliver Kamm has been blogging only sporadically this summer, but the last couple of posts have been teeth-clenching. Here he reprimands the voters of Connecticut for handing a primary victory to Ned Lamont; he also wishes Joe Lieberman luck in
Finkelstein: “We are all Hezbollah now”
This is quite a bandwagon. The famed anti-zionist author Norman Finkelstein has laid bare the depthless poverty of his political and moral judgment: …for those who believe in freedom and dignity, We are all Hezbollah now. So he proclaims, as he distributes a screed from Samah Idriss, editor-in-chief of the magazine Al-Adab. Idriss’s statement, a model of unvarnished and unyielding
An editorial change
Readers are advised that I have enabled the “moderate comments” function on this blog. Open comments are one of several options available to bloggers. All the options have their pluses and minuses; many blogs don’t permit comments at all. I’ve chosen the intermediate course, and will select comments to publish on a case-by-case basis. Factual inaccuracies will of course be
An artistic folly
Just received an email touting a DVD of a benefit concert for the Stop the War Coalition that took place on November 27 of last year. (It hits the stores in October.) Performers included Brian Eno, Rachid Taha, Imogen Heap and Mick Jones of the Clash. I own records by all these people and I think highly of them. Their
Tide turning?
Back on July 31, Judeosphere linked to a story in the Forward. I was struck by the following: Hadar Susskind, who directs the Washington office of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that there is “zero dissent” within the Jewish community [about the war in Lebanon]. “As opposed to everything else we do, on this we have absolute unanimity,”
The week in bigotry
Judeosphere points us to two interesting antisemitic diatribes in the media. First this from Jostein Gaarder of Norway, author of the novel Sophie’s World: There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. […] There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance.
This is now
Heated exchanges today in the UN chamber. Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman said, without a trace of irony, that the Lebanese people must choose between “those who build and those who destroy.” By the latter he meant Hezbollah, indeed a destructive force. But to ordinary Lebanese, the Orwellian tinge of Gillerman’s speech must have been hard to miss. Israel has chosen
It’s Lamont
Ned Lamont beats Joe Lieberman. It’s a potential net gain for the Senate, although Lamont went on The Colbert Report last week and declared there was no difference at all between him and Lieberman on Israel. He also couched his argument for Iraq troop withdrawal in crudely isolationist terms. But Lieberman’s a disaster, and he wasn’t any better in 2000