JustASC

The Forward has a strong editorial on Tibet, and finds the Israel angle:

Yet the world community seems intent on turning a blind eye. Indignation over military occupation seems to operate only when the accused is too weak to defend itself. The nations, for all their lecturing of Israel over its 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, fall silent in the face of China’s 60-year occupation of Tibet. They are still as China works to obliterate Tibetan culture and identity. Governments delight in receiving the Dalai Lama with pomp and ceremony - Bush gave him a Congressional Gold Medal just last year - but none take up his cause.

First the Star-Ledger, now the New York Times picks up on NJJN staff writer Johanna Ginsberg’s scoop about the Great Tam Tam Shortage of 2008.

As we did, the Times explains that Manischewitz is halting Tam Tam production until they can get their new Newark factory fully on line. And the paper includes a sentence that is music to our ears:

The news was first reported in The New Jersey Jewish News.

The 2003 interview with Gen. Merrill A. “Tony” McPeak, Obama supporters’ latest headache,  is worth reading and dissecting for what it suggests about today’s definition of  “anti-Israel” and “anti-Semitism.”

I’ve  read and heard from people who think McPeak’s remarks are both, in the Walt and Mearsheimer mode.

The relevant portions begin with McPeak lamenting that the U.S. lacks an overall strategy for the Mideast: 

We don’t have a playbook for the Middle East. You know, for instance, obviously, a part of that long-term strategy would be getting the Israelis and the Palestinians together at . . . something other than a peace process. Process is not a substitute for achievement or settlement. And even so the process has gone off the tracks, but the process isn’t enough. . . . We [n]eed to get it fixed and only we have the authority with both sides to move them towards that. Everybody knows that.

(more…)

This week in the New Jersey Jewish News:

• The Wright stuff: New Jersey Jews on Obama and his pastor.
• Anne Frank meets Annie: William Paterson University stages a musical comedy (that’s right) about the Secret Annex and Anne’s overlooked sister.
• Katchor’s rising star: An interview with a comics “genius.”
• Just say moo: Labor activists call on the O.U. to get tough with kosher slaughterhouses:

Many rabbis have told us that multiple issues come into play when determining whether a product is kosher. It is not just a question of the ritual slaughter of an animal, that vegetables are free of bugs and parasites, or whether wine has been boiled. Whether products are safe, animals treated well, and workers treated fairly and safely are all issues that can impact whether a product can be considered kosher.

If kosher authorities waive their responsibility to investigate such matters, it nonetheless does not release them from the obligation to act when information from such experts becomes public knowledge. The OU has an obligation to the kosher consumer, the Jewish community, and the general public to act. It has an obligation to protect the image of kashrut.

WSJ’s James Taranto is puzzled about Obama’s Middle East positions,  citing from a much-quoted ElectronicIntifada.com article in which Obama is said to have told a pro-Palestinian activist, “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” The article’s author, and sole source of the quote, is EI’s co-founder, Ali Abunimah.

Writes Taranto:

It is possible that Obama had a sincere change of heart–that he came to see the merits of the Israeli side of the argument. It is also possible that Obama has no sincere views on the subject–that when he was traveling in radical-chic Chicago circles, he told people like Abunimah what they wanted to hear, and now that he has gone national, he has switched to telling a more mainstream Democratic constituency what it wants to hear.

There is a third possibility, as plausible as the other two - that Abunimah is making it up. Wouldn’t be the first time that a Palestinian propagandist was playing with the truth. Strange for Taranto to hang an entire argument on one self-interested person’s version of a conversation – for example, Taranto discounted the Times report about McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist because, in part, its sourcing was thin.

Taranto next takes a post-modern turn:

But what does Obama really believe–about the Middle East, about Wright’s “black liberation theology” or about any other complicated and sensitive topic? The question is a Rorschach inkblot; the answer reveals more about one’s emotional response to Obama than about Obama’s intellectual response to the world.

Taranto’s right that Obama’s credibility is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s an analysis that applies to just about anybody, no? What does any politician “really believe,” and how do we know?

LA Jewish Journal’s Rob Eshman attends a pro-Israel event, and hears the “giant sucking sound” — of Jewish Democratic support for Obama, that is. (I’m not bring this up because he quotes me, but — oh, who am I kidding, or course I am.) This is from his open letter to Obama:

That brief audition was as clear a demonstration as any of something I’ve noticed happening over the last few months: the giant sucking sound of Jewish support for the leading Democratic candidate.

This isn’t normal. Sen. John Kerry received 76 percent of the Jewish vote against President Bush, and no one even liked him. People say you may make history as the first black president, but it’s possible you might also make history as the first Democrat to lose the Jewish vote since 1920, when Warren G. Harding was elected president. (But that doesn’t really count, since a good portion of the Jews then, including my grandmother, Leah Fink, voted for the socialist, Eugene Debs.) Can you survive without the Jews? Sure, but in a general election their activism, money, influence and actual votes can make the difference in swing states like Ohio and Florida.

Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi talks about his Orthodox upbringing and his subsequent marriage to a Catholic woman to make essentially the same point as Jacoby: why did it take 20 years and a presidential run for Obama to declare his pastor pasul?

The following excerpt from Harsanyi’s peice sounds sensible, but I think it is a serious misreading of American faith communities:

When parishioners sit, contribute, listen, clap and offer “amen!” they are endorsing the words and the actions of their chosen church. This goes equally for the black churches of Chicago’s inner city to the mega churches of Colorado Springs….

….Remaining in the orthodox Jewish fold - for me, at least - would mean viewing women as second-class citizens and the eating of lobster as a sin. (Sinfully delicious, maybe.)

….Choosing your church means something. If you’re a practicing Catholic and support gay marriage and abortion, you’re in the wrong place. If you’re a Scientologist knocking back Excedrins every day, think your membership is over.

In an ideal, perhaps Hitchensian world, Harsanyi is right — we’d all be seamless blankets, joining churches, clubs and communities that are completely consistent with our individual values — perhaps all of them, certainly the most essential.

Harsanyi’s experience of organized religion is Orthodox, where the lines of who’s in and who’s out are distinctly drawn. But in many houses of worship, certainly Conservative and Reform synagogues, congregants often choose to live with cognitive dissonance, to worship in the margins, to ignore some precepts and accept others, perhaps ironically. (If truth be told, this is happening in many Orthodox synagogues as well.) They do this in service of something more important to them than ideological consistency — they’re in search of community, continuity, fellowship, a common language. It’s what David Mamet once said he found among theater folk: “Filial piety, humor, language, a responsibility to learn and instruct, a sense of timelessness and history.”

And some people revel in the contradictions, and are never so happy as when they are pushing back at their clergy, or sharpening their own ideas against the whetstones of their pastors’ rhetoric (sorry – I think I just channelled Daniel Webster), or trying to reform their church from within. 

And sometimes people in the pews, like Harsanyi, don’t care what their rabbis or priests are saying — as the old joke goes, “He comes to talk to God; I come to talk to Goldberg.” 

Wrong? Maybe. But that’s reality. And probably a lot healthier than a society in which we retreat into our own corners of fractured consensus.  

Three ways to think about this: 1/ It’s exactly what you’d expect a preacher to say; 2/ It’s exactly what you wouldn’t expect a conservative Republican to say; 3/ none of that matters; Huckabee is just speaking from the heart when he tells MSNBC:

HUCKABEE: [Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements….

…As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

“Tough Dove” — and Obama supporter — Gidon Remba on quittin’ or stickin’ with your pastor:

In an ideal world, I wish Barack Obama had never joined Rev. Wright’s church, or quit once he realized that his opinions were sometimes objectionable. But Obama’s account of the complex weave of the relationship between congregant and pastor reveals his situation to have been far more fraught than ours.

Remba writes that he quit a Chicago synagogue “within months of joining” after the rabbi urged the slaughter of “Palestinians” in the wake of a terrorist attack. The difference between him and Obama: “we had no history, no prior powerful or intimate personal or familial bond with our religious leader before the moment of moral outrage.”

Although, as my friend Larry points out, Jeff Jacoby has the advantage of the “false hypothetical” — “my rabbi never said anything this outrageous” — his essay is still a challenging one and reflects the unease of more than just one Boston Globe columnist:

Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister’s odium.

When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio last year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said. “There’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.”

When it came to Wright, however, he wasn’t nearly so categorical. Oh, he’s “like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” Obama indulgently explained to one interviewer. He’s just “trying to be provocative,” he told another.” Far from severing his ties to Wright, Obama made him a member of his Religious Leadership Committee — a tie he finally cut only four days ago.”

Such a clanging double standard raises doubts about Obama’s character and judgment, and about his fitness for the role of race-transcending healer. Yesterday’s speech was finely crafted, but it leaves some troubling questions unanswered.