I Beg to Disagree

Why There is No Peace Between Israel and the Arabs

2012-01-16T20:49:00.782-05:00

Photo by Ahmed

As I write these lines, there are reports of peace talks in Amman between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, under the auspices of King Abdullah. Notwithstanding my very pessimistic view of such talks, which I will explain in this posting, I certainly hope that I will be proved wrong, that my pessimism is misplaced. Time will tell.

As for now, I hold to a view that took firm form after the Palestinians' definitive rejection of the Camp David - Taba peace efforts of 2000 and 2001. It then became obvious to me, as indeed it did to the Israeli public, that the Arab elites and the Arab "street" will not tolerate a Jewish state, no matter how small, anywhere in what the prevailing Arab view holds to be sacred Arab land, namely Israel.

In brief, I would accept what Professor Richard Landes has described as the Honor/Shame-Jihad paradigm:

The [Honor/Shame-Jihad paradigm] understands the Arab-Israeli conflict through the prism of honor-shame culture and Islamic jihad. These elements of Arab culture are the main factors that have made it impossible to reach a solution to the conflict. Arab leaders view any compromise with Israel as “losing face,” since such an agreement would mean recognizing as a “worthy foe” an inferior group that should be subject. Such a blow to Arab honor cannot be tolerated for cultural and political reasons: losing face means to feel utter humiliation, to lose public credibility, and to lose power. In search of lost honor, Arab (and Palestinian) elites, never particularly concerned with the welfare of their masses...

The Arabs' total rejection of any kind of Jewish presence in the Middle East is often hidden by a pervasive policy of forked tongue: peaceful phrases in Western languages directed toward the West, violence of action and incitement to violence in Arabic-language pronouncements.

The atmosphere of Jew-Hatred

"The Jews, sons of apes and pigs, destroy Al-Aqsa"

Source: Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), Oct. 9, 2009

Friday prayer and sermon, unidentified Hamas speaker:

"Today we look at Al-Aqsa as it sighs beneath the yoke of the Jews, beneath the yoke of the sons of apes and pigs, brothers of apes and pigs. Destroy the Jews and their helpers."Click here to view

In the territory of the Palestinian Authority, streets and other public places are regularly named in honor of suicide-terrorists who have died, thus honoring the deeds of Jew-killing as much as the terrorists who gave their all to banish the Jews from the Middle East. The Palestinian Media Watch (an absolutely indispensable resource) has documented this ongoing PA practice. Israeli spokespeople have rightfully pointed out, repeatedly, that the PA here incites to murder, that it thereby contradicts its own verbal professions of non-violence.

Holocaust-denial, currently the most practiced of the anti-Semitic propaganda tropes worldwide, is pervasive in the PA territory as it is in the media of the Arab world. The PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, has a PhD in Holocaust-denial, awarded by a Soviet university:

The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism (Arabic: al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya. Publisher: Dar Ibn Rushd, Amman, Jordan. 1984) is the title of a book by Mahmoud Abbas,[1] published in Arabic.[1] It is based on his CandSc thesis,[2] completed in 1982 at Patrice Lumumba University (now the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia) under the title The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement (Russian: Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933–1945), and defended at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In the book, Abbas argues that the Nazi Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Zionists created "the myth" of six million murdered Jews, which he called a "fantastic lie".[3][4][5] He further claimed that those Jews which were killed by the Nazis were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot aimed to fuel vengeance against Jews and to expand their mass extermination.[6] (Wikipedia)

One of the most symbolic actions of the Arab elites is the annual observance of "Nakba Day" (Day of the Catastrophe) to mark the establishment of Israel in 1948. Contrary to verbal declarations that PA demands could be satisfied by a return to 1967 borders, the staging of the annual Nakba event consitutes a rejection of Israel even if it were confined to its most limited borders, i.e. those of 1948. These Nakba observances send a powerful message to the Arab "street": the existence of Israel itself is a crime, no matter how small Israel might be; and our cause today is what it was in 1948, when the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded Israel, with material help from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Lybia.

The rejection of Israel by the Arab elites is so extreme that sometimes it appears comical. One case in point is the ritualistic denial by Arab scholars, for propagandistic purposes, of any ancient Jewish connection to Jerusalem. In brief, according to these professors and, in the case of Jerusalem's Al-Quds University, of official University policy, there were no Jews in Jerusalem before modern times, there was no King David, there was no Jewish Temple. I have documented these pseudo-scholarly distortions in a previous posting.

In the Muslim world, it appears that the word "normalization," when used in connection with Israel, is the equivalent of treason to the faith. Despite the fact that both Jordan and Egypt, alone in the Arab world, have peace agreements with Israel, civic groups like unions and professional organizations in these countries routinely refuse any formal or informal relations with their Israeli counterparts. Again, it is the PMW that has documented this phenomenon.

Violent Hatreds in the Muslim World

These Islamist manifestations of hatred against the Jews are very disturbing, but they must be seen against the larger, equally disturbing background of Islamist hatreds and violence that have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews, but which nevertheless have a bearing on the conflict between the Arabs and Israel. The point here is that if the Arabs (and the Muslim world) behaves so violently in its internal conflicts, what hope is there for more pacific behavior when it comes to the Jews ?

First and most conspicuously, there is the conflict in Syria. The Assads' regime, which from its very inception in 1970 declared itself as among the most implacable of foes of Israel, today kills thousands of its own people. This development, unlike some of the others I am about to relate, has been well reported and needs no elaboration here.

The Iraq-Iran war of 1980 to 1988 was among the most savage in history. Here is part of Wikipedia's description:

The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage—half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured—but it brought neither reparations nor change in borders. The conflict is often compared to World War I,[17] in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of that conflict, including large scale trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, use of barbed wire across trenches, human wave attacks across no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops and civilians as well as Iraqi Kurds. At the time, the UN Security Council issued statements that "chemical weapons had been used in the war." However, in these UN statements it was never made clear that it was only Iraq that was using chemical weapons, so it has been said that "the international community remained silent as Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against Iranian as well as Iraqi Kurds" and it is believed[18][19][20] that the "United States prevented the UN from condemning Iraq".[18]

The bloody warfare by the Arabs of the Sudan against its fellow religionists in Darfur (as well as against the Black population of the South) is still ongoing. It has received some Western attention, but the fact that most of the aggression emanates from Arab sources is not often mentioned. (There are now some new reports of warfare within the South, involving the Nuer and their neighbors, none of which are Muslim.)

And then there is the bloody repression of the people of Iran by its own government.

The violence in Somalia -- perhaps the most unfortunate country in the world -- seems mostly initiated by the Islamist Al-Shabaab, although it would take a specialist to sort out the various actors in that continuing disaster.

Of very great relevance here is the bloody story of intra-Palestinian violence. Here is an account from Wikipedia:

Intra-Palestinian violence was a prominent feature of the Intifada, with widespread executions of alleged Israeli collaborators. While Israeli forces killed an estimated 1,100 Palestinians and Palestinians killed 164 Israelis, Palestinians killed an estimated 1,000 other Palestinians as alleged collaborators, although fewer than half had any proven contact with the Israeli authorities.[4][5]And then there are the very frequent mutual killings by Fatah and Hamas.

In short, over and above its violent Jew-hatred, the Muslim world harbors a virulent culture of internal violence. One would think that this topic should be of interest to would-be peacemakers like Peace Now and JStreet, but -- guess what -- these and allied groups are generally mum on the subject.

Which brings us to

The Evolution of bien-pensant thinking on Israel

The intransigence of the Arab elites would matter less if it were not for the support it receives, at least implicitly, from an apparently growing anti-Israel current in the liberal/left circles of the West.

Today we are used to seeing more than a few committed enemies of Israel in academia and in the high-brow punditry, whom Schleiermacher might have called the cultured despisers of Israel and Jews. That was not always the case. For the first twenty years or so of its existence Israel generally enjoyed, if not approbation, at least a modicum of good will among such classes.

A detailed, probing history of the evolution of such bien-pensant views remains to be written (are you listening, Mr. or Ms. Recent Graduate ?). Suffice it to say, while objectivity (at least) could be counted on in the past, this is no longer the case. Of course it is easy to exaggerate the importance of figures like Tony Judt, Mearsheimer, Walt, etc.: when I attend AIPAC conferences, I find the most liberal members of Congress come out very strongly for Israel, no less so than the conservatives. Nevertheless, it would seem that strongly hostile views and strongly hostile action are fairly common in liberal-left circles, especially so in the more activist groups like Occupy Wall Street (on this, see my piece here) and the politicized Lesbian groups.

While the overall picture of changes in the bien-pensants' viewpoint remains to be examined, the position of one part of this public -- that of the Communists, their followers, and their lineal descendants -- is clear. The Soviet Union broke diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 War, on June 10, 1967, and, for geo-political reasons, aligned itself with the Arab enemies of Israel, especially with Syria. I happened to have been in Paris at the time, and I well remember the shock of French Jewish protesters at a demonstration against the sudden change of the line of the French Communist Party (PCF). "We will not forget this," I remember one speaker declaiming, addressing the Party hacks. Annie Kriegel has provided us with the text of a surprisingly anti-Semitic speech delivered by Benoît Franchon, Secretary of the Communist-controlled CGT union, one of the top PCF leaders, at the Thirty Seventh National Congress of the CGT, held in Nanterre from June 12 to 16 of 1967:

They [war correspondents] have shown us -- replete with the details that go with a great demonstration of faith -- a ceremony at the Wailing Wall.... The presence of certain high financiers conferred upon it a significance that had nothing to do with the religious fervor which the true believers who participated thought to find in it. The spectacle makes us think that, as in Faust, it was Satan who led the dance. Nor was the golden calf missing; there it was, just as in the Gounod opera, standing up contemplating its feet, amid the blood and the filth, the results of these diabolical machinations. And indeed, we are told the two representatives of a cosmopolitan tribe of bankers attended this saturnalia, people well known throughout the world: Alain and Edmond de Rothschild. At their feet lay the dead, still bleeding. Among them were Jewish workers, who died for them; Jordanian workers and peasant, who also died for them. (from l'Humanité, June 17, 1967; reproduced in Kriegel, The French Communists, p. 163-4).

I believe that, with all the marginalized anti-Semitism that could be found in the Stalinist movement for years before, the decisive turning point came at this point, in 1967. The upshot of course is well known: how the "German Democratic Republic" became a bastion of "anti-Zionism;" how the Lumumba University in Moscow turned out doctors of Holocaust-denial (see the case of Abbas, above), etc. etc.

The Soviets' 1967 line, to which they held to the end of their existence in 1989, had a tremendous effect on the broad spectrum of liberal/left opinion. The Soviets' fiercest opponents on the Left, the Trotskyists, followed their Stalinist enemy/friends in the decisive turn against Israel after the '67 War. The Trotskyists saw themselves in competition with the Communists for the pool of left-leaning "militants." As a result of the Soviet position, it became more and more required for the "revolutionary socialists" and the "anti-imperialists" to include a fierce opposition to "Zionism" in their propaganda. The Trotskyists could not afford to be outbid in the left-wing marketplace. (Of course there were earlier reasons, primarily the inherent Marxist anti-Semitism, that made them vulnerable for this shift. I have discussed these matters here.)

As for the descendants of the old Stalinist movement, most strikingly The Nation magazine of the United States, it is the Soviets' turn against Israel in 1967 that still seems to weigh heavily in its hysterical campaign against Israel. (See my blog on this here). Obviously there are other reasons as well for the liberal/left "anti-Zionism" of our day. Just what these are awaits the careful study of a historian yet to appear.

Conclusion

There is little hope for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the foreseeable future. The reasons for this pessimism lie mainly in the Muslim culture of hate and violence. The "anti-Zionism" of parts of liberal/left opinion in the West -- giving support to the Islamist anti-Israel project -- contributes to the difficulty of finding a solution.

How clean are the countries that do not recognize Israel ?

2012-01-12T22:00:00.000-05:00

There is a fairly reliable index of corruption in the various countries of the world, the Corruption Perception Index, according to which the "cleanest country" (New Zealand) is rated 9.5, and the lowest (Somalia) is rated 1.0. The average country receives a score of 5 or 6.

Now, of the 192 members of the UN, Israel has diplomatic relations with 156. The remaining 36 governments refuse to have such relations with Israel, some more vociferously than others. Quite a few go so far as to deny that Israel exists at all. The full story is told here.

As it happens, the countries that refuse to have diplomatic relations with Israel are, by and large, among the most corrupt in the world, some having a cleanliness score of no more than 1 or 1.5 out of ten. The average rating for these refusal countries is 3.16. (The US has a score of 7.1, Israel 5.8). Below are the scores of all the 36 governments that refuse to deal with Israel:

Afghanistan	1.50
Algeria	2.90
Bahrain	5.10
Bangladesh	2.70
Bhutan	5.70
Bolivia	2.80
Brunei	5.20
Chad	2.00
Comoros	2.40
Cuba	4.20
Djibouti	3.00
Guinea	2.20
Indonesia	3.00
Iran	2.70
Iraq	1.80
Kuwait	4.60
Lebanon	2.50
Libya	2.00
Malaysia	4.30
Mali	2.80
Mauritania	2.40
Morocco	3.40
Nicaragua	2.50
Niger	2.50
North Korea	1.00
Oman	4.80
Pakistan	2.50
Qatar	7.20
Saudi Arabia	4.40
Somalia;	1.00
Sudan	1.60
Syria	2.60
Tunisia	3.80
United Arab Emirates	6.80
Venezuela	1.90
Yemen	2.10

average	3.16

"Guilt by Association"

2011-12-26T00:04:00.004-05:00

I. F. Stone (Isidore Feinstein), 1907-1989

very progressive journalist, and pioneering user of

the trope "guilt by association"

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. I.F.Stone

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing). Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all. Jeremy Ben Ami, President, JStreet

The tenuous "evidence"—later discredited—that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe? Naomi Klein

This is the story of a late-twentieth century invention, namely the ostensible moral and intellectual sin of accusations of "guilt by association."

This trope, "guilt by association," or GbA, has a curious history and a curious present. It has the following characteristics:

1) The trope user is almost invariably a self-described person of the "Left," or, in somewhat more modern usage, a "progressive." The target is someone perceived as, or at least designated as someone opposed to the Left, a "right-winger."

2) The trope has a surface resemblance to accusations of established errors of reasoning -- fallacies -- but in fact it is the user of the trope who is illogical and irrational.

3) The accusation underlying the usage of the trope is as much moral as intellectual; the trope user combines a disdain for the ethics and morality of the target (the ostensible bad faith of so-called right-wing McCarthites, for example) with an accusation of intellectual incompetence (failure to understand elementary logic).

4) The trope enables its users, who are often devoted supporters of totalitarian and other hateful movements, to pose as moral and intellectual superiors.

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947)

Except when an author is involved in left-wing political polemics himself ( e.g. Fearnside and Holther in "Fallacy," 1959), books on formal logic do not discuss this trope; despite the claims by its proponents, it is not one of the recognized "fallacies." But there is, or can be, some kernel of truth in the otherwise mindless GbA trope, namely that generalizations can be inappropriate. Here is what that eminent American logician and long-term CCNY professor Morris Raphael Cohen (with Ernest Nagel) had to say in their Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934):

We have so far discussed the relation between premises and conclusion in case of rigorous proof. But complete or conclusive evidence is not always available, and we generally have to rely on partial or incomplete evidence. Suppose the issue is whether a certain individual, Baron X, was a militarist, and the fact that most aristocrats have been militarists is offered as evidence. As a rigorous proof this is obviously inadequate. It is clearly possible for the proposition Baron X was a militarist to be false even though the proposition offered as evidence is true. But it would also be absurd to assert that the fact that most aristocrats are militarists is altogether irrelevant as evidence for Baron X having been one. Obviously one who continues to make inferences of this type (Most Xs are Y's, Z is an X, therefore Z is a Y) will in the long run be more often right than wrong. An inference of this type, which from true premises gives us conclusions which are true in most cases, is call probable.

Those who employ the GbA trope misconstrue statements of probability to make them appear to be statements of certainty. For example, the Wikipedia article on GbA employs a Euler diagram to argue the obvious: if some B is part of C, it does not follow that all of B is C. But in the political discussions to which the GbA users address themselves, the arguments by the GbA targets are not arguments of certainty. It is not (typically) claimed that all members of a Communist front organization were dedicated Stalinists. Insofar as such arguments were at all serious, they were arguments of probability, not certainty.

The "guilt" in the GbA trope is also telling. "Guilt" is a term most frequently used in the criminal law, where the standard of proof is much higher -- "beyond a reasonable doubt" -- than in the everyday world of political discussion. The judgements we make in ordinary scholarship and in ordinary life rely on what seems more probable, not on what seems probably beyond a reasonable doubt. During the lifetime of the late Paul Robeson, for instance, both he and the Communist Party always insisted that he was not a Communist at all, just a very progressive person. (After he died, the CP revealed that he had been a secret Communist all along). But in his lifetime, given all the various associations of Robeson, it was reasonable to hold, by a balance of probabilities, that Robeson was a Communist, even absent proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Moreover, the trope "guilt by association" is ambiguous in its very nature. It is regularly applied to the following types of statement, among others:

1) A was once seen in a certain bar in which the notorious gangster B was also seen. Therefore A is a gangster.

2) A is a member of five groups that were dominated by the Communist Party. Therefore there is a certain probability -- whether high or low needs to be established by all the other circumstances -- that A is also a Communist.

It is the gravamen of GbA proponents that the truth-value of propositions 1) and 2) is exactly the same, namely nil. That is of course preposterous on its face. Pace these progressive writers and activists, associations among men are varied. Sometimes negative inferences can be drawn from them to a greater or lesser degree of probability. In some instances, as for example in those designated by the law of conspiracy, association may indeed give rise to valid findings of criminality. In other cases association may be totally harmless. Most generally, human associations are relevant without being conclusive in a great many of the judgements that we are called upon to make. The proponents of the GbA trope must know this as well as we all do; in the course of their daily lives they must know, just as the rest of us do, how to chose their spouses, their friends, their business associates, their merchants, all on the basis of some sort of "guilt by association" judgements. But when it comes to politics, these progressive GbA proponents declare that all evidence of human association is ultra vires, inadmissible for discussion in the market place of political ideas.

The origins of the GbA are not altogether clear. The usage seems to have arisen in the post-WWII era, most specifically in the nineteen fifties. The country was faced, on the one hand, with a Stalinist conspiracy, both through an elaborate network of Communist front organizations and Soviet espionage. On the other hand, there were demagogic politicians, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sought to use the Soviet conspiracy for his own purposes by making exaggerated claims of Communist penetration of the US government. But there were indeed many Communists in places of influence, for example in the trade unions, who by and large attempted to rid themselves of Communist domination. The trope "guilt by association" seems to have arisen in this atmosphere as a defense mechanism by Communists and their fellow travelers. I. F. Stone, quoted above, was one of the most prominent users of the trope. The logic was always this: true, some members of the front organizations are Communists, some may even be Communist spies. But this has no relevance, no relevance whatever, to the nature of the "progressive" (read front-organization) movement. Not a few of these progressives had been students at CCNY during the tenure of Morris Raphael Cohen; their ears had obviously been deaf to his teaching.

Today, the trope seems to be used in two specific efforts by the progressives. The first is to criticize (and to misconstrue) the public's concern over Islamist terrorism. This concern is termed "Islamophobia," a fairly new addition to the progressive polemical armamentarium. The GbA argument runs as follows: a) it is true that some Muslims are terrorists; b) not all Muslims are terrorists; therefore, c), it is unjust, it is "guilt by association," to be more concerned over activities of American Muslims than over those of American Christians and Jews. The fallacy of the trope, of course, is to construe the heightened concern by the public as holding that "all Muslims are terrorists." This latter proposition is not advanced by anyone in public life who is at all serious. Were it to be encountered, it would of course be both false and malicious.

The second GbA effort concerns the overlap of self-described "leftists" and "progressives" on the one hand with the organized anti-Israel movement on the other. As I have shown in a previous posting, the progressive group JStreet contains a sizable number of aggressive opponents of Israel. Those of us who point to this association are regularly accused of using "guilt by association." The logic, or rather the illogic of this accusation takes the same form as that of the other GbA accusations that we have seen.

I recently reported my finding that six of the nine identified top leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement were also active in the anti-Israel movement. One reader, an ordained rabbi no less, wrote to complain that I was engaging in a "guilt-by-association" argument. I wrote back, explaining, among other things, that I made no accusation of "guilt" but I also insisted that surely, to a thinking man, there would be something of interest in this finding. "Nothing of interest at all," replied the rabbi, "what you say is a red herring." Red herring ? Here is another left-wing trope from the fifties. My curiosity was aroused. "Rabbi," I wrote back, "indulge my curiosity: do you personally support the boycott movement against Israel ? " "I will not answer this question; it has no relevance to our discussion," replied the good rabbi. Well there you have it: an I. F. Stone of our time, bearer, unlike his predecessor, of the nice Jewish name of his birth.

Above all, the Arabs don't want the Jews to have a state....

2011-09-18T21:27:00.003-04:00

Finally, a leading Israeli politician tells it as it is.

The Arab street, and elites, may or may not wish the Palestinians to have a state. But their main preoccupation, now as much as at any time, is to get rid of Israel. This, more or less, is the gist of a remarkable interview with left-of-center Knesset member Einat Wilf, published in the Jewish Week of September 16. To read the whole interview, click here.

And here is an excerpt:

... the last decade, with the failure of Camp David, the intifada, the disengagement, the repeated failures of the Palestinian leadership to take advantage of opportunities to have a state has made me very skeptical. I began to question whether the Palestinians want a state more than they want the Jews not to have a state. They may want a state, but it’s second or third priority after making sure the Jews don’t have their state … I’ve become increasingly convinced that the conflict is not about simple territorial claims that can be resolved by finding where exactly the border should go. At the core, the entire Palestinian identity is wrapped in the battle against Zionism. It emerged as a separate identity only through this battle, and for them justice was always more important than statehood. … Given the opportunity to have a state but not perfect justice they’ve always tried to pursue their version of justice and given up on having a state…

Einat Wilf

I felt the self-flagellation that has become a mark of the left — we don’t have peace because Israel didn’t do enough, in Camp David Barak should have been nicer to Arafat, should have let him go first through the door — it was getting to the point of just being ridiculous...
I’m still in the left in the sense that if by some miracle tomorrow there were an agreement with the Palestinians and it came to a vote in Knesset and we had to get out of the West Bank, I’d vote for it. I don’t have an emotional problem or attachment or messianic views that would make that difficult for me … But I’ve become skeptical that this is what the conflict is about and that it is possible to reach an agreement …

RIP: Eugene Nida, 1914-2011

2011-09-05T00:58:00.000-04:00

He was not literally my teacher. I never met him, and I certainly never sat in a class that he taught. But I have learned from colleagues who had learned from him. Two of his great books are on my shelf and I still refer to them from time to time: God's Word in Man's Language (1952), and Bible Translating (1961). Despite the fact that I have never had a direct interest in Bible translating, these books had a lot to teach me and indeed all social scientists. Nida, together with a few others, was a giant in the social science of linguistics. (Those were the days when linguistics was still a social science and not the speculative game it became later). Now he died, aged 96.

Here is a rare video of Nida as an old man, still teaching:

and here, a bit of comic relief, is an attack on Nida's scholarly approach to translation by a fundamentalist who thinks that the Bible needs to be translated one word at a time:

Of course the Chomskyans, who do not believe that language should be studied empirically any more than this misguided religious fundamentalist, could no doubt make an equally ludicrous anti-Nida video. Maybe they already have.

Not to be missed: the fine obit in the NYT by Margalit Fox.

Snake Oil for Sale: The Charlatans of Jewish Public Opinion Research

2011-08-07T14:25:00.001-04:00

Two well-known Jewish organizations with contrasting attitudes toward Israel have recently claimed to have plumbed American Jewish attitudes in this subject. Each group has claimed that its own political stance is the one actually favored by the Jewish community as a whole. But since neither of these groups -- JStreet on the one hand, the Committee for Accuracy in Media (CAMERA) on the other -- has used scientific methods of public opinion research, neither's claim can be said to be supported.

I have recently written an article in which I summarized my objections to JStreet's methods, including its polling, so I will not repeat this material here. My objections to CAMERA's polling materials will become clearer presently.

*****

Some thirty or forty years ago my colleague Tony and I were sipping a little something in the Faculty Club, and this is the amusing tale he told:

It seems that a couple of decades before this, a man who later became quite important as "an intellectual" -- let's call him X -- crossed the US-Canada border from Detroit to Windsor to spend a half hour of "observation" in Ontario. He carefully took note of the automobiles that passed him in the street of Windsor, noting the manufacturer of each. Upon returning to Michigan, he penned a report to his nephew. Canadians, X averred, favor the Ford automobile over any other make, by a margin of about ten to one. That "observation," I believe, later became enshrined in the X's published oeuvre.

But snake oil sold as social-science wisdom is not always so charmingly harmless. During the presidential election campaign of 1936, the Literary Digest polled ten million Americans (of whom about 2.5 million responded) and concluded that Ralph Landon, the Republican, would be an easy winner. In November, as we all know, it was the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt who won, overwhelmingly, carrying 46 out of 48 states.

What went wrong ? And what went wrong with the current polling of American Jews that I am so concerned about here ?

When properly done, the science of public opinion polling can accomplish remarkable feats of understanding. By consulting about two thousand people -- an appropriate random sample of about this number -- it is possible to gain insight into the opinions and attitudes of millions. The theory of this sampling (i.e. probability theory) has been understood by mathematicians for hundreds of years, but it has been the social science of the twentieth century that has developed the techniques to accomplish adequate public opinion polling. But recent times have also brought to the fore a host of charlatans in this area. How can we tell the genuine from the specious ? The genuine from the grey-area operator ?

The principles are clear enough. On the one hand there is a "population" or "universe," too large or otherwise impractical to study directly, on the other hand there is the random sample which, to a known degree of accuracy, "represents" this population. How can this sample be obtained ? The most basic requirement is that each member of the population has an equal chance to be drawn for the sample. So, in principle, we must have a complete listing of the members of the population, and then a mechanism, such as a lottery cylinder, to draw individuals by strict random methods.

In practice, the strict adherence to random principles is generally impossible, not least because a complete enumeration of the underlying population does not exist. If American Jewry is postulated as the population, there is also the additional problem of definition: who is a Jew, exactly; is synagogue affiliation either a necessary or sufficient attribute ? Jewish parents ? If so, how many ? And so forth. Also, as I have shown elsewhere, there are inherent problems of a sample of American Jews if it is based on a random sample of all Americans, primarily because American Jews are not distributed randomly in the American population, so that such samples systematically under-sample areas of Jewish concentration. All such problems have reasonable solutions, but these are scientifically complex, and also generally more expensive than certain "pollsters" will want to consider. The National Jewish Population Survey, on the other hand, furnishes an example of responsible scientific work.

For the use of public opinion polls in general, the New York Times has published its own very sensible standards. What can the reader do when faced with reported "public opinion data" of unknown quality ? Responsible, high quality social science in this area is not always easy to verify, since there are so many variables: the selection of a scientific sample (obviously the first necessity), the formulation of the questions (sometimes inadequate, sometimes biased), the overall scientific quality of the various steps in the research process. On the other hand, there is a telltale of absolutely unacceptable work: failure of the researcher to disclose the details of his work. When, as is the case of both JStreet and CAMERA here, the researcher fails to specify how his sample was obtained, the research, if for no other reason, is unacceptable.

As it happens, I have in the past corresponded with the executives of CAMERA, and so felt free, especially in view of my overall support of the work of that group, to express my suggestions in regard to their use of polling data. I wrote to two of these people, for a total of three times, without ever once receiving a reply. Here is the text of one of my messages:

Dear ,

It would appear that the Luntz poll, which CAMERA sent around in its latest Alert, is not a scientific poll. If I am right on this, it should be labelled non-scientific, to be accepted, if at all, with caution.

I am particularly interested in this problem because I recently had to criticize the polling practices of JStreet....It would appear that my methodological points here apply to Luntz as much as to Gerstein (JS's pollster). The problem is the following: it is very difficult (read expensive) to have a valid sample of the American Jewish population. As I point out in my blog, the National Jewish Population Survey does a very good scientific job of surveying the Jewish population, but, as far as I can tell, nobody else does. I wrote to JS's Gerstein to voice these concerns, but never received an answer.

Yesterday I wrote to Luntz, as follows:

Would it be possible to get details on how your sample was selected ?
My interest in the matter is detailed here:
http://www.fringegroups.com/2011/05/jstreet-gentle-facade-and-whats-behind.html
thanks for your help
Werner Cohn
to which I received the following reply:

Thank you for contacting us. We appreciate your thoughts, suggestions and time it took you to write us.

You MUST register ON OUR WEBSITE to be eligible for one of our focus groups or nationwide surveys. You can sign-up on our website at http://www.theworddoctors.com/ Sorry, but requesting to sign you up by emailing us will not work.

Due to the high volume of emails we receive, we cannot guarantee a response to your email.

Remember: it's not what you say, it's what people hear.

Sincerely,

Dr. Frank Luntz & The Word Doctors Team
*Become a fan on Facebook* http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Frank-Luntz/249263279310
The report of the Luntz survey, to which CAMERA links, contains no information on how the sample was selected. When this information is missing, no knowledgeable reader can accept the results as scientific. I think that you should press Luntz to explain his methodology publicly. If he does not provide this information, and/or if, as I suspect, his methods prove to be less than scientific, there needs to be a disclaimer on your website, IMHO.

No doubt you will appreciate the position of CAMERA supporters like myself when we criticize JStreet's various obfuscations. If, as I hope it will, CAMERA comes out for truth in polling, our criticisms of JStreet can gain significant additional force.

IN MEMORIAM: John Gray Peatman (1904-1997), my first statistics professor at CCNY, ca. 1949

The Syrian revolutionary anthem -- Get out, Bashar

2011-07-22T10:53:00.001-04:00

<p>&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;AAnd&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;A&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>
And here is the NYT article that gives the background

The Brouhaha about the Anti-Boycott Law in Israel

2011-07-14T00:36:00.014-04:00

Two days ago two events took place in Israel: 1) the Israeli Knesset passed a law that provides for civil penalties for those who organize boycotts against Israel, and 2), at about the same time, Hamas resumed the firing of Qasam missiles into Israel. And guess what: all the self-described friends of peace in the Middle East -- the New Israel Fund, the Americans for Peace Now, and their allies -- are outraged, absolutely outraged at event number one, but considerably less so at event number two. In fact, these great friends of peace, to judge by their websites, have not at all noticed event number two. Peace, to these peaceniks, is not at all endangered by Hamas bombardments.

(It seems that Jewish organizations across the political spectrum have expressed criticism of the the anti-boycott law, but the hysteria about it is restricted to the self-styled Left. NGO Monitor has published a very good analysis of the law, including an English translation of its text.)

It may very well be, as NGO Monitor maintains, that this new law is objectionable on a number of grounds, and it also may very well be that it will be overturned by the courts. But in the meantime here are some factors that got lost in the brouhaha:

1) Israel finds itself in an existential crisis. The loftiest of advice is of questionable value when it comes from people far away, who, moreover, do not have to face the consequences of their admonitions. A beau mentir qui vient de loin.

2) Freedom of expression is a vacuous formulation if considered without context. For example, there is no jurisdiction on earth, or imaginable, without limitations to freedom. There are the obvious prohibitions about shouting "fire" in a crowded theater; about libel and slander; about false advertising; and many others. What the limits should be in a given circumstance can only be determined by a close consideration of its particulars. In the case of the anti-boycott law, it is important to recognize the evil to which this law is addressed: the agitation by a number of well financed groups, with the bulk of the money coming from abroad, to delegitemize the state of Israel. That is a problem to which the Knesset obviously had to react. Perhaps the law in this first version is overreaching or otherwise inappropriate, and it seems that amendments to it are under consideration. But to criticize the law without at all recognizing the underlying problem is mindless.

3) The right to organize boycotts, pace the opinion of the hysterics who are discussing this law from afar, is not one of those rock-bottom democratic rights like freedom of the press. It is not a tool of rational discussion but rather a tool of coercion: do as I say or I will try to take away your livelihood. In the United States there are limits to the right to organize boycotts. Unions may boycott employers with whom they have a dispute, but they cannot engage in "secondary boycotts," i.e. boycott those who do business with these employers. And it is also illegal, in the United States, to collude in boycotts organized by foreign governments. It is similarly illegal to orchestrate boycotts against racial or religious groups where public accommodations are in play. In brief, public policy recognizes that the freedom to engage in public actions must stop where the freedom of others is encroached.

4) The left-leaning groups who are so enraged at what they think is an unjustifiable limitation of freedom here never criticized the Knesset, as far as I can remember, when it banned Kahane's Kach party in 1988. It seems that these great defenders of absolute freedom are quite happy when it is their opponents who are banned.

In the end, many people in this world, including many diaspora Jews and not only those on the Left, are quite eager to see a mote in Israel's eye while missing the beam elsewhere.

Excising the Context, Killing the Truth

2011-05-09T22:14:00.003-04:00

How the contextomists (those who would cut out the context) see a Mafia without crime, a Hiroshima without World War II, and Israel's defensive actions without the Arab terror. Read my new posting

The rooster clucks defiant ....

2011-04-25T13:54:00.018-04:00

As advocate, a lawyer zealously asserts the client's position under the rules of the adversary system. As negotiator, a lawyer seeks a result advantageous to the client but consistent with requirements of honest dealings with others. American Bar Association

The rooster clucks defiant, the lawyer ....s the client. Disputed legal maxim

In my life of 85 years I only rarely had occasion to engage a lawyer. All of the instances in which I did involved either real estate transactions or preparation of a will. Most of these transactions went smoothly enough, but there were exceptions. Too many of these, IMHO.

One case of malfeasance can be described simply enough. Some fifteen years ago I had a neighborhood attorney, whom I shall call Mr. A., prepare wills for Rita and me. Upon completion of this task, A. told us that he would keep the originals in his files, at no charge, so that they could always be found. Some thirteen years later we felt it necessary to revise these wills and tried to get hold of the originals. But A., who was still listed as a member of the NY bar, was nowhere to be found. He had no listed telephone, nor had he bothered to inform Appellate Division of the NY Supreme Court of his whereabouts, as by law he was obligated to do. After about a week of phoning people who had the same last name as he, I located a relative who gave me his then-current address. It took another week or ten days before I could finally wrench our wills out of him. I reported the incident to the legal disciplinary body, which, months later, administered the slightest tap on A's wrist that it could find.

Comment: lawyers who keep your will for safekeeping do you no favor. It is a common practice whose sole purpose seems to be to ensure more legal business for the lawyer years hence. In the state of New York, the Surrogate Court will file a will for safekeeping; that, IMHO, is the logical course of action to take.

We were victims of an earlier, more complex case of attorney malfeasance twenty years ago.

The matter arose in connection with the sale of our house in Vancouver in 1991. The incident was very painful to me at the time but I cannot say that it caused me actual damage. So, as far as I am personally involved, you might say that the matter is moot. But I think that there remain issues of public concern, and it is for that reason that I am spending time on it now.

I retired from teaching at the University of British Columbia some years before, and Rita and I decided to leave Vancouver to return to New York. We sold our house in the West Point Grey section of Vancouver in March of 1991 in preparation for our return to New York on April 15. We were represented in this sale by a solo-practice neighborhood attorney (Mr. B) with whom we were acquainted because he was a "friend of a friend" (red flag !). The buyer was a member of a very prominent Canadian family and was represented by one of the most prestigious law firms in Canada (firm C.). B. is no longer listed as a member of the British Columbia bar; firm C. seems to have become even more powerful and more prominent in the intervening years, many QC's serving among its partners (QC, Queens Counsel, is a distinction bestowed by the government upon the most prominent lawyers in Canada). I have now written to the Chair of firm C.; his reply was gracious (he had been a student of mine, it turns out), but he professed ignorance of the case.

The possession date in our transaction was March 31, 1991. On March 25, B. presented us, for the first time, with a Vendors' Statement that included the following as Note 4:

All parties agree that the representations regarding the sale and purchase of the subject property are not merged in the formal completion of this transaction and survive the execution of the closing documents.

When I questioned B. about the meaning of this provision, he explained that I had represented the house as free from Urea-Formaldehyde Insulation (UFFI) in the pre-purchase stage of the transaction, and that this warranty of freedom from UFFI would ordinarily expire with the formal completion of the sale under the doctrine of merger. Now, B. explained, the "other side" wanted me to sign a waiver of merger so that I would continue to be liable for any UFFI found in the future, apparently in perpetuity.

I explained to B. my position as follows: 1) I had not participated in his negotiation that resulted in the drafting of this waiver, and I do not agree to it; 2) my representation regarding UFFI was made in good faith, according to the best of my knowledge and belief; 3) the buyer had inspected the house in the pre-purchase period, and had not, presumably, found any UFFI. Thereupon B. explained that if I were to demand the deletion of this Note 4, the buyer would interpret that as a sign of guilty knowledge and would back out of the deal. He also said that Note 4 was the fair thing to do. Fair to whom, I asked. I explained to him that it was his obligation to represent my interests, and, in any case, to consult me about making concessions. Nevertheless, he pressed me to sign.

My situation was as follows: my family had packed its belongings and was ready to leave Vancouver within days. To have the buyer back out of the deal at that stage would have been very inconvenient, to say the least. So I did sign, but I also wrote a letter to B. that expressed my great displeasure at his disloyal behavior. I considered it malpractice, and I also wrote to him that, in the unlikely event that his negligence result in damages to us, I would hold him responsible for these.

As it turned out, there never were any subsequent claims about UFFI at this residence, at least not as far as I was informed.

Now here are my conclusions about this affair. Points 1) and 2) are critical of my lawyer, Mr. B.; Point 3) is critical of the law firm that represented the buyer, firm C. Point 4) is critical of both. Point 5) is the most important, and relates to the problem of inequality in legal representation.

1) An attorney should not agree to concessions on behalf of a client without consulting the client.

2) An attorney should not agree to concessions which, once made by this attorney, turn out to be irreversible, even before the client is ever made aware of them.

3) The party adverse in a case like this should be mindful of the behavior of the attorney with whom it is negotiating. It should be careful not to collude with an attorney who appears to violate obligations to his own client.

4) The legitimate concerns of a buyer over possible hidden defects should be met in ways other than binding the seller in perpetuity. I understand, for instance, that it is possible to buy insurance to cover such contingency.

5) As I reconstruct the events in this transaction, it would seem that the great inequality in power and prestige between the attorneys may well have been influential in the outcome. It seems that B. may have felt powerless to stand up to the high-prestige legal team on the other side, and may, for that reason, have agreed to terms that were injurious to his own client.

My Point 5) is of course conjecture. But it might be interesting to look into the problem by consulting other Vendor Statements. How often are there non-merger clauses when the seller is a client of a high-prestige firm, compared to when the seller is represented by low-ranking lawyers ?

Dear Jewish Sincere Friends of Peace: Have you Missed this little Detail ?

2011-03-16T21:56:00.006-04:00

Poster of the (Israeli) Peace Now movement:
"Each flag needs a balcony"

Israeli public life has many very Sincere Friends of Peace. "Peace Now," the Meretz Party, many members of Labor, the most influential Israeli newspaper (HaAretz), and many smaller groups, all compete with one another, year in year out, demanding that the Israeli government make more concessions to the Arabs so as to achieve peace. And as for Jews in the diaspora -- the U.S., Britain, continental Europe -- well, it seems that currently the loudest voices (though not necessarily the most numerous or the most thoughtful) chime in: peace now, make more concessions, abandon the settlers on the West Bank -- peace now !

Even people like myself who are unaffiliated with such groups can rejoice in the colorful diversity that such organizations contribute to Israeli and Jewish society. Of course I do not rejoice in the ultras, those who work for the destruction of Israel, but, surely, those are a different kettle of fish altogether.

But to come back to the major "peace" groups. Anyone who has watched them for many decades, as I have, must have noticed a little detail that seems to have escaped them altogether. That detail consists of an absolute absence of any similar peace movement among the Arabs. Even allowing for the fact that there is very little of a functioning "civil society" in Arab societies that would allow for unofficial political movements, it is nevertheless true there is some variety among Arabs in their views concerning Israel. Insofar are we can judge from public opinion polls and expressions in Arab writings and speeches, this variety runs the gamut from the most extreme hostility (Hamas) to somewhat milder hostility.

But, whatever the details, the broad picture is evident. There is no "Peace Now" among Arabs. There is no "Arab Voice for Peace." There are no "Arabs for a Just Peace." There is no AStreet that would urge concessions to Israel. Nothing of the sort.

My dear Sincere Jewish Friends of Peace: can you detect a little problem here somewhere ?

Arab Attitudes toward Jews (WARNING: graphic images)

2011-03-06T16:03:00.021-05:00

Yehoshafat Harkabi,author of Arab Attitudes to Israel,Jerusalem,1972
born 1921, died 1994

Anti-Jewish sentiments are almost universal in the three Arab nations surveyed - 95% or more in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt say they have an unfavorable opinion of Jews. 2008 Pew Report

In my previous posting I described the newest manifestations of Jew-hatred in the Egypt of today, and also the conspiracy of silence in the Western press when faced with this inconvenient set of facts. The deep-seated hatred of Jews among Arabs is not new and has often been documented. Perhaps the most thorough of these descriptions is that of Y.Harkabi ("Arab Attitudes to Israel," Jerusalem, 1972). Now almost forty years old, this classic, indispensable work consists of a content analysis of the Arab press and literature throughout the Middle East. When Harkabi first wrote the book as a dissertation at the Hebrew University in 1967, direct studies of Arab public opinion (opinion polls) were unavailable. Now that they are, for instance in the form of Pew poll data, we are faced with the sad realization that what Harkabi reported in the Arab literature of his day is still with us, and not only as written words, and that the details he gives are descriptive, by and large, of what goes on today.

Before we go to expressions of Arab opinion, much of it consisting of verbal violence, here is the Wikipedia report on an incident in which this verbal violence was acted out in deeds -- the lynching of Israeli soldiers during the 2000 Intifada. (And to those who say that Harkabi's work is so outdated: this incident took place thirty-three years after he wrote.)

The 2000 Ramallah lynching was a violent incident in October 2000 at the beginning of the Second Intifada in which a Palestinian mob lynched two Israel Defense Forces reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz (sometimes spelled as Norzhich) and Yossi Avrahami (or Yosef Avrahami),^[1] who had accidentally entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank. The brutality of the event, captured in a photo of a Palestinian rioter proudly waving his blood-stained hands to the crowd below, sparked international outrage and further intensified the ongoing conflict between Israeli and Palestinian forces.

Aziz Salha, one of the lynchers, waving his blood-stained hands from the police station window. Salha was later arrested by Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Harkabi devotes separate sections to various themes in the Arab treatment of Israel and the Jews. Here are a few of his section headings: the vileness of Zionism; Zionism and Nazism; the vileness of the Jews; Judaism as conspiracy for world domination; scurrility, absurdity, and falsehood in the Arab statements; the Islamization of Jew-hatred. He also notes the frequent use of the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

One element of current Arab anti-Semitism that was not found in Harkaby's materials is Holocaust-denial. This aspect of Arab anti-Semitism is relatively new, reaching great prominence only in the 21st century. There is a good description of it in Robert Wistrich's very important recent A Lethal Obsession, pages 646-661.

Harkabi lists 182 Arab sources, all of which he analyzed in their original language. (Just wondering here: how many Arab books have been studied by Mr. Jimmy Carter, in their original language ? Or by the telling-Israel-what-to-do crowd at J Street ?) Here is a quotation from the Arab writer Nashashibi, who visited Jerusalem before the unification of 1967, and looked over the wall at the Jews of West Jerusalem:

.... a collection of the world's hooligans and its garbage .... Dogs, robbers, clear out to your own countries !

(We recently heard an echo of that one from Ms. Helen Thomas.) Nashashibi continues somewhat later:

an international dung-heap in which the squalor of the whole world has been collected.

And then there is a quotation from an academic publication, the Egyptian Political Science Review, by the author Fathi Uthman al-Mahlawi (Jan.-March, 1959), among many other such quotations in Harkabi's book:

And thus Britain wanted to exhaust the strength of the Arabs and divide them, and at one and the same time to get rid of the Zionist plague in her country; she assembled these thousands of vagabonds and aliens, blood-suckers and pimps, and said to them: Take for yourselves a national home called Israel. Thus the dregs of the nations were collected in the Holy Land.

It bears emphasis that these Arab writings, like everything else in Harkabi's book, date from before the 1967 war. The reason that this needs emphasis is that we hear so often from the חכמים (Wise Men) of J Street, etc., that if only Israel were to go back to its 1967 borders, the Arabs would make peace post-haste. Fat chance !

Current Arab anti-Semitism is regularly reported by Memri and Palestine Media Watch, and there is plenty to report, week in week out: Holocaust denial, description of Jews as descendants of pigs and dogs; allegations that Jews murder gentile children; description of Israel as being similar to Nazi Germany; incitement to hatred in Arab schools and mosques; etc. etc. What we cannot know from such reports is how typical they are of the Arab population. The Pew Report, cited above, is not reassuring in this respect. Moreover, of course, we do not know what the future will bring. Harkabi himself believed that anti-Semitism is not very deeply rooted in Arab culture, and he was cautiously optimistic about prospects for an eventual accommodation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

But whatever the prospects for the future, we cannot afford to be in denial of the current deep, pervasive hatred of Jews in what is known as the "Arab street," among the Palestinians and among their brethren in all the neighboring countries.

Egypt's "Street" still hates the Jews

2011-02-26T17:05:00.008-05:00

Israelmatzav: Anti-Semitism in the anti-Mubarak crowd

Here is a major scandal that involves The New York Times and other American main-line media: there has been an apparently deliberate suppression of the anti-Semitic incidents in their great, beloved, democratic revolution of Egypt. Al Jazeera reported that "many of the gangs who attack reporters shout 'Yehudi !' " (Feb. 13), but this is something the Times didn't find fit to print. The New York Post had an altogether credible account of the sexual gang assault on CBS's (non-Jewish) correspondent Lara Logan (Feb. 16), viz. that it was accompanied by shouts of "Jew, Jew." But our so very high-minded "quality" newspapers would have none of that. We also know of other anti-Semitic incidents, reported elsewhere, but not in the New York Times.

Now, to its great credit, the Jewish Week of February 25 publishes an impressively researched article by its associate editor Jonathan Mark, The Lara Logan Cover-Up ?, in which he gives details about the shameful Egypt-prettyfication campaign by the Times and other papers.

UPDATE May 1, 2011: Tonight's 60 Minutes has an interview with Lara Logan in which she confirms, though in a muted way, the anti-Semitic aspect of the incident. Will that be enough for the NY Times to break its conspiracy of silence ?

What Goes On at Broolyn College ? -- Some Observations by Abigail Rosenthal

2011-02-06T20:34:00.007-05:00

Below is a letter from Abigail Rosenthal, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, to the National Association of Scholars, a watchdog organization. I reproduce it here with her permission.

I've long felt that Brooklyn College is an important place in the academic universe. It's a kind of Ellis Island, with students from all over the world, & a significant contingent of Talmudically trained young Jews who do wonderfully in Philosophy. And, when I was there, the student body included upwardly mobile Muslim young people who were often a pleasure to teach, too.

I was gratified when NAS took the stand it did last fall, against a one-sided "common text," portraying Muslims in America as victims, which was assigned as "orientation" reading to incoming students. Since then, as you may know, the latest FBI statistics have come out, showing that Jews are eight times likelier than Muslims to be victims of hate crimes -- the likelihood particularly high in the borough of Brooklyn. It's obvious that we wouldn't want a common orientation text devoted to interviews with Jewish victims of hate crimes in Brooklyn -- not because they aren't victims -- but because we don't want incoming students treated as part of a group with a grievance. Students are individuals seeking their own higher education.

The Petersen-Overton case, where the Provost reversed the hire and then reversed the reversal, was somewhat different. Due process was not followed in the hire. (A second-year student in the PhD program is under-credentialed to teach a graduate course, & his course syllabus, which included a history component, wasn't cleared with the History Dept.) Due process was also not followed in his firing. I think due process, rather than academic freedom, was the main issue here. (Political considerations should not have determined the hire either. Yet it's probable that the Political Science Dept.'s rush to hire Petersen-Overton was connected to his views. When a faculty unit acts that way, I don't think it should be considered the only stakeholder. One can claim, with the AAUP, that advocacy is okay in the classroom. But who in Brooklyn College's Political Science Dept advocates on the other side? One-sided advocacy is not okay, by any standards.)

Anyway, what's done is done. My question is, where are we now, on the Brooklyn campus? Well, the "Palestinian Club" (a group that -- unlike other Muslim groups on campus -- refuses to talk to Jewish students), immediately staged a noisy rally, under the slogan, "We won!" -- rally attended by Petersen-Overton, who addressed his jubilant followers. (I don't think the "We" stands here for academic freedom.) I am told by the Executive Director of campus Hillel that last year's "Israel Apartheid Week" is to be extended to two weeks this year. Which will add up to two weeks of defamation & bigotry on the time & space of a public college.

Meanwhile, thinking it was time for me to get better informed about Petersen-Overton, I read through his posted piece, "Inventing the Martyr: Martyrdom as Palestinian National Signifier." To reporters, he had claimed that it was preposterous to say he endorsed suicide killers; the piece was merely a scholarly study -- in no sense an endorsement of what he now calls "heinous acts". However, now that I've read it, I can say that his denial is not true. The piece is an extraordinary propaganda sheet for Palestinian suicide killers. It is, however, wrapped in postmodern jargon, so that national identity is said to be forged in "imagination" & key terms are in (now-you-see-'em-now-you-don't) scare quotes. One example: the al Dura hoax is first presented as fact, then admitted to have been controverted (though without mention of the relevant evidence) & finally celebrated as a substantive contribution to the process of imagining/creating national identity, with truth or falsity deemed irrelevant. Jews who were physically attacked on the pretext of the al Dura footage could not have agreed that its falsity was irrelevant. One could spend a lot of blood, sweat & tears countering every slanted & misleading claim about Israel. He is counting on that not being done.

It seems to me that by now the campus has generated a hostile atmosphere for Jewish students & has conveyed the message (via the orientation text, via political theatre on campus, via this now-underscored hire, via the expanded "Israel Apartheid Week"), to students & faculty, that only one political view has official sanction, from the effective faculty & administration.

I'm not sure whether anything can be done about it, but it needs watching, & what we don't have is a victory for academic freedom tout court. The College is not a better place, after all this has happened. At any rate, I wanted to let you know of my view of this troubling situation.

Mr. Hu: Tear Down the Laogai

2011-01-22T12:20:00.007-05:00

Flash: here is what Mr. Obama did not say: "Mr. Hu, Tear Down the Laogai !" He should have said it, publicly, loudly.

What is the Laogai ?

Laogai (simplified Chinese: 劳改; traditional Chinese: 勞改; pinyin: láogǎi), the abbreviation for Láodòng Gǎizào (勞動改造/劳动改造), which means "reform through labor," is a slogan of the Chinese criminal justice system and has been used to refer to the use of prison labor and prison farms in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to laogai camps.^[1] Laogai is distinguished from laojiao, or re-education through labor, which is an administrative detention for a person who is not a criminal but has committed minor offenses, and is intended to reform offenders into law-abiding citizens.^[2] Persons detained under laojiao are detained in facilities which are separate from the general prison system of laogai. Both systems, however, involve penal labor. (Wikipedia)

Laogai constitutes perhaps the single worst human rights outrage on earth today. It is probably the only large-scale remnant of the Soviet system. The indispensable source of information is the Laogai Research Foundation, led by Harry Wu, a former prisoner of the system.

How do you figure the circumference of a circle ?

2011-01-14T13:28:00.011-05:00

And why would you want to do that ?

In his final week as Chancellor of New York's public schools, Mr. Joel Klein was interviewed on TV about his educational philosophy. Well, he opined, a child certainly must know how to figure the circumference of a circle.

Now I bet that Mr. Klein himself, a lawyer and educational administrator, never once had to figure the circumference of a circle after leaving high school. Perhaps he needed this knowledge for higher math in college, and perhaps not. I myself happen to remember the idea: 2πR, and of course I needed this knowledge when I studied trigonometry and calculus. So yes, I am not against teaching 2πR somewhere in high school, or, better yet, teaching how to find the formula if you happen to need it.

But compare this to mathematical ideas that everyone truly needs, and that are not taught in high school, at least not on a regular basis. Take the basic ideas of statistics, in particular the idea of sampling and the often-abused idea of "statistical significance." These concepts are essential to all citizens because they enable a person to evaluate the (frequently false) claims made in the media about medical research, public opinion polls, and much else. (For a recent account of the misleading nature of scientific reporting -- in the absence of an understanding of the basic ides of statistics -- see the important article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker of December 13, 2010.)

Here is one more example of the mindlessness of the current crop of "educational reformers" who preach the gospel of testing, large classes, charter schools, firing of teachers, and. overall, a disregard of Dewey's concern for "the child and the curriculum." See my previous posting here.

Let there be better teachers ..

2010-12-28T13:48:00.028-05:00

John Dewey

What are the problems of education ? Are they complex, calling for thought to be given to a number of factors, or are they, as current fashion would have it, so simple that they can be reduced to a single factor ?

From the White House down, and most certainly including City Hall in New York and its brand-new Chancellor of Education, there is now a simple mantra: let there be better teachers and all will be well, in the schools, in the country, in the world. Ninotchka had similar ideas ("The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians."), but let that pass.

Michelle Rhee, until recently the Chancellor of the District of Columbia schools, was perhaps the most vocal and the most active proponent of this doctrine. She came into office, she fired teachers, she got tremendous acclaim from politicians (including the current incumbent at the White House), and, voilà, the District schools are, well, in turmoil politically but, insofar as anyone can tell, academically no better than before.

No matter. Rhee may be gone, but her ideas still carry in the halls of power. Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System) describes Rhee's program:

As a member of Teach for American, Rhee taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school managed by Education Alternatives Inc., a for-profit organization that received a contract as part of an experiment in privatization. According to Rhee, during her second and third years of teaching, the proportion of her students who read on grade level leapt from 13 percent to 90 percent (critics were doubtful since the Baltimore records could not be located). From her experience, she concluded that effective teachers could overcome poverty and other disadvantages…."Those kids, where they lived didn't change. Their parents didn't change. Their diets didn't change. The violence in the community didn't change. The only thing that changed for those 70 kids was the adults who were in front of them every single day teaching them."

So here we have it: the teacher is the thing, nothing else matters. Nothing. And, to judge from Rhee's administration in D.C., let these teachers be few, young, inexpensive, and, above all, "good." How do we know when a teacher is "good," or as it is sometimes put, "effective" ? Not a problem. Just administer tests to students, and those teachers whose students do best on the test are the best teachers. And how do we know whether the tests are any good ? Not a problem. Tests are good if their results can be quantified.

Well, a beginning -- and only a beginning -- of appreciating the problems with the Rhee doctrine is to look at how these attempts at measuring student and teacher performance have worked. As Diane Ravitch has shown in her book, the testing of student achievement by standardized, bureaucratized instruments has been almost uniformly unreliable. She cites the "law" promulgated by the social scientist Donald Campbell: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it intended to monitor."

If the prevailing standardized tests for student achievement have proven unreliable, the attempts to measure "teacher effectiveness" by such measures have been a complete failure. The New York Times has published an unusually good accounting on December 26. Despite very considerable number-crunching by statisticians, nobody has been able to find coherence in these ostensible measures of teaching quality. Even after overlooking such obvious absurdities as grading teachers who weren't teaching for the period in question and failing to grade those who were, these reports undermine their own premise when they indicate that a "good" teacher one year is, almost as often as not, a bad one the next and then back again.

There is no rhyme or reason in this kind of quantitative "accountability" of the teaching profession. For anyone who has given thought to the complexity of the teaching enterprise, the reason is obvious: the problems of education are far more complex and far more profound than are dreamt of in the philosophies of Ms. Rhee's Teach for America (a three-year program), or Ms. Black's Hearst Publishing (executive suite).

John Dewey, the great American philosopher of education, published a little booklet in 1902: "The Child and the Curriculum," calling attention to two of the complex factors that need to be considered in any discussion of education. Let me run down a few:

1. The child. Obviously, every child differs from all the others, as every snow flake differs from all its peers. But there are some regularities in this variance that the school must accommodate. It is a truism of the social science research that children from lower economic strata, as a group, come to first grade with far less (formal) verbal equipment than their peers from the more advantaged classes. To say, as Ms. Rhee does, that the heterogeneity of the students doesn't matter is to say that the moon is made of green cheese. To everyone else, it would appear that the school must take careful account of heterogeneity and that, for that reason, class size -- and the time a teacher can spend with an individual child -- is too obvious a factor to sweep under the rug.

2. The neighborhood. Variable neighborhoods are obvious to all serious observers. Educational planners cannot ignore them.

3. The curriculum. The current fad of emphasizing only language comprehension and mathematics, at the expense of a great world of other topics, rules out the necessary and continuing debate about what it is that our children need to experience in the school. There really should not be final answers about what is and what is not important to the curriculum. We need to learn from evolving research -- both into the state of scientific knowledge and the state of children's needs -- how the curriculum is to evolve.

I had planned to make this posting one in which I say everything that I can I think of on the topic of education. But I will not go that route; I can see too well all the obvious reasons that would make such an effort both shallow and futile. Instead I will close by recalling two mathematics teachers with whom I studied at City College between 1948 and 1949:

A. Mr. Zeig, instructor in Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, using the 1936 text by Rietz, Reilly, and Woods, which is before me as I write. It was a class of tremendous energy, with a teacher better organized than anyone I have met before or after. Every week, without fail, there was a test. Everyone, I believe, kept up with the material, everyone did well. I certainly did. I got an A. I memorized the trigonometric functions, I could perform all the required operations, and I mastered all this to its very maximum, as far as the class was concerned.

B. Professor Bergman, Professor of Calculus. The text by Sherwood and Taylor, dated 1942, is also before me now. I remember Professor Bergman standing in front of the class, scratching his head, trying to write a proof on the board, muttering: "I am not sure I'm quick-witted enough to get this right here...." I felt bewildered, as did, I suspect, much of the class. I worked very very hard in the class, but I did not have the neat structure -- a test every week, etc. -- that Mr. Zeig had provided in trigonometry. Moreover, much of calculus, I knew then and I know now, was beyond me. I managed to get a B for the course, which in those days was considered an achievement.

Who was the "better," the "more effective" teacher ? By Ms. Rhee's lights, it undoubtedly was Mr. Zeig who performed better: more of his students, no doubt, would pass a Rhee-devised test. But it was Professor Bergman's difficult calculus that I remember, and it is Professor Bergman, from my perspective today, who has contributed far more to my education. Of course it is not an entirely fair comparison because Mr. Zeig's trigonometry may be an inherently less profound subject. Still, Mr. Zeig made no attempt to convey to us whatever profundity that, surely, could have been found, even in trigonometry.

Final tally: I give Professor Bergman an A as a teacher. I will not grade Mr. Zeig ....

The Nicest Guy in the World

2010-12-18T13:29:00.011-05:00

Sometimes, perhaps not often enough, people we do business with people are so nice that they make our day, sometimes even year: that really attentive waitress; that ultra-smart handyman; that honest and efficient car mechanic. And now we found a great jeweler in downtown Brooklyn, Mr. Jacques Renard.

Rita Corbeau and I needed to buy a nice magen david, Jewish star, for our youngest granddaughter. Jacques had been recommended to us by some of Rita's fellow health-club members, so we knew that we could trust him. Also, and this was a surprise in hard-bitten Brooklyn, he turned out to be the nicest guy in the world. His grandfather had started the business, he told us, his father had continued it, and now, to him, it was his life. The star that Jacques selected for us turned out to be more expensive than we had expected, but what a star ! Beautiful. Jacques does not accept credit cards, but, perhaps to make up for that inconvenience, he accepted some of Rita's old trinkets in partial payment. Jacques found that most of the trinkets had no value but he took them in to give to a local rabbi for charitable use. It sure saved us a lot of time and trouble.

That was two weeks ago. Yesterday I decided to go to his store once more. I needed a new battery for my watch. I realized that Jacques, having a quality store in an expensive location, would have to charge a tad more than the five dollars or so that I usually spend on that item. As before, Jacques was great. He took a quick look at the watch, opened it, slipped in a new battery, handed it back to me: "all done." No more than twenty seconds had elapsed. That's great, I said, what do I owe you ? "Twenty five dollars." Twenty-five dollars ? What's going on here ? Twenty-five dollars ? "But it's good for five years," Jacques said, "I know others charge less, but this battery will last five years."

OK. I was taken. It was a Madoff-victim experience, but, in that light, really cheap. After all, is twenty dollars a lot to learn a lesson about human greed, and more importantly, human gullibility ? I did go to see another watchmaker whom I usually use, just to check. "A battery for that watch ? Five dollars, but it's good for two years." Is there such a thing as a five-year battery ? The man just laughed.

Obviously I should have checked on Jacques. But who will question the greatest guy in the world ? Had I checked the internet before getting involved, I would have found his record right here.

UPDATE, Jan. 9, 2011: I ran into that local rabbi whom Jacques had mentioned, the one to whom he would give Rita's trinkets. Yes, the rabbi does know Jacques. And no, Jacques has never given him any jewelery "for charitable use." So the rabbi and I rehearsed some of the more important Yiddish expressions one needs to get through the day. The one we needed today was ganev.

Left Wing, Right Wing in Politics

2010-11-07T12:12:00.005-05:00

Few people think that the political spectrum can be usefully depicted as extending from a "Left" to a "Right." Ever since the Bolsheviks became fatefully different from the Socialists -- about 1903 -- it has been apparent that what some people still insist on calling the (overall) Left conflates political forces of fundamentally different values.

But there is another aspect of this sloppy "Left vs. Right" usage that is often overlooked. While "Left" is a term that some political forces use as self-description, "Right" is not. English-language dictionaries do not describe the political connotations of political terms, but the great French Robert tells us under "droite" ('right') :

Dans le contexte français contemporain, le mot est surtout employé par des adversaires, se disant de gauche; les partis et le public dits de droite (par les autres) se réclamant en général d'autres dénominations.

In today's French, the word is mostly employed by opponents, who refer to themselves as being of the Left. Parties and public-opinion tendencies that are called right-wing (by others) generally use different self-descriptions.

So it would appear that the whole Left-Right political usage is primarily one of those who like to refer to themselves as being of the Left. Certainly those who are called "Right-wing" (as in such inexcusable phrases as "the Israeli government is a right-wing coalition") do not themselves use the term. In other words, while "Left" is often used by political groups -- for their own political ends -- to describe themselves, "Right-wing" is almost always used as a pejorative, as a term of abuse.

Ambassador Oren on Israel-US Relations (Oct. 2010)

2010-10-21T18:13:00.001-04:00

The Puzzle of Vanity

2010-09-23T12:44:00.033-04:00

C. Allen Gilbert

הבל הבלים אמר קהלת הבל הבלים הכל הבל
Vanity of vanities, said Kohelet, all is vanity. Eccl. 1:2

At first sight, and even at second, vanity makes no sense. A man boasts and brags, he trumpets wisdom and accomplishment and brains, all in the hope of gaining esteem and honor and admiration. But lo and behold, the world likes neither braggart nor show-off. Even a person of substantial accomplishment faces ridicule behind his back when he becomes a braggart; for a lesser person, bragging can be devastating.

Presumably the braggart craves esteem; that's why he brags. But bragging results in disesteem, a result quite generally understood. Hence the puzzle: why vanity ?

I have been interested for some time in the vanities of everyday life. Parents and grandparents like to boast of the accomplishments of their offspring. Does this kind of talk endear them, or their children, to anyone ? Minor academics sometimes like to place a "Ph.D." after their names in contexts where this is not customary. Obviously the effect is pathetic. The owner of a delicatessen store, an immigrant from a European country, calls himself "Dr. X." in his storefront window. Why ? People with business-related titles or academic degrees, real or self-conferred, or conferred by questionable authorities, adorn themselves with such decorations on their sig-files in personal e-mail. But obviously, all such show of vanity is to no avail. None of it can stave off the ridicule that the boasters so desperately hope to forestall.

Of course vanity comes in various forms and in various degrees of severity. One interesting type is vanity-by-understatement. When Queen Elizabeth opened the Faculty Club at the University of British Columbia in July of 1959 (some nine months before I myself became a member of that Club), she was asked to sign the visitors' registry. Her entry in its entirety read "Elizabeth R." I was twenty-one years old when I addressed a letter to Albert Einstein, disagreeing with him about the Soviet Union. Within days I had a modestly-worded reply from the Nobel winner, signed simply "A. Einstein." In Britain, we are told, "When a medical doctor passes the examinations which enable him to become a member of one or more of the Royal Surgical Colleges and become "MRCS", it is customary for him or her to drop the "Doctor" prefix and take up "Miss", "Mister", or etc. " (Wikipedia). I must say that where naked vanity is offensive, the vanity-by-understatement is charming. Or so it seems to me. It is the only kind, as far as I can tell, that does not produce the rebound of ridicule.

But vanity-by-understatement aside, there are obviously many degrees of vanity, and many types, and, not least, cases in which it is not clear whether the incident can be called vanity at all.

A most poignant account of vanity under extreme conditions comes to us from Arthur Goldschmidt (1873-1947), a Protestant German jurist of Jewish background who was imprisoned in the Nazi Ghetto Theresienstadt (Terezin) from 1942 until the end of the war in 1945. Immediately upon imprisonment, he established a church among the Protestant inmates, and, upon his release, wrote a "History of the Evangelical Congregation Theresienstadt, 1942-1945." The story is one of jockeying among a number of would-be preachers among these Jews-turned-Protestants. Whatever titles and positions they had had before imprisonment -- doctors, engineers, etc. -- were carefully referenced in the missives they sent one another in the course of the dispute over leadership in this little church. None had had theological training, but quite a few aspired to become lay pastors in the camp. Ultimately Goldschmidt, not least because he based his polemics on the Führer principle, prevailed in his exclusive right to preach. He survived the imprisonment, but almost all of the others -- his antagonists and allies alike -- were killed in the Holocaust. The various vanities documented in his story did little to either aggravate or alleviate the sufferings of the protagonists, but neither do they enhance our expectations for an ennobling effect of religious practice.

In the many instances of self-assertion of daily life, what would count as vanity and should therefore be avoided ? What is necessary for a decent self-respect, and should therefore be practiced ?

Without denying gray areas that may sometimes be genuinely difficult to navigate, a number of principles seem well established:

1) It is good to pay close attention to customary practices. It is not customary, for example, to add a Ph.D. after one's name except under very limited circumstances. It is not customary (and may indeed be illegal) to call oneself "Doctor" if one is not a licensed physician. And so forth. Obviously, any gross violation of custom will be taken as vanity and invites ridicule.

2) Avoid any deviation from veracity. Avoid half-truths. Avoid exaggeration.

3) When in doubt, use under-statement.

I do not think that my advice will affect the person of true vanity. To whom does such a person listen, anyway ? With all that, the puzzle remains. Braggarts and boasters are not liked, their actions, beyond some very short-term advantage sometimes, bring them disesteem and grief in the end. And yet they persist.

Why ?

Academic Criticisms of Israel: 96% Hypocritical

2010-09-16T23:01:00.006-04:00

Like any other democracy, Israel's is imperfect and therefore open to reasonable criticism. There is certainly no a priori reason for suspecting the critics of Israel of unworthy motives. On the other hand, we do know that there are people who, under color of universal human values, criticize Israel because, not to put too fine a point on it, they don't like Jews. So it is often a bit of a quandary to figure out, in any given circumstance, the preponderant motivation of the critic.

To solve this quandary, if only in the case of a single initiative by a group of Israel critics, we now have the ingenious work of Fred Gottheil, a University of Illinois economist. Gottheil contacted the 675 professor who signed an anti-Israel petition (a statement alleging human rights violations, and all the rest). Without making reference to their petition, he asked each of these signers to endorse a protest against human rights violations in Muslim countries. The result: of the 675 scholars he contacted, only 27 would endorse his proposed protest. So it appears that, at least in this case, fully ninety-six percent of the academic criticism of Israel was hypocritical. Except for a small minority, the signers did not appear to be moved by universsal human values at all. They don't like Israel, pure and simple.

Gottheil's project was carried out with sophistication and care, but of course, like any study in the social sciences, it has its limitations and cannot give an absolutely definitive answer to the questions it poses. But the results came back so clear-cut that they certainly constitute very strong evidence for the conclusion: this particular anti-Israel effort was 96% hypocritical.

Click here to read Gottheil's report.

Read interview with Gottheil

Charflie Rose Stumbles -- II: Tariq Ramadan

2010-09-10T17:48:00.003-04:00

Dear Charlie,

Your interview with Tariq Ramadan yesterday was very disappointing.

There is an important literature that describes the darker sides of Ramadan's public life. In particular, a recent book by Paul Berman, "The Flight of the Intellectuals," has detailed Ramadan's record of anti-Semitism and his support of terror attacks against Israel. When Ramadan mentioned "Palestine" in your interview with him, in a context in which it was probable that in fact he meant Israel, this should have alerted you to the problem even if you were unaware of what Berman and so many others have written.

You did not probe at all. You gave him a pass on all that is disreputable in his positions. The least that I can say is that you did not promote public understanding of this very problematic public figure.

Werner Cohn

Charlie Rose Stumbles -- I: the Question of Alzheimer's Disease

2010-09-10T16:54:00.005-04:00

As current television goes, the Charlie Rose show must be rated as among the very best. He often gets intelligent guests, and the discussion is, more often than not, informative. Offhand and just guessing, I would say that I benefit from watching this show about half the time; I cannot think of another TV offering to which I could give a higher score.

All the more reason for me to criticize when he falters. Here is the first of a number of instances that I plan to discuss:

On August 28, the New York Times published an exceptionally informative article about the current state of knowledge of Alzheimer's disease. It seems that the National Institutes of Health had convened a very high-level "science court" to assess what is known and what isn't, and that this court had come to a conclusion:

... the jury’s verdict was depressing and distressing. So far, nothing has been found to prevent or delay this devastating disease, which ceaselessly kills brain cells, eventually leaving people mute, incontinent, unable to feed themselves, unaware of who they are or who their family and friends are.
“Currently,” the panel wrote, “no evidence of even moderate scientific quality exists to support the association of any modifiable factor (such as nutritional supplements, herbal preparations, dietary factors, prescription or nonprescription drugs, social or economic factors, medical conditions, toxins or environmental exposures) with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Nevertheless, a couple of days after these widely-diffused findings, Charlie had Dr. Eric Kandel, an aged Nobel Prize winner, mentioning quite casually that mental stimulation would help delay or mitigate the onset of Altzheimer's.

Does Kandel know something that the NIH panel does not ? If so, that should have been mentioned. Of course Charlie is not responsible for the opinions of his guests, but he should have known enough, or his staff should have known enough, to question the venerable Nobelist. And if Charlie was caught by surprise during the interview, he should have brought his viewers up to date on a later date. In the meantime, I am afraid, here is an example of Charlie working against public enlightenment.

How to Be a Progressive Jew

2010-09-08T18:05:00.005-04:00

In his important book "Trials of the Diaspora," Anthony Julius has a section on "oppositionist Jews." They are also, I think, Progressive Jews. This is what Julius writes about them:

There has always been in Jewish circles the harshest self-criticism. These criticisms foster the taking of public stands by some Jews against their community or its established institutions. They often preface their criticisms with the phrase, 'As Jews, we …..', by impaction claiming to champion the 'true' Jewish perspective -- an embattled, minority position, for sure, calling for a certain moral heroism, and articulating fidelity to an idea of Jewishness, rather than more mundane solidarity with Jews. In modern times, they often deprecated Jewry's 'narrow-minded provincialism', 'narrow bigotry', 'religious intransigence', and so on -- what Bruno Bettelheim disparaged as 'ghetto thinking'. Some oppositionists have rather complex relations with Judaism that repay study; others are no better than posturers, without real knowledge or understanding of the religion. There are oppositionists who are prophetic excoriators of Israel, and they speak or write of of a love of Israel. There are an equivalent number (perhaps a greater number) of oppositionists, who lack that commitment, and are driven instead by embarrassment, fear, or a desire to ingratiate themselves with non-Jews or to distance themselves from their fellow Jews' reprehensible conduct -- or some combination of these motives. … Many oppositionist Jews have now taken up positions as scourges of the Jewish State. Out of perversity, some oppositionist Jews now place themselves in the company of anti-Semites.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan ?

2010-08-28T17:40:00.015-04:00

Some five hundred years ago François Villon (1431-1463) wrote his Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis about important women, who, alas, were no longer. At the end of each such evocation he concluded with the wistful mais où sont les neiges d'antan ?, ' where are the snows of yesteryear ?' This line, frequently quoted in the original even by speakers of other languages, may well be the best loved in all of French poetry.

Now fast forward a few hundred years. Back in the 1940's I was part of the Trotskyist movement in America, some decades before this movement turned more or less anti-Semitic (for an account of this development, see my old essay on this). While in this movement, I was fortunate enough to enjoy the friendship of an exceptional group of people, all, I was sure, brilliant like me, all able to see the unspeakable evil and ignorance of the non-Trotskyist world.

Now and then, the Internet being informative about the famous and obscure alike, I get glimpses of these erstwhile comrades. Some seem to be as smart as before (i.e. they evolved their thinking as I have), but about some there is a cloud of uncertainty. In this latter group there is X, who had been, as a girl, really, but really smart. In those days of our youth, that is to say the 1940's, X had known all about the pretense and phoniness (a favorite term then) of conventional big shots. But I did hear, over the years, that perhaps X turned into a bit of a pretentious windbag herself. Could it be ? What is she like today ?

Recently I was involved in a project that led me into some collaborative work with Y, a long-term colleague of X at an institution of higher learning. I asked Y: you know X as a colleague. What is she like today ? I understand that X may have political opinions that differ from ours (Y and I are together in our work now), but, surely, beyond that, and remembering her from days of old, she is still a very decent human being ?

So here is Y's report, which I have every reason to trust completely:

I doubt that I knew X. in the days of which you speak. She should live and be well, but she very much hates me, and I have to admire her capacity to hate lastingly. Not many civilians have it. Has she gone all the way to Chomsky? That is far.

So here is the lesson about the snows of yesteryear, as I see it: those snows that looked so bright and white probably never were what they seemed; as is the case with so much that glitters clean and white, they more than likely always had plenty of dirty mud just below the surface.

The Imam and the Sergeant: Open Letter to Mr. Jeffrey Goldberg

2010-08-26T00:36:00.009-04:00

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

In your Atlantic article last week ("'Ground Zero' Immam...") you heap praise on Imam Rauf and excoriate his critics:

The right-wing campaign against the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" includes vicious personal attacks on the Muslim cleric who leads the Cordoba Initiative, the organization behind the plan. I know Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, and I know him to be a moderate, forward-leaning Muslim -- yes, it is true he has said things with which I disagree, but I have never expected him to function as a member of the Zionist Organization of America.

Now here is why I am writing. You no doubt know of Sgt. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was abducted from Israel by Hamas more than four years ago and who has been held hostage, incommunicado, for all this time. International groups like the Red Cross have been denied access to him. It is a barbaric action by these Islamists, and it is ongoing. So here is my thought. You tell us that Imam Rauf, while devoted to Islam, of course, is also both moderate and forward-leaning (whatever that means), and you tell us that he is a man you know. You vouch for him. So this is my suggestion. Get the Imam to prevail upon Hamas (a group the Imam has always refused to criticize), to prevail upon this group of fellow-Muslims to end their barbaric imprisonment of Sergeant Shalit.

Can you do that, Mr. Goldberg ? That would be, how can I put it, very forward-leaning on your part.

Sincerely,

Werner Cohn

Dystopia on Bedford Avenue

2010-08-25T22:18:00.011-04:00

Brooklyn College

Every transfer student to Brooklyn College must read one and only one book: "How Does it Feel to Be a Problem," by BC's own Associate Professor of English, Moustafa Bayoumi. I suppose that there is no penalty for reading more than this one book, but only one book is required. And all freshmen at BC are also required to read this book. Moreover, the students are then to hear Prof. Bayoumi, and only Professor Bayoumi, at a presentation of his views.

The book is all about Arab immigrants to Brooklyn. There are five or so case studies, with no indication of how typical these may be for Arab Americans in general. The case studies are then distilled in the author's thesis in an "afterword" as follows: Arab immigrants suffer here because of American imperialism. (For a moment the author hesitates between blaming American "hegemony" or American "imperialism," but he quickly decides for the latter, without explanation.) In any case, it is this U.S. imperialism that deprives the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination, since, he says, the US takes the side of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. And it is this pro-Israel US imperialism, if I understand Professor Bayoumi at all correctly, which makes the life of Brooklyn Arabs so difficult. That is the thesis, that is the book that every student at BC must read, and that is the only book that every incoming transfer student to BC must read.

So far so good. Surely Professor Bayoumi (known also as a regular writer for The Nation, as the editor of the Edward Said Reader, and as a tireless polemicist against Israel) has a right to his opinions, this being a free country. And of course BC has every right to require its students to study him. But does he have a right to have his book used as the only source in a discussion of a public issue, at an institution of higher learning ? And does BC have a moral right to give him a monopoly in the presentation of his views ?

I asked these very questions of Dean Donna Wilson of BC, and this is what she replied:

Each year professors in the English Department and I select a common reading for our entering students. We choose memoirs (a genre familiar to students) set in New York City, often reflecting an immigrant experience, and written by authors who are available to visit campus. Students in freshman composition respond to the common reading by writing about their own experiences, many of them published in ‘Telling Our Stories; Sharing our Lives’. This year we selected How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America by one of our own faculty members, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi, because it is a well-written collection of stories by and about young Arab Brooklynites whose experiences may be familiar to our students, their neighbors, or the students with whom they will study and work at Brooklyn College. We appreciate your concerns. Rest assured that Brooklyn College values tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view in all that we do.

Naturally I was happy to learn of Dean Wilson's commitment to tolerance, to diversity, and, most of all, to respect for differing points of view. So I wrote to her again, and again, and then again once more, suggesting that she provide some balance to Bayoumi's book, that she provide additional authors and additional speakers. I even suggested another author, Paul Berman, also resident in Brooklyn, also writing on Arab themes, also willing (I would assume) to speak to her students. And what did Dean Wilson reply to these repeated suggestions of mine ? You guessed it, she did not deign to reply at all.

As the saying goes in dystopia: Big Brother (or here, Big Sister) knows best.

Update, Aug. 30:

The Jewish Week in its online edition has additional material on Professor Bayoumi:

But Bayoumi , an associate professor at the school, also recently published “Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: the Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict.”

A publisher's blurb describes the book this way:

“In these pages, a range of activists, journalists, and analysts piece together the events that occurred that May night...Midnight on the Mavi Marmara reveals why the attack on Gaza Freedom Flotilla may just turn out to be Israel’s Selma, Alabama: the beginning of the end for an apartheid Palestine.”

The book includes contributions by prominent Israel critics – including Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Walt and Philip Weiss.

Everyman a Handyman !

2010-07-28T18:54:00.002-04:00

A. D. Gordon

I think that all youngsters should have instruction -- formal and informal -- in basic carpentry, plumbing, electricity, auto mechanics, and similar subjects, and I think that such instruction should be consistent and prolonged. My reasons here are only partially practical.

Young children do get training in soccer, in dancing, sometimes in chess, often in music, and sometimes even in cooking. But training with basic tools ? I have never heard of it. I suppose that farm children, or at least the boys, do get such training early on. But this does not seem to happen anywhere off the farm.

The practical need for such skills is obvious. When something goes wrong around the house or apartment, or in the car, those with basic handyman skills can take care of it more often than not. Obviously, anything serious needs a serious specialist, but, in my experience, most problems of life do not rise to that degree of difficulty.

Beyond the obvious convenience of being able to solve many of life's little problems, I believe that a habit of problem solving by the use of manual skills will help develop the practical aspects of intelligence. I would think that this is the case even though I have not looked into the technical literature on the subject, if any.

So much for the utilitarian considerations. There is also an ethical, moral, and philosophical side, which is not free of problems but which, in the end, is the decisive consideration for me.

Various movements in Europe, beginning roughly in the middle of the 19th century, spoke of an ethical, redeeming value of manual labor. A. D. Gordon (1856-1922) represented this strain in the early Zionist movement, and there is no doubt his thought and life had an important influence on the kibbutzim and continue to influence aspects of Israeli thought today. Elsewhere, very similar ideas of Thoreau, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Marx, the anarchists, and many others, constitute one of the living legacies in Western thought.

Much of this legacy is shoddy or worse. The totalitarian movements, both Nazi and Communist, adapted snippets of manual-labor worship as part of their propaganda (consider, for instance, the "proletarian art" of the Stalin era, and the similar esthetic of the Nazi art scene). And, at least since Marx's 1844 essay "The Jewish Question," it became a staple of certain left-wing (and later Nazi) propaganda to accuse the Jews of being "parasites" because Jewish occupations were seldom manual.

So the broad "religion of [manual] labor" (a phrase associated with the thought of A. D. Gordon) had connections with all the horrors of the last two centuries. Nevertheless, I would maintain, the notion of manual work as an ethically positive should not be dismissed on account of the perversions of this idea by the totalitarians.

I do get uneasy when some of the young people that I encounter are too exclusively engrossed by techniques of amassing money and status -- the study of business administration, for example. Obviously not all bookish work in schools of business administration -- and certainly not the bookish work required for mastery in other branches of scholarship -- is to be suspected on ethical grounds. But I would like to see more of a general appreciation of manual skills to be acquired for their own sake, or at least for practical ends that are separate from those of advancing in the eyes of the world.

I cannot prove that effort and time spent on developing manual skills will make people better human beings. I cannot prove it, but I believe it nonetheless.

So -- everyman, every girl and every boy -- a handyman !

Yivo's Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe

2010-07-11T17:07:00.003-04:00

A few months ago there occurred an event in Jewish scholarship that was not marked as it should have been: the publication of "The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe," edited in two volumes by Gershon Hundert.

A great review of this work by Professor Bernard Wasserstein, in itself a monument to Jewish scholarship, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of December 18-25, 2009. Click here for this review-article.

And here is the best part: the whole of this important work is available on-line to the public, free of charge, courtesy of YIVO. Our profound thanks must go to these folks on West 16th Street. Click here to consult the book.

Larry King interviews Bibi Netanyahu

2010-07-08T20:29:00.002-04:00

Archives of Medical Ethics

2010-07-05T13:21:00.002-04:00

One day, she confronted a woman and her mother, who were getting into an illegally parked black sedan with medical license plates, which often had a placard in the window. "I said, 'How do you like your parking space?'" the executive recalled. "And she said, 'I went to school for many years and worked very hard for this.' And I said, 'For a parking space?' And she said, 'Yes.' And her mother said to her, 'Close the window!'"
---Lizzi Widdicombe, The New Yorker, Jan. 18, 2010

Israel and Its Arab Neighbors

2010-06-28T00:13:00.003-04:00

http://www.justpeaceforisrael.com/

Surprise ! Hitler less than truthful (and then there is Professor Khalidi)

2010-06-22T13:16:00.015-04:00

Sixty-nine years ago today, the Nazi armies started their surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. I was a boy of fifteen at the time, and my strongest memory of the day was this: I was wondering what the (American) Stalinists would say to THAT ! Well , right on cue and within hours, they changed their front organization "American Peace Mobilization" (which advocated staying out of the war) to the "American People's Mobilization" (which demanded and full and energetic participation in the war).

Now, sixty-nine years later, a new detail has captured my interest. Hitler's proclamation to his people on that June 22 (read on the radio by Goebbels -- see the video above) contains the following interesting passage:

As early as 1936, according to the testimony of the American General Wood to a committee of the American House of Representatives, Churchill had said that Germany was becoming too strong again, and that it therefore had to be destroyed.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there was indeed an "American General Wood" who testified in Washington in 1936. (In that year Stanley Baldwin was prime minister of Britain, who preceded Neville Chamberlain, who preceded Winston Churchill ... but let that pass). What relevance would that have to the Nazi invasion of June 1941 ? It seems that Hitler meant to suggest that this statement from the horse's mouth, as if "by his own admission," would prove, in and of itself, the evil intentions of the British empire.

Hitler was not in the habit of supplying supporting footnotes to his declarations, so now I can only guess at the grain of truth that may be involved here. (I have not made a thorough search of all the scholarship on Hitler's statement). In that period there was indeed a retired Brigadier (one-star) General Robert E. Wood of the US Army, later chairman of Sears, Roebuck and, more importantly, a leader of the America First Committee. So I surmise that Wood may have appeared in Washington in 1936 to speak for his isolationist agenda. What he may or may not have known about Winston Churchill at the time would be anyone's guess. In any case, his testimony would hardly qualify as reasonable evidence concerning Britain's war aims five years later.

Now fast-forward to 2009. Israel is engaged in battle with Hamas in Gaza, and a New York professor, Rashid Khalidi, finds that another general, this time an Israeli, had some years before spilled the beans about Israel's "real" war aims. Here again there are words allegedly from the horse's mouth, so to speak "by his own admission," etc. As I pointed out at the time, even if an Israeli general had said years before what Khalid attributed to him now, that would hardly have been proof positive of what Israel tried to do in Gaza. As it turned, Khalidi's alleged quotation was so completely distorted that what he reported was the contrary of what the general had in fact said. The New York Times, which published Khalidi's statement to begin with, was forced to publish a retraction. (Khalidi himself, however, never retracted and never explained.)

(Click here to see my series of four previous posts on the Khalidi affair, giving all the details)

Now, for those folks who specialize in communication with the dead, can we get Mr. Hitler to retract his reference to "General Wood," or at least explain ? That is not likely, but no less likely than getting Professor Khalidi to do the right thing.

"Accountability" for our Schools ?

2010-06-17T23:02:00.004-04:00

Bill Gates: Working for Good or Not-so-Good ?

Let us say that a hospital were to institute incentive-based accountability for doctors as follows: 1) improvement in patient health is to be measured strictly by the numbers; 2) these numbers are to consist exclusively of fever measurements; 3) the more patients improve on fever charts, the more the doctors get paid; 4) whenever patients do not improve by a certain quota of temperature degrees, the doctors are fired to be replaced by newer, younger, more compliant and therefore "better" doctors.

What would happen under this system ? First, doctors would find ways of lowering temperatures (alcohol rubs, etc.) without improving underlying conditions. But even if temperature figures were not to get gamed in this way, any improvement in fever scores could not reasonably be interpreted as improvement in the overall health of the patients.

Well, let us hope that no such "accountability" scheme will ever be used in a public health setting. But in education ? As Diane Ravitch points out in her brilliant new book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," it is exactly such misleading "accountability" that has taken over our education system.

First, standardized tests (which, like the fever thermometer, certainly have a place if intelligently used) are systematically gamed by teachers and administrators to get desired results. Even where used without deceptive intent, they cannot possibly tell us about the total quality of instruction.

Second, the extraordinary growth of charter schools has weakened the public education system. And nobody has shown that charter school results are superior to public education.

Third, gimmickry has taken over some of our largest school systems. Michelle Rhee, the young new chancellor of schools of the District of Columbia, symbolizes the new belief in quick fixes. With all of three years teaching experience of her own, she has formulated her educational philosophy as follows: a pupil's home background is irrelevant to education; neither poverty nor health nor parental input play any role; nor does a teacher's own background or education. Some teachers are just more effective, she holds, and it is these teachers she wishes to promote. All the others she fires, or tries to fire. Obama (who sends his own children to a very expensive private school) is among Ms. Rhee's many fans. Has her system worked, even in terms of higher test marks ? Not yet, as far as anyone can tell.

But the biggest bombshell of the book is its penultimate chapter, The Billionaire Boys' Club. Guess who is primarily responsible for pushing these pernicious ideas and for financing their adoption ? Among the three prime villains there is one I had up to now thought of as among the angels: Bill Gates of Microsoft, or rather Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Neither he, nor his associates of the Walton and Broad foundations, practice any of the precious accountability that they demand of others. Here are the ultra of the ultra rich, dispensing billions with profligate abandon, dominating educational practice through ill-advised projects, but with nary a side glance at the deeper issues involved in educating our children.

On these broader issues of educational philosophy, Ravitch has all the right instincts (see her last chapter), but she lacks depth. John Dewey, one of the towering figures of American educational thought, is not found in the index. And when it comes to multiple-choice tests -- the be-all and end-all of the new fixers -- Ravitch only skims the surface of necessary criticism.

OK, she hasn't quite written the book I would have liked her to write. But what she has done is giving us a tremendous wealth of detail on what goes on, and especially on what does not go on, in America's schools. For that she deserves our gratitude.

How smart are you ?

2010-05-23T23:15:00.008-04:00

How smart are you, I mean really ?

Here is a little test. There are ten questions. Each is worth the number of points shown in parentheses. For each correct answer you get the appropriate number of points. But here is the kicker: DO NOT GUESS. For each incorrect or incomplete answer there is a deduction of the number of points that is assigned to the question. Remember: there are no partial answers. To get the credit, the answer has to be complete and accurate. Any (substantial) error or incompleteness will earn you the full demerit.

For each statement, explain -- clearly and thoroughly -- what it most likely means, and also give examples of how it could be applied. Give as much detail as necessary, but no more.

1. “Other things being equal, it is expected that X causes Y.” (2)

2. “It was found that the law regulating X had unexpected consequences.”(2)

3. “There is only a weak correlation between X and Y.” (7)

4. “Most reviewers were favorable, but, even among the supporters of the work, there were reservations.” (1)

5. “The possibility for this happening is very remote.” (1)

6. “This is an empirical question.” (5)

7. “What is the place of value in a world of fact ?” (8)

8. “Sometimes an ad hominem argument is appropriate, sometimes it is not.” (8)

9. “Anachronism is the enemy of historical understanding.” (10)

10. “Under certain circumstances, all differences are statistically significant.” (13)

Any score of one or more is good, actually. A score of 57, the maximum, means that you have probably cheated. (Just kidding; you cannot cheat. If you get a 57 you can be satisfied with yourself -- up to a point.)

Good luck !

Thanks to Shoshana and Ruthie Schoenfeld for their help in this project.

Groves of Sanctimony -- and not only in the RC church

2010-04-25T13:38:00.038-04:00

A.W.N. Pugin (1843) -- BBC

Tax hanky-panky; the "non-refundable" deposit; unenforceable waivers

Religious and quasi-religious institutions like to tell us what is ethical and what is not. But, aside from what they say, how do they in fact behave ? That can be quite a different story, a conundrum in fact. For poor Benedict XVI -- I feel that I have a special relationship to him because we were both born in the same country within a few months of one another -- for this poor Pope, who has inherited a mess that is mostly not of his own making, this conundrum probably disturbs his sleep.

The Pope now finds himself in the glaring light of worldwide publicity. New revelations appear constantly, seemingly from everywhere, about Catholic pastors, Catholic bishops, Catholic cardinals even, who are said have transgressed in ways strictly forbidden by Canon Law. Obviously there is more than a bit of Schadenfreude in all this publicity, a point stressed by Catholic apologists. And equally obviously, there is a real moral problem as well.

Compared to these alleged high crimes and misdemeanors in the Catholic hierarchy, certain garden-variety hypocrisies, chicaneries, and sanctimonious practices seem hardly worth mentioning. But obviously these almost-routine practices, generally not reaching the level of spectacular crime, nevertheless need the warming sunlight of public knowledge.

Tax Hanky Panky

Here are excerpts from the website of Camp Ramah of the Berkshires, a non-profit group that is directed by a rabbi and whose office is located at the (Conservative) Jewish Theological Seminary:

Camp Improvement Fund *. An additional $500 will be added to each family’s account as an annual, voluntary, tax-deductible contribution to the Camp Improvement Fund. This is an amount essential to the development and maintenance of Camp Ramah and is included as a donation to ensure tax deductibility for your benefit. As with all similar tax-deductible contributions, these payments may qualify for your employer’s matching gift program. Please forward the appropriate form if this option is available to you.

For your benefit. Right. Under our tax laws, "no goods or services" may be provided for a "contribution" to enjoy tax deductibility. So this "voluntary" CIF fee is first listed as a "fee," apparently part and parcel of the required payments for this camp, and is then called "voluntary." Which is it ? Between the wink and the nod, what is the message ? The "fee" part seems to be directed to the parent, the "voluntary" to pesky IRS investigators. So what these religious guides here teach, by example, is how to speak with forked tongues.

It is of course an open secret that many non-profit groups abuse the tax laws by providing tax-deduction receipts for what in fact are goods and services that they render, but rarely is the practice so blatantly advertised, on the internet no less.

The "non-refundable deposit" and other fees for services that are not performed

• A non-refundable enrollment deposit [of $725.00] is required at the time of acceptance. Website of Friends Seminary, New York

· Children will be dismissed early from camp for attempting to harm others, leaving the cabin after curfew, attempting to run away or for disruptive behavior.
· Refunds are not issued for children who are dismissed early due to disruptive behavior.
· The Camp Director makes the final decision on early dismissals.
Website of Long Point Camp, Salvation Army

Camper Withdrawals. No tuition refunds will be made for withdrawals after the start of camp that are initiated by parents without the concurrence of camp or if a camper is sent home due to behavioral misconduct. For other withdrawals, a prorated portion of the tuition will be refunded after deducting a withdrawal fee of half the tuition. (Conservative Jewish) Camp Ramah (Berkshires) website

"Behavioral misconduct" ? Yes, obviously, that kind, the behavioral kind of misconduct needs to be punished by a religious camp. But alas, abuse of the English language is the least egregious thing here. Non-profit schools and summer camps, including those run by religious groups, often give warnings to prospective parents: generally, once fees are paid they will not be returned, or will only be partially returned, even though no services are performed by the institution for these often considerable sums of money. The groups also frequently demand sizable deposits before enrollment, often with a warning that such deposits are non-refundable, or even "not refundable under any circumstances."

What is disturbing about these practices is that no attempt is made to relate these considerable sums to actual damages that may have been incurred by the institutions. Restitution of damages that are caused by early withdrawal, etc., would be rational demands and would have a strong basis in law. But a refusal to return deposits when there are no actual damages, or when such damages are smaller than the sums withheld, such refusal is illegal, and no agreement that a parent may have signed to that effect is enforceable. Parents should always demand a return of any such fees; if they do, they will regularly be vindicated in the courts.

Here are two cases that illustrate how courts have dealt with the issue:

Gunderson v Park West Montessori

Pacheco v Scoblionko

Obviously the many lawyers associated with these religious groups know very well -- the legal issue is beyond dispute -- that these practices are illegal, and that, if brought before the courts, they will lose. So why do they persist in these unconscionable demands ?

Unenforceable waivers

I hereby give permission for this youth to attend and participate in
___________________________________. I have familiarized myself with the expected activities and understand the possible risk involved. Permission is also given for the person named above to ride in any vehicle designated by the adult in charge during this event. If a problem occurs I assume all transportation cost for my young person. I understand that the participant is expected to obey the general guidelines for behavior: that the instructions of the adult(s) in charge must be respected and obeyed and that NO alcohol, illegal drugs or sexual misconduct will be permitted at this event. I will take no civil or legal action against the adult(s) in charge of this event. Website of Episcopal Diocese, Western New York

Camps and schools, soccer teams, all kinds of "youth-serving" organizations, both religious and secular, regularly demand that parents sign waivers to release them from their legal responsibilities in negligence cases. Such waivers are proper and enforceable in the case of adults but not in the case of minors. Professors Richard B. Malamud and John Karayan cite the legal doctrine as follows: "Minors can waive nothing. In the law they are helpless, so much so that their representatives can waive nothing for them." As their article makes clear, the courts will not honor such waivers, since parents do not have the power to grant them.

So why, knowing that the courts will not enforce them, do the lawyers of these groups -- secular as well as religious -- persist in demanding them from parents as a condition for their children's participation in recreational pursuits ? Do these lawyers act in good faith ? Do they, in fact, practice the integrity that their groups preach ?

Still more groves of sanctimony:

Sidwell Friends School

Jewish philanthropy

New Israel Fund

I own a lot of copyrights, and here are the benefits that I derive ....

2010-04-17T12:18:00.006-04:00

Logo of US Copyright Office

During my academic career I would write scholarly articles from time to time and see them published in the periodical literature devoted to such work. I was rarely paid in money, but the gratification of seeing my work in print, and of contributing to the scholarly conversation was more than enough compensation.

But there was an additional, legal gratification: absent an explicit contract to the contrary, copyright remains with the writer. So now I own quite a few copyrights, and here are the benefits that I derive from them:

In this age of computerization, not a few of my old articles are available in the data bases of a number of well-known publishers. So I can find much of my old work there any time I want to refer to it. I can find it there, but as I learned to my chagrin, it is generally not free. Since I never gave permission for my work to be sold by others, I approached a number of these publishers. Look, I said, this work is mine. You sell it without my permission. Tell you what, I said to a number of them, I will give you permission to keep using my work if, by way of compensation, you will give me free access to your data base.

In not a single case have any of these publishers -- a very famous university press among them -- agreed to my proposal. I generally get a letter back saying that the matter is being referred to their legal department, or whatever, and then I never hear from them again.

The one exception is the well-known conservative magazine Commentary, to which I contributed a few very minor items more than fifty years ago, back when it was not at all conservative. This is what I wrote on October 2 of last year:

Some fifty years ago I contributed some book reviews to Commentary. Whatever the custom may be now, at that time I retained the copyright to this material, since, absent an explicit contract to the contrary, the copyright automatically belongs to the author. Now it appears that you sell access to these reviews on your website, even though these rights are not yours to sell. I was asked to pay for access to my own property !

I am willing to negotiate an arrangement under which I would grant you rights to sell access to my work in return for my having free usage of your archives.

In any case, please note that, as of now, you are infringing on my intellectual property rights.

Kindest regards, and best wishes for the new year.

Well, it did not take long to get an answer from the good people of Commentary. Here is what they wrote back, on October 5:

Dear Werner Cohn:

I apologize for any misunderstanding. We will remove your work from our website as soon as possible.

I hope you have a sweet new year.

Well, I can't say that I was happy with this answer, but at least, I thought, they are doing the right thing: they know they are infringing on my property rights, and they agree to cease and desist, in full compliance with their own (current) private-property principles.

But there is a funny ending to this story. They have indeed removed my name from an old book review of mine, but the review itself is still there, published as "Reviewed by [blank]." No, I am not making this up. Click here.

UPDATE, about three hours later from the above:
Whoever says that Commentary has no shame is wrong, completely wrong. After I posted the above, and sent a link to Mr. John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine, lo and behold, a couple of hours later, two of my ancient book reviews have disappeared from the on-line archive of the magazine. And all that happened on shabat. Great work, John P. !

The Salary Scandal in Jewish Philanthropy

2010-04-11T15:01:00.011-04:00

This is an old story, and bringing it up once again, by an obscure blogger like me, is not likely to cure the problem. But please ... why are these gentlemen (mainly) of the "Jewish civil service" paid as they are ?

In the chart above, I've pulled out salaries in excess of $500,000 in the world of Jewish philanthropy (see the excellent site of the Chronicle of Philanthropy), but this is just a tip of the iceberg of excessive payments to Big Shots, Jewish and otherwise. No more than one half of one percent of the American workforce receives this much (oops, I almost said "earns this much"). Ordinary people like you and me earn far, far less. We are regularly asked to contribute to groups like UJA-Federation, in the name of helping the less fortunate. Is there any rhyme or reason, or any decency whatsoever, in using our contributions to support the lifestyles of the upper one half of one percent ? There is not.

The apologists of such salaries invariably say that it is not possible to get "good people" to work for less. The same argument was advanced on behalf of the salaries and bonuses paid to the "good people" whose incompetence gave us the current recession.

Can you get "good people" to work for non-stratospheric salaries ? The President of the United States ($400,000), the federal judges ($170,000), officials of the Salvation Army ($216,000), Jesuit priests who lead major universities (room and board), all these seem willing enough to work for reasonable incomes. Moreover, scholars who have looked for empirical evidence to support stratospheric incomes have found none: there is simply no evidence that such salaries "are needed."

As it happens, the highest salary at the Salvation Army is $216,000. That is one fifth of the salary paid to the president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. On the other hand, the yearly income of the Salvation Army is $3,237,768,000, which happens to be fifty times as much as that of the Jewish Federation of LA. In other words, Sally Anne gets 250 times more value for her money than does the Jewish Federation of LA.

No, there is no valid argument "from necessity" for the high salaries at Jewish institutions. But in any case, whatever pragmatic reasons could be found or invented to justify such payments, the most important thing about these payments, in my view, is that they are unseemly.

Finally, I must hasten to add that certain payments to officials of elite universities are still more shocking than these abuses at Jewish groups. Please study the Chronicle of Philanthropy materials to which I have linked above.

Stalin, Robeson, and Me

2010-03-24T22:26:00.006-04:00

Fifty-seven years ago this month Joseph Stalin died in Moscow, on March 5, 1953. I was a sociology graduate student, aged 26, just recently married, not yet a father (though expecting). Those Stalinists in New York, whom I had encountered at CCNY and elsewhere, were of professional interest to me (as were Jehovah's Witnesses, the Plymouth Brethren, etc. etc.). How would the Stalinists react to the death of their "great leader" ? I decided to make some observations.

By coincidence, a large public meeting had previously been planned by one of the Communist front organizations to take place on what turned out to be a day or two after Stalin's death. The venue was a large hall in Harlem, and Paul Robeson (whom the Communists had not yet revealed as a secret party member) was the scheduled speaker. I decided to attend. Would there be tears for the newly-late leader ? Would there be great public grief ? I wanted to know and I went up to Harlem to find out.

What a surprise ! The comrades arrived on time, maybe a couple of thousand, and sat politely through routine speeches without there being a single mention of Stalin. Finally Paul Robeson got up, and in the first sentence of his speech declaimed the death of "the great Stalin." Well, at that moment there was loud applause, a standing applause, but applause no different from that accompanying other points that the various CP speakers had emphasized.

I concluded that these New York Stalinists were devoted to their party and its discipline, but that they lacked any warm emotional tie to the man whom they had seen praised, so many times, in the Daily Worker and elsewhere, as Coryphaeus of Science, Father of Nations, Brilliant Genius of Humanity, Great Architect of Communism, Gardener of Human Happiness. The cult of personality, I concluded, was thin and arid, at least among the New York comrades.

The Name Changers

2010-02-16T19:20:00.003-05:00

ricodebuco.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/two-faced/

No no no. This picture, designed by Rico de Buco, does not at all represent my view of people who have changed their names, say from an ancestral "Cohn" to a less incriminating "Collins." The sentiment suggested by the picture is an exaggeration of my views, at best. But, for what it's worth, here is my article on the subject, now more than twenty-five years old.

Child slaves in Haiti: The Restaveks

2010-02-15T00:31:00.004-05:00

The institution of "restavek" (from the French "reste avec," 'stay with') in Haiti, in which hundreds of thousands of poor children are given into a form of slavery, is no secret whatsoever. Every Haitian is well acquainted with it, books have been written about it ... and yet, there seems to be no international concern.

For those who would like to learn more, there is the book by Jean-Robert Cadet, himself a former restavek, and the Restavek Foundation he has founded.

Take a look at the CNN video:

Are some people good, others bad ?

2010-02-10T17:26:00.004-05:00

People aren't either good or bad. It's circumstances that differ: some are more fortunate, more educated, richer or healthier, etc. etc., than others. Do not make value judgement. Do not be moralistic.

That is the doctrine of the college-educated. But in real life all people speak of "nice guys," of "absolute jerks," etc.

What to make of it ? Here are my answers, or at least my reflections:

Bad Character, Good character

Who are the Jews ? What do they do ?

2010-01-20T16:14:00.004-05:00

Photo by Werner Cohn

"Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction." -- David Brooks, NY Times, Jan. 11, 2010

Coptic Christians in New York Protest Persecutions by Muslims

2010-01-20T12:03:00.006-05:00

Photo by Werner Cohn

January 19, 2010: demonstration in front of the UN. The crowd, mostly Coptic Christians, protested the killing of their fellow Copts in the Egyptian town of Nagaa Hammadi on January 6, just as the community prepared for the celebration of their Christmas. There are more pictures here.

But the Copts won't get much attention. After all, they are Christians. What "progressives" worry about the survival of a Christian church or, for that matter, of pious Christian lives? -- Marty Peretz

On Indulgences and Torah Scrolls

2009-12-28T22:47:00.008-05:00

Let's say that a Roman Catholic diocese needs to obtain a mortgage loan on its property. And let's also say that times are bad, that unemployment is high, and that the faithful of the diocese might find it hard to keep up regular contributions. That would mean that the diocese could find it difficult to make monthly payments on the loan. The church buildings, representing the security for the loan, are difficult to sell, making a foreclosure on the mortgage impractical. So here is an idea that might come up in the minds of the bank lawyers: have the diocese pledge not only the churches' real estate, but also its "personal property," property that is not real estate.

What sort of "personal property" does a diocese own ? Well, it could always sell indulgences, couldn't it ?

No, of course it could not. Canon law forbids it, and civil law, probably, forbids it also. Most of all, as far as I know, there is no active market in indulgences, so this lack of a market, if nothing else, would make the idea impractical. But before this fact was determined by the mortgage bankers, I think they might well have entertained the idea.

What makes me say this ? Well, I have before me an actual mortgage agreement that mortgage lawyers concocted for a synagogue, in which I find the following:

... which loan shall be secured by a mortgage on the Congregation's premises and a security interest on all items of personal property used at or related to the Congregation's premises ...

One of the reasons that lawyers like to use obscure legal terms is that laymen cannot understand them. The hapless congregants of this synagogue approved the language, but how many of them understood that they were mortgaging their sacred Torah scrolls ? As I said, "personal property" means all property that is not real estate. What does a synagogue own in this regard that has value ? Used books, used computers ? Hardly. But Torah scrolls have a market value of between $20,000 and $60,000 each, so in the case at hand the value of the scrolls might be half a million dollars. Furthermore, in case of foreclosure, Torah scrolls are a great deal more marketable than synagogue buildings ...

There is of course a catch to all this, but it isn't a catch that seems to have worried either the mortgage bankers or the congregation's board: Jewish law, halakha, forbids the trafficking in Torah scrolls, sifrei torah. Moreover, even to those who are either not versed in halakha or are fairly indifferent to its many provisions, there is something unusual in this piece of "creative financing" that should have raised red flags. As it happens, the involvement of "personal property" in connection with a real estate loan, especially in the case of synagogues, has so far been unknown.

Now I have to say something that I believe is generally true, but is also no doubt unfair to some honest and hard-working people. This is it: red flags are not popular among creative-finance lawyers. It is said about mortgage bankers (a good many of them), and their lawyers (a good many of these), that they each have one glass eye, and that you can always tell which eye it is because it is the one that inspires more confidence in its owner's probity.

Hate crimes USA: Jews are the most targeted

2009-12-28T11:35:00.007-05:00

# of offenses = number of "hate crimes" reported by U.S. Department of Justice for 2008

size of target = for the "racial" groups, US Census data; for the religious groups, poll data of self-identified religious adherents, corrected to include both children and adults; all rounded to nearest million, except that for Jews and Muslims the rounding is to the nearest 100,000.

Interpretation: Proportionately, Jews were targeted more than three times as often as Blacks, more than four times as often as Muslims.

The Non-Accountability of Religious Groups

2009-12-08T17:47:00.012-05:00

carlbrockstudio.com/Pawley_s_and_Fripp.html

No, it is probably not true that religious groups in this country are robbing us blind. But we cannot be sure, because, inexplicably, our laws have loopholes that prevent the government from effectively checking on the finances of churches, synagogues, and mosques, on how these groups manage or mismanage the very considerable public funds with which they are entrusted by way of tax exemptions and tax deductibility of donations.

Does it ever happen, for example, that a religious group will offer a receipt for a donation for a payment which was not in fact a voluntary contribution but rather a payment for some sort of service, say a church-catered wedding or individual religious tutoring ? Issuing a donation-receipt under such circumstances would be illegal but under current auditing rules of the IRS and state agencies, it would be almost impossible to detect.

I have outlined the contours of the problem in the first part of a law review article entitled "When the Constitution Fails on Church and State: Two Case Studies," 6 Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, 1.2 (2005). Here I reproduce Sections 5-15 of this article. I have omitted the numerous footnotes; they contain supporting detail and and can be consulted by clicking on the link shown above.

I. THE NON-ACCOUNTABILITY OF RELIGIOUS GROUPS

[5] The United States in recent years have seen well-publicized scandals in the
Catholic Church, primarily concerning sex, but also involving concomitant financial
irregularities. The public discussion surrounding this matter has not touched upon the fact the Catholic Church, like all other religious groups, is given very unusual immunity from financial reporting to the government and from most auditing by the government.

[6] The federal religious immunities in the IRC are found in Sections
508(a)(c)(1)(a), 6033, and 7611, and have a long history, going back at least to the
beginning of the twentieth century. They are noteworthy because they benefit religious groups and not other non-profit entities (except by way of certain de minimis provisions).

[7] Section 508 immunity provides that new religious groups (and small secular
groups that can qualify under a de minimis rule) need not file an application to qualify for tax exemption. Most non-profit groups must file a Form 1023 to obtain recognition as a tax-exempt entity. This form asks searching questions about the group's finances angovernance. But churches and synagogues need not file; they are considered tax exempt on their own say-so. This is a very significant exemption from accountability.

[8] However, Form 1023 may be filed by churches on a voluntary basis. A
church that takes this route will be asked, in addition to the questions that are applicable to all non-profits, a special group of questions contained in “Schedule A”, which are designed to distinguish bona fide churches from illegal schemes.16 The logic, if any, of Schedule A is not obvious. If a group considers itself a church or synagogue it need not file such information unless it decides to do so voluntarily, in which case it will have its bona fides questioned; those declining the voluntary filing have their bona fides assumed.

[9] Nor are the advantages of filing [to a church] obvious. A publication by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (the Reform movement) recommends voluntary filing, partly because it results in a listing by the IRS's Publication 78. Such listing does confer more visibility to a group, and perhaps enhances its credibility among prospective donors, but does not enhance a church's tax status or any other legal prerogative. Many churches and synagogues are listed in this mammoth book but many are not. There does not seem to be an easy way to estimate the extent of this voluntary compliance.

[10] The Section 6033 and 7611 exemptions free churches from the periodic
financial reporting that is required of other non-profit groups. These exemptions
benefit "churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions and associations of
churches" (as well as secular groups with annual gross receipts of less than $5000) and are thus more narrowly drawn than certain other definitions of "religion." Obviously, a mosque and a synagogue is a "church" for this purpose, but certain other church-related groups are not.

[11] The § 6033 exemption is particularly significant and far-reaching because it
affects not only the targeted groups but also the public at large. At issue is the famous IRS Form 990, which for all other non-profit groups affords a revealing and very accessible picture of how non-profit groups manage their money. Secular non-profit groups are required to file this form annually, but churches are not. Most states require that the secular groups operating within their borders also file a copy of the 990 with the state government. Religious groups, however, are generally exempt from these state filings.

[12] The philosophy behind Form 990 is as follows: in return for the many
privileges that the government bestows on non-profit organizations -- income tax
exemption, exemption from property taxes, and tax deductibility of donations, the
government asks for the disclosure of financial information, akin to, but much less
extensive than the information required of publicly owned corporations. Since the
various tax privileges of these non-profit groups may be considered tax expenditures by government on all levels, non-profit groups may be said to receive considerable public funds and should be held accountable for such funds.

[13] The Form 990 filings of all the major non-profit organizations are now widely
available in various publications and on the Internet. They form the basis for ratings given to nonprofit groups by various "watchdog" groups who are interested in how efficiently the charities and other nonprofit groups are managed. The information required on Form 990 includes total receipts, sources of such receipts, expenditures by type and recipient, salaries of top officials, and information on self-dealing operations among board and staff members. The IRC provides penalties for self-dealing, for example a property sold by a board member to the organization at an inflated price. Churches do not have to file such information. Consequently, it is possible that the inappropriate expenditures surrounding the sex scandal in the Catholic Church could not have been as easily kept secret if the Church had been required annually to file Form 990.

[14] The Form 990 disclosure of salaries has attracted particular attention in a
report published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This kind of publicity is likely to
have a deterrent effect on excessive salaries. Again, this public disclosure is not required of religious bodies. In addition, the § 7611 exemption frees churches from routine auditing by the IRS. The Service can do audits, but only for cause, and then only with restrictions that do not apply to secular groups.

[15] Taken together, these Code exemptions create the impression that Congress
regards religious folk as more trustworthy than non-religious folk and less in need of
accountability. As we shall see below, most of the states have followed these Federal
exemptions from accountability. Concerning the state exemptions, Catherine Knight
observes:
[a] church officer who dips into the collection plate may be
held accountable on Judgment Day, but what about a
reckoning in this life? . . . The ability of the attorneys
general of the various states or of church members to
regulate the fiscal decisions of the church's corporate
directors or officers is mired in statutory limitations and
constitutional questions. As a result, religious corporations
are largely self-regulated.
Was Congress right to assume that, when acting under color of church, man's probity is beyond question? ...

While, as we have seen, IRS approval is not needed to qualify a religious group for 501(c)(3) status, obtaining such approval seems ludicrously simple. Professor Rob Reich of Stanford has issued a report on the topic: "Anything Goes." The report has an appendix listing 60 "most eccentric" groups that have managed to obtain IRS approval, for instance groups who impersonate nuns.

The New York Times tells the Swiss: You Are Disgraceful

2009-12-01T22:25:00.004-05:00

Fifty-seven and a half percent of Swiss voters have approved an initiative that bans the building of minarets on Swiss territory. I personally do not see much merit in the proposal, and, had I been a Swiss voter, would probably have voted No. Now whatever the rights or wrongs of the proposal, it was a democratically-arrived decision, a peaceful action, subject, like all such decisions, to discussion and possible reversal in the future.

But to judge by the hysterical and incendiary editorial of the New York Times, this decision by Swiss voters was the moral equivalent of an Islamist suicide attack:

Disgraceful. That is the only way to describe the success of a right-wing initiative to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland, where 57 percent of voters cast ballots for a bigoted and mean-spirited measure..... the worst response to extremism and intolerance is extremism and intolerance.

No, this initiative does not constitute "extremism and intolerance" in the same way that, say, a suicide attack is "extremism and intolerance." The murder of innocent people is irreversible, while a democratic vote, in principle, is not.

The educated classes, in Switzerland and especially elsewhere, had condemned this initiative. Like the Sarah Palin phenomenon in the United States, the vote constituted a revolt by the Swiss electorate, more in the rural districts than in the cities, against the learned advice of their enlightened betters. The vote was also a response to perceived threats from Islamic immigrants to traditional lifestyles. The Swiss-based journalist Daniel Ammann, without in any way endorsing the initiative, does what the finger-wagging New York Times editorialists cannot get themselves to do; he provides some cultural context to the vote:

A majority of Swiss voters obviously feels that there are problems with Muslim integration into civil society at the moment. This vague sentiment was fueled by a number of incidents over the last years: The former Imam of a mosque in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, a Swiss citizen by the way, publicly justified the stoning of adulterers or the punitive amputation of the hand of a thief. Muslim parents prevented their daughters from attending swimming classes, gymnastics or summer camps in public schools because they didn't want their girls to be together with boys. Media reports about forced marriages, female genital mutilations and "honor killings" of Muslim women - all confirmed by authorities or in court -- came as a shocking surprise. A university professor even went as far as to suggest in an official publication of a federal commission to introduce elements of the Sharia, the Muslim legal system, into Switzerland.

To repeat, neither Ammann nor I would have voted for this initiative. But, at the very least, let's try to go beyond condemnation to understanding.

Standardized Testing and Mayor Mike

2009-11-30T12:35:00.010-05:00

www.college-cram.com/study/rudy/files/30

New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just announced that he will place still greater emphasis on the use of standardized testing in his administration of the public schools.

There are people, easily located on the Web, who oppose any and all use of standardized testing in the schools. I am not one of these. There is and there will continue to be an important place for the intelligent and critical use of standardized testing in education. But as I read the recent pronouncements from City Hall and the White House, I fear that the trend is away from intelligence and critical examination of these tests, toward an ever increasing acceptance of them at face value, as completely reliable measures of success in the schools. The about-face by Obama, from pre-election statements that signaled a much more critical approach, is especially worrying.

Much of the political language pushing the primacy of standardized testing borrows from economic notions of "efficiency." As Henry Ford found, an assembly line, based on interchangeable parts, allows for the building of more and cheaper automobiles. Make sure the line runs smoothly, make sure the right worker tightens the right bolt at the right time, and out it comes: the well-running Model T. Why not use such methods to get Johnny to produce mastery of the Three R's, efficiently, thoroughly, and without the bothersome interference of teachers' unions ? (Henry Ford thought of the UAW much as the standardized-test enthusiasts of today think of the UFT.)

Some standardized tests are better than others, some test more, others less, for underlying abilities that are relevant to what we want from education. In any case, each test, and each use of a test, needs to be critically examined: does it do what we want ? To what extent does it do this ?
But beyond the virtues, or otherwise, of specific uses of these tests, there are some inherent limitations to which its critics point. Here are just some of these:

1) Experienced teachers say that it is almost impossible to eliminate widespread cheating on standardized tests, by students, teachers, and even administrators. This does not mean that these tests should be abolished, but it does mean that greater caution needs to shown in their interpretation.

2) It is probably impossible to test, in the context of these standardized measures, for some of the most important results of a humane education:

a. A critical approach to book learning. No, it's not only Wikipedia that can mislead you -- any established source is error-prone, bias-prone. Our children need to learn, as a matter of intellectual habit, to check one source against many others.

b. A realization that appearance is not necessarily reality. A man has degrees, titles, positions; another has none. The two get into an argument. Who is right, and why ? Our children should learn, more and more as they progress through the grades, that not everything that glitters is gold.

3) The more there is an emphasis on standardized tests, the more teachers will be pressured to "teach for The Test." Here is a teacher, say of American history, who knows that a deeper and better understanding of the Civil War requires generous side-glances at European society, at the American and European literature of the day, at Africa and its cultures. But these things will not be "on The Test." What is he to do ? Furnish what he knows is the better education, or teach, as Henry Ford would no doubt counsel, to "produce results," efficiently, i.e. results on The Test ? What do you think he will do ?

Read statement by United Federation of Teachers

Dell Hymes, RIP

2009-11-24T20:17:00.003-05:00

Dell Hymes, one of the great American linguists, has died at the age of 82.

Hymes was one of the great influences on me as I did my field work on Gypsies. He was a linguist, an anthropologist, and never wavered from his devotion to empirical research as the foundation of the study of language, that is to say language in the context culture. In this he differed radically from the speculative, armchair "linguists" of today.

Read Margalit Fox's obit in the New York Times of 11/22/09.

Read the article in Reed Magazine (Hymes was a graduate of Reed) by Rebecca Koffman, Winter 2008.

The Laogai of China

2009-11-08T00:48:00.007-05:00

Chongqing (AsiaNews/CHRD)

New Yorkers who understand French can subscribe to the French TV network TV 5 Monde and often get information that American media ignore. So tonight we heard about the ongoing totalitarian repression in China, something that should not have surprised me, but it did, just because we do not hear much about it. It's not a secret, there is quite a bit of information on the internet, yet for all the American public knows, "Laogai" may as well be a secret. There are millions -- perhaps as many as seven million -- prisoners in forced labor camps all over China. The Chinese bureaucratic term Laogai, "reform through labor," has now entered European languages to mean what it in fact is: brutal political and cultural repression There is a Laogai Research Foundation, a Laogai Museum in Washington (whose founder was Harry Wu), and a small band of human rights activists who take an interest. The prisoners are persons suspected of political or cultural or religious incorrectness, or in some cases are people who have committed criminal acts.

Could we perhaps get Ms. Clinton to think about Laogai the next time she hobnobs with Chinese Communist diplomats ? Or perhaps Mr. Obama might keep it mind at some diplomatic cocktail party, while sipping a cocktail with the Chinese ambassador ? He should be warned that a Chinese Communist diplomat in Berlin became furious and abusive after the Bundestag voted to condemn Laogai a couple of years ago.

Update, Nov. 17, 2009. Harry Wu to Obama: remember human rights on your visit !

Moyers, Goldstone, and the Shackled Hands

2009-11-05T10:48:00.021-05:00

Some six weeks ago, on Wednesday, September 23, Bill Moyers interviewed Judge Richard Goldstone on the PBS "Journal." The judge had just released his Report in which he had accused Israel (and, much less urgently, Hamas) of "war crimes" in the conduct of the 2008-9 Gaza war.

(It should be noted parenthetically that Judge Goldstone has made numerous Recommendations to Israel for improving its behavior, his Report has nothing to recommend to Hamas, at least not to Hamas by name.)

As I listened to these two gentlemen in September, Moyers and Goldstone -- each more compassionate than the other, each more exuding compassion and good will than the other -- one accusation struck me as the most frightening of them all: it appears that Israel, in Goldstone's telling, had actually and deliberately shot prisoners to death whose hands were shackled behind them. The image stuck in my mind. No, I didn't believe that Jewish boys, even in the midst of war, would deliberately shoot captured and "shackled" men to death. And yet ... Jews, God knows, are no angels. Some are terribly cruel, not doubt. Could a terrible thing like this have happened ? I decided to look into the matter as much as I could. And I found out, as we shall see, that the best short answer to the question is that this alleged cruelty did not take place.

First of all, my memory played a trick on me. (I would suggest that others must have had the same experience.) I had remembered that, in the interview, Goldstone had actually used the words "shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them." It turns out that it wasn't Goldstone but Moyers who used the words, and that Goldstone -- shall I say merely ? -- that Goldstone assented to this telling of the story. Here (right below the video) is the relevant transcript:

BILL MOYERS: Your report, as you know, basically accuses Israel of waging war on the entire population of Gaza.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: That's correct.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, there are allegations in here, some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who'd been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it's a damning indictment of Israel's conduct in Gaza, right?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I've really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report.

Now, in his Report itself, the accusation by the Judge is very far from what it appears to be in this interview.

First of all, nowhere that I can see does the Report accuse Israeli soldiers of shooting "people" (i.e. plural) whose hands were shackled. I did not read every word of this 575-page report, but I looked at every use of the words "tied," "shackled," and "bound." There was only one instance that I could find in which the Report alleges that an Arab prisoner died while his hands were bound, the case of Iyad al-Samouni, which the Report takes up in paragraphs 739-742. These tell a confused story, completely based on Palestinian sources, about which Goldstone himself, it seems, had some doubts:

741. While the fire directed at Iyad al-Samouni [in shackles] could have been intended to incapacitate rather than to kill, by threatening his family members and friends with lethal fire, the Israeli armed forces ensured that he did not receive lifesaving medical help. They deliberately let him bleed to death.

So, it turns out, there was no cold-blooded deliberate killing of "people," or even of one person, as far as the Judge's actual Report goes.

Judge Goldstone's Report, relying on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sources, paints the al-Samouni family as totally pacifist and innocent of terrorist activities. Other reports have claimed that this family has been involved in terrorist activities. On the whole, Judge Goldstone relies on biased sources, makes light of Hamas terror, and, overall, falls short of the blind justice that he is sworn to uphold. All that has been documented in the sources that I cite below. But in this case of "shackled hands" he has colluded with Bill Moyers in something that goes far beyond bias: a truly dreadful allegation, made orally on national TV, for which he could find no evidence in his own Report.

UPDATE (Feb. 3, 2010): Israeli Government Reply to Goldstone

Watch the debate at Brandeis University between Judge Goldstone and former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold

Read more about Goldstone and his Report:

goldstonereport.org

thegoldstonereport.com

Dershowitz's detailed case against Goldstone

Update 2/9/10: The Goldstone Report relied heavily on the work of extreme leftist groups in Israel. These groups were largely financed from abroad. Among their most important financial sources was the New York-based New Israel Fund, headed by the American-educated former member of Knesset, Naomi Chazan. Here is a full report of how NIF-financed groups contributed to the Goldstone bias.

Update 3/15/10: A very detailed response to Goldstone -- about 350 pages -- is now available from the Intelligence and Terrorism Information, an Israel NGO: "Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from Gaza."

Update 5/7/10: The Israeli press has uncovered sordid details about Goldstone's past, especially how, as an appellate judge for the apartheid regime, he routinely approved death sentences against Blacks.

Hannah Arendt

2009-10-19T11:53:00.006-04:00

I was 26 years old in 1952 when I devoted several weeks to a close study of Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism," which had appeared the previous year. I was a college graduate by then (from the then-famed CCNY), but otherwise innocent of the world of scholarship. "Origins" made a tremendous impression on me, as it did on many others at the time. Nobody was aware of, or would have cared if aware, her strange love life as the mistress of Heidegger.

First and perhaps foremost, "Origins" boldly proclaimed an equivalence between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. ( Since then specialists have pointed to the pitfalls in insisting on equivalence in history: two things are never exactly the same, and, it is now argued, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, while similar in many ways, were different in others.) To her great credit, Arendt went against the fashions of her time, a time when prevailing moods held the Soviet Union to be somehow on the Left and the Nazis on the Right. Of course, Arendt was neither the first nor the most incisive of the writers who insisted on the striking similarities between Soviet and Nazi domination.

The other noteworthy feature of Arendt's book, it struck me then and still strikes me now, was her observation that neither of the totalitarian movements could be explained by the self-interest of its supporters. The Marxist "materialist" explanations needed to be exposed. She was foremost in describing these movements as irrational and, in that sense, selfless. (Recent research, of course, has shown both self-interest and selfless "idealism" in these movements.)

Beyond these enduring aperçus, the book was full of what seemed to me erudite references to historical events and movements. Huge sections of the book were devoted to British and French history, and, I was led to believe, all this detail showed how profoundly educated the writer was, how deep a thinker. Now, more than half a century of commentaries by specialists, it is obvious to one and all that much if not all of Arendt's book place her into that category of know-all writers who start with having an idea (sometimes quite a good one) and then dress it up with whatever footnote references they can find to prove this idea. She had strong opinions, many of them valuable, but she had neither the inclination nor the scholarly habits to test these opinions.

A year or two after I studied her book, I enrolled in a graduate seminar with her at the New School. I thought then, and I think now, that she was the most arrogant person I ever met in my life, or at least tied for that position. She insisted that every one of her thoughts, no matter how fleeting or obviously ridiculous, be accepted as truth beyond any doubt.

Eleven years ago now, Walter Laqueur, in an indispensable article "The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator," shows many instances of a petulant narcissism in her personal and professional life, and also demonstrates the irrationality of the admiration that her writings have inspired since her death. He also shows how prone she was to anti-Jewish prejudices (being Jewish herself was no inhibition).

So what is new ? Plenty. The Times Literary Supplement of October 9, 2009, carries a lengthy article entitled "Blame the victim. Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: the historian and her sources," by the distinguished historian Bernard Wasserstein (I have not been able to find an on-line version of this piece.) Much of Laqueur's older criticism is amplified here, with much new detail of Arendt's personal anti-Semitism, her haughty relations with others, the unscholarly nature of her "Origins of Totalitarianism:"

Her conception of the dynamics of historical change was confused, a mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial. She was painfully ignorant of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy and had little grasp or interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote. She snapped up unconsidered trifles of evidence and inflated them into richly coloured balloons of generalization.

But Wasserstein's most telling criticism comes when he details Arendt's ignorant use of anti-Semitic sources to reach her generalizations about the nature of the Jews. Sometimes she relies on such sources just carelessly, but more often she seems malicious. We all know, of course, that some years after writing her "Origins," Arendt repeatedly insisted that groups of Jews, particularly those incarcerated by the Nazis, collaborated with Nazis in ways that, presumably, she herself never would. She didn't much like Jews, and she didn't seem to care that her personal tastes and prejudices, and not only about Jews, ruined her objectivity as a writer.

UPDATE, March 13, 2010: read "Where Hannah Arendt Went Wrong," by the distinguished Israeli scholar Shloma Avineri, in Haaretz Books of March 2010.

A new website devoted to the "Goldstone Report"

2009-10-15T10:47:00.005-04:00

There is a new website, Understanding the Goldstone Report. I find the site marked by sobriety and restraint, and think that it is an important resource that you will wish to consult. The site's sponsors outline the conclusions that they have reached about the Report, as follows:

The report violates international standards for inquries, including UN rules on fact-finding, replicating earlier UNHRC biased statements.
The Commission systematically favored witnesses and evidence put forward by anti-Israel advocates, and dismissed evidence and testimony that would undermine its case.
The commission relied extensively on mediating agencies, especially UN and NGOs, which have a documented hostility to Israel; the report reproduces earlier reports and claims from these agencies.
At the same time, the Commission inexplicably downplayed or ignored substantial evidence of Hamas’ commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of terror, including specifically its victimization of the Palestinian population by its use of human shields, civilian dress for combatants, and combat use of protected objects like ambulances, hospitals and mosques.
The Commission openly denies a presumption of innocence to the Israelis accused of crimes (while honoring Hamas’ presumed innocence) and acknowledges that it made accusations of crimes without proof that would stand up in court.
The report contains numerous gratuitous digressions into issues beyond the purview of a fact-finding commission that are inaccurate and profoundly hostile to Israel and Jews.
The Commission distorted legal standards, imposing on Israel standards that reverse their generally understood and applied meaning, while ignoring important rules of international law that put the onus of responsibility on an organization as base, by Goldstone’s own standards, as Hamas.

Here is the testimony of Col. Richard Kemp of the UK Army, Ret.

When the Authority Figures Improvise

2009-10-12T00:02:00.014-04:00

If a person doesn't know, should he improvise an answer, or should he admit that he doesn't know ?

Here is an example from the field of Jewish studies, one in which I am not expert at all. It concerns a problem I have encountered in the Hebrew prayer book, and I have made an effort to consult a number of experts with whose help, and that of books they recommended, I found what I believe to be the correct answer.

The problem arises from the daily Amidah prayer, part of which I reproduce here:

(Text, transliteration, and translation courtesy of a Christian group).

Now here is the problem. In the first line shown above, the prayer addresses G'd twice, each time asking, rhetorically, "who is like you ?," each time using a personal, second person pronoun-suffix. The first time the pronoun-suffix is used, " in "khamokha," G'd appears to be addressed as a male, but the second time, in "lakh," G'd appears to be a woman.

How is this apparent inconsistency to be explained ?

Ask people charged with being knowledgeable about such things, and you will get one of three answers:

1) I do not know.

2) Since G'd is neither male nor female, the writers of this prayer here indicate the gender neutrality of the deity by alternating the grammatical gender indicators. Some variation of this is the most commonly elicited answer. It happens to be ignorant, wrong, and unacceptable from one whose professional responsibility is to either know better or, at least, to understand the limitations of his own knowledge.

3) The correct answer, which I will not fully give away here, can be found by consulting a work on pausal forms in the history of the Hebrew language, for example pp. 96-98 of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, Second English Edition, 1910.

The problem with improvising knowledge about materials that come to us from the past is that this improvisation tends to be in the direction of what is now, currently, fashionable. In the case at hand, the improvised interpretation looks at the ancient text in the light of current, fashionable "gender fairness." Historians call this error one of anachronism.

Why is this kind of error so bad ? To put it most briefly, it robs us of understanding the text at hand. It suggests meanings to the prayers we utter that these prayers do not contain. In short, in this case, it reduces the actual Hebrew text to a mumbojumbo of phrases that are recited by rote without understanding.

For a stimulating discussion of gender in Jewish prayer, see the article by Lois C. Dubin

A Lesson from the Torah

2009-10-08T12:26:00.005-04:00

Rabbi Wolpe, whose mini-column I read every week in the Jewish Week, had a particularly important lesson last month. Here is an excerpt:

The Dubno Maggid told a story that should be learned by every Jewish child. He told of a father in a small Eastern European village who was walking his child to cheder, to school. Suddenly they heard a fanfare of trumpets and an elaborate coach pulled by beautiful horses rode down the road. The coach stopped right by them and out stepped a man wrapped in lush furs and dripping with jewels, dazzling the onlookers.

The father whispered to his son: “Take a good look, my child. For unless you learn and live Torah, that’s what you are going to look like!”

Learning Torah — and living Torah — can save us from the excesses that masquerade as meaning. How many of us are wise enough to whisper those words to our children — or heed them ourselves?

Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. His latest book is “Why Faith Matters” (HarperOne).

From: Jewish Week, Sept. 15, 2009

Peace Now -- Peace in Our Time

2009-08-15T12:46:00.011-04:00

Mr. Neville Chamberlain (center), Pg. Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), Führer Adolf Hitler, Sept. 28, 1938

History has not been kind to Mr. Chamberlain. The agreement with Hitler that he so proudly displayed on his return to Britain proved to be worthless. In a way, mutatis mutandis, Chamberlain was the Barack Obama of his time: confrontation is noxious and dangerous, he believed, negotiation is the only reasonable way to go. Of course the situation then was not the situation today, and today's foes are not identical to the foes of 1938; Obama's path today may yet prove to be the wise one that his admirers hope it will be.

But there is something eerily similar between then and now. Hitler's Nazi movement made an appeal to dark human passions that sweet reason could not assuage. Sweet reason -- can't we all just get along ? -- does not solve all issues, pace Chamberlain, Obama, and the bien-pensant liberals of our day. Today, I fear, our (mostly liberal) chattering classes, so intent on getting on with negotiation and avoiding confrontation, simply fail to notice that Islamism, in this respect not unlike the Nazism of yore, appeals to passions that are not provided for by rational-man images of bourgeois society.

Today's New York Times tells us that "at least 6 die as Islamists clash with Hamas" in the Gaza territory. The story of bloody mayhem, members of one Islamicist faction killing those of another, is buried on page 7, with the front page taken up by more important news: "retailers see slowing sales in key season," "idle Iraqi date farms show decline in economy," a shooting in Harlem, etc. But the violence of Palestinian Islamicists against one another gets swept under a page-seven rug. And New York Times's readers are spared a confrontation with uncomfortable reality.

The sweet-reason, can't-we-all-just-get-along movement in Israel is called Peace Now, and is promoted by left-wing parties like Meretz. Peace Now was founded some thirty years ago with the proposition that if only Israel were nicer to the Arabs, the Arabs, in turn, would be nicer to Israel. If Peace Now has a guiding principle, it is that radical, uncompromising Islamicism is to be strictly ignored. But, alas, while Israel has tried to be as nice as possible to the Arabs (most notably at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001), more or less following Peace Now prescriptions, there have been no positive results, peace now being more elusive than ever. Consequently, as explained by Carlo Strenger in a recent issue of Haaretz, Peace Now has virtually disappeared from Israeli politics.

Update on the intra-Islamist violence in Gaza (Haaretz, 8/15/09):

Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said 24 people were killed, including six Hamas police officers and an 11-year-old girl. At least 150 people were wounded, he said.

When Everything is Black or White: Caldwell's book on Islam in Europe

2009-08-06T12:58:00.010-04:00

In the Photoshop program for editing photographs, there is a facility by which one can increase or decrease the contrast of an image. I took a black-and-white portrait of my youngest granddaughter, and then dialed up the contrast to a maximum. The result is a picture, interesting in itself, but lacking all nuance of shading. Everything is black or white.

I thought of this ability to rev up contrast, with its result of utter distortion, as I read the book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell is upset by the large Muslim populations in Europe, and, indeed, there are real enough problems. But Caldwell sees everything in black and white. The Muslim populations, he claims, have not assimilated, AT ALL, to European culture. Caldwell is not a scholar, and his use of statistics (and other data) is tendentious and naive. I think that he does point to things we need to worry about, but his highly contrasty portrait will not help us think about the problem intelligently.

I have reviewed this book for Amazon.

Sotomayor: My Mom Doesn't Get It

2009-07-22T14:19:00.008-04:00

Celina Sotomayor (AP)

The Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court were bland and brought little to surprise anyone. Certainly, if I were a US Senator I would vote to confirm. That said, I must report my unease at her response, which I heard on CSPAN, to comedian Al Franken's question: why do you want this job. I have so far been unable to obtain the transcript of her response, but the NY Times blog The Caucus gives an account very close to what I remember:

Franken and the Job | 12:16 p.m. Why does the judge want to join the Supreme Court? asks Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.

This prompts a lengthy story from the judge, in which her mother, Celina, and her stepfather, Omar, play a role. As she tells it, her mother couldn’t understand why she would take a job that involved a sizable pay cut from her lawyer’s work in private practice, would limit her foreign travel and would prohibit her from having friends who might come before her in court. Her stepfather apparently, at the end, turned to his wife, and said in Spanish, “You know you daughter and her stuff with public service.”
And the judge continued: “That really has always been the answer given, who I am, my love of the law, my sense of importance about the rule of law, how central it is to the functioning of our society …” Those have always created a passion in her, she added. “I can’t think of any greater service I could give to the country.”

As I recall the Judge, she said "all this was in Spanish," wink wink, suggesting, when taken together with her verbiage here, an unpleasant condescension toward her mother --how cute, my old mom, but alas lacking in the sophistication of all those Eastern schools where I learned my selfless morality. There is no doubt that the judge has great affection for her mother, whom she has praised repeatedly in the public record. But condescension nevertheless.

As it happens, Celina Sotomayor achieved graduation from college in New York and became a Registered Nurse, passing her RN boards in English, so the Judge's condescension is doubly misplaced.

Doubly: even if her mother had not had American higher education, or English proficiency, it is a bit outrageous to suggest that our immigrant parents and grandparents cannot be trusted with making ethical decisions as good as ours.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me"

2009-06-11T23:03:00.002-04:00

And as he tries to "explain," the Rev. Wright becomes even more rabid. See the New York Times treatment.

The Menace of "Alternative Medicine"

2009-06-04T19:58:00.005-04:00

Daniel David Palmer (1845-1914), Father of Chiropractic

There was a time, some thirty or forty years ago, when the elite medical schools and hospitals warned patients away from self-styled healers who lacked medical training. Then as now, "chiropractic," "naturopathy," "acupuncture," and many others, were popular and offered their wares, but then they were rejected without equivocation by established medical authorities. But oh, how things have changed.

To give but one example, New York University's Langone Medical Center now offers naturopathy, acupuncture, and herbalism among its treatments for a long list of ailments, including, yes, cancer. Unbelievable ? Click here to see for yourself.

The gradual change in attitudes by leaders of the medical profession is documented in a 2005 article by the sociologist Terri Winnick, "From Quackery to 'Complementary' Medicine: The American Medical Profession Confronts Alternative Therapies." The article is as much a symptom of the change as a description of it, thereby offering some clues to attitudes that caused it.

To Winnick, changes in medical positions seem all to the good. Her narrative is mainly one of sordid political power plays by the AMA in the 1960's, replaced by more reasonable positions now. Some fifty years ago, she tells us, the medical establishment had more power and could therefore fight off the claims of the rival "modalities." Today organized medicine is constrained to be more reasonable, and, she suggests, has therefore come to see the light of cooperation with "CAM" ("complementary and alternative medicine").

The striking shortcoming in Winnick's article, and in the many similar books and articles on the subject, is absence any sort of hard-headed examination of the claims made by these "alternative" practitioners and of their scientific credentials.

As for the claims, the short answer is that, now as before, there simply is no evidence that any of these alternatives to scientific medicine have any merit whatever. This may seem a harsh and intolerant thing to say, but it is the conclusion reached, despite much pressure in opposite directions, by the very government agency set up to find any and every possible scrap of merit in these "alternatives," namely the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

As for scientific credentials of the "alternative" practitioners, it is instructive to look at those of the man hired by NYU to cure cancer (among other ailments) by "alternative" methods. This is what we read

Dr. X, N.D., joins NYU Urology from the Center for Holistic Urology at Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. X. holds a four-year naturopathic doctoral degree and a two-year acupuncture degree from the University of Bridgeport. His clinical practice and research focus on integrative, holistic appraches to urological conditions.

Readers should ask themselves how these credentials compare to those of Board-certified medical practitioners. And they should ask the people in charge of NYU and Columbia whether they themselves, personally, would entrust their health and that of their families to the man from Bridgeport.

To be sure, there still are clear voices of warning. Edzard Ernst has recently written a no-nonsense book, and then of course there is Quackwatch. But given the prevailing anything-goes attitudes of our elite medical institutions, these voices seem to be coming from the wilderness.

On dotty judges, doctors, professors ...

2009-04-27T13:10:00.009-04:00

Humph, by Roger B.

There are two compelling reasons for the timely retirement of people in sensitive professions:

1) Institutions like courts, hospitals, and universities need new blood; they need those who have been trained in up-to-date science and technology to be in charge. True, the aged incumbents have experience (and, some would say, wisdom) that younger people may lack. This experience, where it exists, needs to be available to these institutions, but in advisory capacities. It is also a fact that the younger and more competent scientists and scholars receive lower salaries than their less competent seniors. So these seniors constitute not only an intellectual but also a fiscal drain on some of our most crucial institutions.

2) The diminution of human capacities in old age is very common indeed; it seems that by age 75 a majority of people have experienced some substantial drop in their mental acuity. When the very old still occupy positions of great power and influence, the decrepitude of the elders has proven to be a public menace. In response, and rather than rely on questionable tests of continued competence, many institutions have enforced mandatory retirement (but universities have been forbidden to do so by federal legislation). The oldest still-existing government in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, retires its priests at age 70, its bishops at 75, and forbids its Cardinals to vote in papal elections after age 75. The Supreme Court of Canada retires its justices at 75; the Israeli Supreme Court at 70. But there is no mandatory retirement at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The United States Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Its membership is small but it enjoys tremendous public attention. We know more about its Justices than we know about almost any other group of human beings. And some of these Justices stayed in office until they were old, very old. From my observations in my last paragraph, I expected to find that more than a few of these Justices became mentally decrepit while in office, and this proved to be the case: dozing during arguments, not knowing which side of an issue they supported, sometimes not knowing the difference between appellant and respondent.

The most complete accounting of this Supreme Scandal is now nine years old: Professor David J. Garrow, "Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment." Writing in 2000, Garrow finds evidence of decrepitude in twenty justices (roughly 20% of all) since the beginning of the republic. (We do not know how many more he would have needed to list had he written today.) In the more modern history of the Court, Garrow lists the following Justices as among those who showed signs of mental decrepitude while sitting on the Court: William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frank Murphy, Sherman Minton, Charles E. Whittaker, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, William H. Rehnquist, Lewis F. Powell, William Jr. Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall. (Again: would he have had to add any names from the Court of today ?) Quite reasonably, Garrow supports a constitutional amendment to control the open-ended tenure that obtains now.

The Medical Profession

Once a physician obtains a license to practice, it is extraordinarily difficult to withdraw this privilege from him, no matter what his age. It is not uncommon to see practicing physicians who went to medical school more than half a century ago. How much do they know about modern medicine ? Very few jurisdictions, if any, have procedures for re-examining the holders of medical licenses at regular intervals.

There is a general problem about licensing a person to perform a potentially dangerous act. Driver's licenses, among others, tend to be valid indefinitely, with very few restrictions. The person who performed well at age twenty at a driver's test is, for all intents and purposes, presumed to have his youthful driving abilities intact at age ninety.

If this is a problem in dotty drivers, so much more in dotty doctors. They can do a great deal of harm, but, unlike Supreme Court Justices, their cases do not enjoy great notoriety. In December of 2007 I reported on the famous inter-war German Doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch whose great prestige among his peers as a young man prevented the German medical establishment from coping with his senility when he continued to practice, and endanger his patients, as an old man. While the aged Justice Thurgood Marshall didn't know who was appellant and who was respondent, the aged Doctor Sauerbruch didn't know, in the operating room, which organ needed surgery. Since then, my family has had a number of sad experiences with dotty doctors, some of which endangered the health and even the life of the patient.

No physician should be allowed to practice (other than, perhaps, in a consultative capacity) at an age at which a substantial number of persons have been found to be impaired in their judgment. The self-policing by the profession, through voluntary referrals, etc., seems to have fallen far short of preventing substantial abuses. I think that the unlimited license to practice should expire at a reasonable age, say seventy, with perhaps some limited privileges allowed after that.

The Universities

Dotty professors are less conspicuous in the harm they do than their fellow-dotties behind the wheel, on the bench, or in the operating room. But even consider the not-dotty over-70's, do we really need so many elderly gentlemen teaching the students of today from a perspective, largely, of their own graduate studies in the 1950's ?

Some six years ago history professor Henry Huttenbach of City College in New York was seventy-three years old, and he explained for the Chronicle of Higher Education why he does not at all feel like retiring:

As long as one has something vital to contribute -- half a century of classroom experience, decades of research still filled with unexpressed ideas in as yet unwritten articles and books -- why stop? Why abandon the satisfaction of the daily give-and-takes with students and colleagues? For golf? For Florida? For full-time grandchildren-sitting?

And frankly, he also says, the money is better if you don't retire. He does not mention any need for new blood in the academy. Nor does he mention any new facts, or insights, or techniques that the graduate schools of today may have to offer to younger scholars that were not available in his graduate training. Nor the fact that, with his full professor's salary, his college could hire more of these younger people. But, by all means, read what he himself has to say by clicking here.

Where is the burden of proof ?

The argument against mandatory retirement is often phrased roughly as follows: If a person attains a certain chronological age, say sixty-five or seventy, or whatever, that fact alone does not prove that he is no longer competent to perform in his profession. He or she should be allowed to continue unless he is proven incompetent.

My argument is the opposite. Given the fact that society has a strong interest in competent judges, doctors, professors, etc., and given the fact that a substantial number among the aged suffer from at least some degree of mental diminution, the burden of proof should be on the elderly individual to prove his continuing capacity. If the eighty-year old physician can pass the equivalent of his specialty board once again, and can prove his mental competence, by all means, be my guest, keep practicing. But for all the others, for all those elderly doctors and judges and professors, etc., unwilling or unable to pass the tests that their younger colleagues need to pass, I say, please, it's time to move over, to make room for the young, to protect the patients and the litigants and the students.

Khalidi: At it Once Again

2009-03-16T13:02:00.004-04:00

www.daylife.com

Khalidi's new book, "Sowing Crisis," once again uses propaganda instead of history, and, worse, trickery in the guise of documentation. All this, at least, according to a review in the New York Times Book Review, dated March 15. Click here to read the review.

Even in retraction, the NY Times shows bad faith

2009-01-30T12:44:00.013-05:00

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher, NY Times
Portfolio.com

It is now seventy-six years ago to the day that Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. And the New York Times, as if to mark the event, has been caught red-handed in publishing outright falsehoods against Israel. Now the paper offers a vaguely worded "Editor's Note" in which it says that, well, maybe we were wrong, maybe we were right, but since the "original source has not been found," the alleged quotation from an Israeli general "should not have appeared."

As readers of this blog know (see postings below), the offensive material appeared on January 8 in an Op-Ed piece by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Today's "Editor's Note" does not mention Khalidi, who, after all, was the one who made the original false allegation against the Israeli general. Let me try to guess why the NYT is so solicitous about the professor's reputation: so as to run more Op-Ed pieces by him in the future ?

This Editor's Note is completely disingenuous from beginning to end. It says that an "original source has not been found" when, in fact, there is a publicly available original source for General Moshe Ya'alon's views, and that these views are the very opposite of what Khalidi and the NY Times claimed them to be. (See my posting below). I nominate the Times, and Khalidi, for the Anti-Pulitzer Prize for Disreputable Journalism.

CAMERA has published a useful history of the Khalidi hoax.

See also Michelle Sieff's informative account of this whole affair.

Professor Rashid Khalidi Had Access to What General Yaalon Really Said

2009-01-14T11:22:00.009-05:00

Further on Professor Khalidi's piece in the New York Times (see my previous posting).

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has shown just how Professor Khalidi obtained his (false) quotation from General Moshe Yaalon. It would seem from this that Professor Khalidi had access to what General Yaalon really said, but chose, apparently deliberately, to turn the General's words into their very opposite. Here is part of CAMERA's article (click here for the whole piece):

Perhaps most egregious is Khalidi's conclusion of his column with a fabricated quote. He writes:

"Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: 'The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.'"

Khalidi uses the same fabricated quote in his book Resurrecting Empire, citing in the footnote an interview with Ari Shavit in Haaretz Magazine, August 30, 2002, as quoted in Arnaud de Borchegrave, "Road Map or Road Rage?" Washington Times, May 28, 2003.

But, in fact, Ya'alon said no such thing in the Shavit interview. On the contrary. He said that Palestinian Arabs must understand that terrorism would not make Israelis into a defeated people. Khalidi, in other words, reverses the meaning of Ya'alon's words with a fabricated quote.

Below is Shavit's question and Ya'alon's answer:

Shavit: "Do you have a definition of victory? Is it clear to you what Israel's goal in this war is?"

Ya'alon: "I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us."

Ya'alon repeated in the same interview:

"The facts that are being determined in this confrontation — in terms of what will be burned into the Palestinian consciousness — are fateful. If we end the confrontation in a way that makes it clear to every Palestinian that terrorism does not lead to agreements, that will improve our strategic position."

The story of how Khalidi first came to use this alleged Yaalon quotation, in his book "Resurrecting Empire," is described in more detail by Alex Safian in his contribution to the pamphlet "Israel's Jewish Defamers," Boston, CAMERA, 2008, pp. 42-44. For all those of us who had regard for Khalidi over the years, these disclosures of his sleight of hand will be profoundly disquieting.

Professor Rashid Khalidi and the Method of Indiscriminate Quotation

2009-01-11T22:30:00.012-05:00

Professor Rashid Khalidi
photo by Bryn Mawr Now

Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Middle Eastern expert at Columbia University. At various times of his life he has also been active in various Palestinian causes. His scholarly writings, not always uncontroversial, have earned him an international reputation. Whatever his political commitments, he has always maintained cordial relations with people of other persuasions. His friendly relations with Barack Obama, when both lived in Chicago, have become a matter of public notice. He has an enviable reputation for civility in personal and professional relations; in a recent interview, Professor Khalidi remarked that he has about a thousand Jewish friends.

On January 7, however, he published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that has caused consternation to at least some of his well-wishers. Not only does Khalidi here do what scholarly practice forbids -- use indiscriminate quotation as a method of proof -- but he also, as we shall see, claims a quotation is genuine when, in fact, it most likely is a forgery.

Khalidi's piece is entitled "What You Don't Know About Gaza," and suggests that Hamas had no part in causing any difficulty in the Gaza situation. Israel's Gaza operation, according to Khalidi, has no justification at all that he can detect:

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

So the war, according to Khalidi, "isn't really about rockets" but rather, exclusively, about the malice and the evil intentions of Israelis. This strong assertion, it would seem, needs strong evidence.

But what does he offer ? Nothing but a single quotation which, he says, stems from an Israeli general, some seven years ago. He does not tell us how he obtained the text of this alleged statement, nor does he give any information about the circumstances under which it is said to have been made. Nor did he seem to have searched for statements by other influential Israelis that may be relevant. ( Nor does he address himself to the question of a possible relevance of statements by Hamas leaders, who routinely threaten all Jews with death; but that is another matter.) In other words, he did not do what a scholar must do under the circumstances, viz. determine, assuming the statement is genuine, whether it represents Israeli policy today, as he claims it does. I am afraid that Professor Khalidi, to the dismay of those in academia who wish him well, has here abandoned the method of the scholar to embrace the method of the propagandist: the notorious Method of Indiscriminate Quotation (MIQ).

MIQ is bad, and routinely earns graduate students failing marks. The reason that MIQ is so disreputable is that literally anthing can be proven with it: the world is flat, the moon is made of green cheese. But quite often, when lucky, practitioners of MIQ can get away with it in the non-scholarly public because, on its face, the method looks so persuasive. Often its practitioners are even praised by their friends as great researchers, "scrupulously," as it is sometimes said, "documenting" all kinds of outrageous assertions. Unfortunately, people often do not ask whether quotations are presented with adequate context.

But in this case, Professor Khalidi is not so lucky. It turns out that the quotation on which he has so carelessly relied is most likely wholly specious. We now know, thanks to the excellent detective work of Jason Maoz, that Generally Yaalon apparently never said what Khalidi claims he said. (Please read the whole article by Maoz; just click on his name above.)

Remember, this is what Khalidi claims Yaalon said:

The Palstinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

Here, according to Maoz, is what Yaalon actually said

I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us….

What Yaalon wants Palestinians to understand, deeply, is that Palestinian violence will not defeat Israel. Professor Khalidi turns that into something completely different, viz. a desire by Yaalon to have Palestinians see themselves as defeated. As Maoz shows, other anti-Israel propagandists, before Khalidi, have twisted Yaalon's words in the same way, and it appears that the distortion is being handed around from one to the other. Perhaps Khalidi sincerely believed in the accuracy of what he was quoting, but that certainly does not explain away his irresponsibility of passing on this deception without checking the sources.

Professors are human, professors sometimes enter the political fray, and yes, professors sometimes discard all scholarly probity when they allow themselves to be propagandists. These are facts, but not facts that can make us happy. I do worry about that campus up on Morningside Heights and other such places (which, by the way, use up a great deal of public money in the form of grants and tax privileges); I worry about what is happening to the ethos of scholarly responsibility.

Machers -- The Jewish Oligarchy

2008-12-19T15:49:00.017-05:00

The Madoff story has put the Jewish community in the news in the most prominent possible way. But not in ways that its members would have wanted. It seems that some, many, of the most prominent Jewish machers -- movers and shakers -- have left the community vulnerable at the hands of a stupendous Ponzi scheme. The man accused of guilt in the Ponzi scheme is Bernard Madoff. One of the men accused of facilitating the scheme -- without being criminally responsible himself -- is J. Ezra Merkin. Both have been known as big machers among the Jews of the land. (A front-page article by Diana Henriques in the New York Times of December 20 tells the story in great detail.)

[Here is a personal aside. I have had a bit of mole-view of the Merkin family since my mother had been a baby nurse (domestic servant) in the Merkin and allied families some fifty years ago.]

Who are these machers, these movers and shakers, and what is their role ?

In a word, the machers constitute the oligarchy that has by and large run the Jewish community. The idea that nominally democratic institutions are actually run by oligarchies was most forcefully argued by the 19th century German-Italian thinker Robert Michels, especially in a classic description translated in English under the title Political Parties.

Michels speaks of an "iron law of oligarchy," a view that has led later social scientists, notably Seymour Martin Lipset, to refine the concept and specifyy limits to the phenomenon. And indeed, macherdom was defeated in those institutions that, throughout, maintained a high degree of self-criticism and due diligence. The UJA-Federation of New York, with some others, stands out as a bastion of good sense.

Wikipedia describes the oligarchy concept as traditionally formulated:

Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family, military powers or occult spiritual hegemony. The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for "few" (ὀλίγος olígos) and "rule" (ἀρχή arkhē). Such states are often controlled by politically powerful families whose children were heavily conditioned and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy. This type of power by its very nature may not be exercised openly; the oligarchs preferring to remain "the power behind the throne", exerting control through economic means. Oligarchies have been tyrannical throughout history, being completely reliant on public servitude to exist. Although Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group.

President Joel (Yeshiva University) presents an honorary degree to Trustee J. Ezra Merkin as Ludwig Bravmann, vice chairman, Board of Trustees, looks on. November 26, 2003

J. Ezra Merkin & friends, charity function, June 16, 2008

Mr. Bernard Madoff

In the American Jewish community, as far as I can tell, the machers play a diffuse, inconsistent, but often dominating role.

I cannot offer a tightly delineated definition. Take the level of synagogue leadership. The concept of macher overlaps, but is not identical, with elected officer and board member. Not every macher has a formal role; not every formal leader is a macher. But as I have observed it in at least some synagogues, you cannot hold an elected post without the behind-the-scenes nod from a consensus of the machers. A macher tends to be rich, well-connected, and very influential. Influence, of course, is the stock in trade of macherdom.

Macher-led synagogues and other organziations have formal elections, but these elections are essentially sham because there is no more than one candidate per post. (I have heard of a venerable Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan, however, in which there is a lively democratic tradition with real, i.e. contested, elections.)

Literally tranlated, a macher is one who does things, who makes things happen. The membership of macher-run groups often could not imagine how things could happen without these machers. The machers tend to be thought of as despots, perhaps, but benevolent despots. The groups keep running, at least that seems to be the impression, largely because of the work and ceaseless energy of the machers.

Machers are thought to be very wise. During the planning for a synagogue renovation, it was the judgement and wisdom of the machers that prevailed, even though expert-backed contrary views were offered. Disagreement with machers -- especially on problems where expert advice might suggest that the machers are actually beyond their depth -- is scorned. As I see it, this is one of the greatest dangers to Jewish public life: an unwarranted faith in the wisdom and benevolence of the machers. Macherdom tends to prevent the one activity that saved some individuals and institutions in the current Madoff affair, due diligence.

How do you become a macher ? What are the qualifications ? These questions await careful treatment by scholars. But there are two institutions that seem to foster and develop macherdom. One is the honorary degree bestowed by prestigious institutions, the other -- more important because much more pervasive -- is the "award dinner" at which groups promote the idea that prestige can be fostered and created artificially. Awards are bestowed for apparent financial prowess, for handing over money to institutions, and for, well, being a macher.

No doubt there are many recipients of such "honors" whose merit can be objectively verified. A scientist or scholar who has made verifiable contributions to his field, or an artist or writer whose work can be independently assessed, may well have at least some of the merit that is attributed to him. But as for the merit of all those other honorees and awardees at award dinners and award dinner-dances, well, that merit partakes more than a little of the great investment returns offered by Mr. Bernard Madoff. It is widely talked about, very widely praised and admired, but it is not verifiable. It does not withstand due diligence.

It is often said that a synagogue, say, relies on such award dinner-dances to raise the funds that it needs. There are three problems with this proposition. 1) It has not been empirically tested -- nobody has tried alternate, more ethical methods. 2) Whatever the financial value of such activity, there is a terrible moral price that is paid, viz. claiming merit where no such merit can truthfully be claimed. 3) At least in the current environment, it has been shown that there was no financial gain to the institutions in this counterfeit traffic in honor.

Finally, I wish to offer two thoughts on how to strengthen Jewish communal activity:

1) Due diligence. When the combined wisdom of the machers in your congregation, say, urges a path of action, resist. Ask for outside expert advice. Independent expert advice is the antithesis of macherdom. Insist on it. Be a trouble maker. You won't earn an award at a dinner dance, but that, as I see it, is an added benefit.

2) Do not in any way approve of or participate in the bestowal of honorary degrees. Ever. Those who have the merit to deserve such degrees probably have earned, real degrees.

3) Do not, ever, attend an award dinner-dance. Do not praise the big machers in display ads. Do not be part of the macher claque. Ever.

Sidwell Does So Help Public School Kids

2008-12-05T13:12:00.003-05:00

In my "Modest Proposal for the Sidwell Friends School" (see my blog of November 22), I wrote, among other things

At least some of Sidwell's resources could be made available to all students in the District. Perhaps there could be classes in art appreciation, or college-entrance preparation, or music, or whatever, free of charge to all children. Perhaps the STO funds could be used for these services.

I have now had the chance to talk with Mr. Ellis Turner, the Associate Head of the School, and learned that Sidwell has a number of specific programs to help children in Washington's public schools. For example, Sidwell has a relationship with the (public) Brightwood Elementary School to help in a "lap reading" program. On the high school level, it has a relationship with the (public) Duke Ellington School, which, among other things, provides scholarships for math students. And these are only two examples of programs in which Sidwell cooperates with public schools.

Bravo Sidwell !

African Americans at Sidwell Friends

2008-11-26T11:06:00.005-05:00

I have now had word from Ellis Turner, the Associate Head of Sidwell Friends School, with further information on the racial composition of the school. He reports that 12.8% of his students are African-American. But when we compare this percentage with US Census figures for the District of Columbia, where 55.4% of the population is Black, we can see that African Americans at Sidwell are not doing well -- they have less than a quarter of what their share would be if the student body were representative of the District.

Mr. Turner also reports that a further 13.2% of the student body reports itself as "multi-racial" (the Census figure is 1.5% for multi-racial in the District). The significance of this figure is not clear to me, and, unlike Mr. Turner, I cannot see that it mitigates the very low African American presence at the school.

Moreover, given this low African American presence, I must repeat that the only figure published by the school for "students of color" on its website -- 39% -- is misleading.

Finally, Mr. Turner has taken me to task for my suggestions that Sidwell share some of its resources with the public. I have made these suggestions for two reasons: 1) Like all non-profits, Sidwell is the recipient of significant public financial aid by way of tax benefits; and 2), more important, such sharing is required by the professed values of the school. Here are Mr. Turner's comments:

Further, you make an erroneous assumption in stating that we do not
"share some of your resources with the public, especially with those
children who have no hope of ever attending your school." We have many programs and co-sponsored activities which do just that.

Please investigate before you publish.

I have invited Mr. Turner to let me have details on these programs and co-sponsored activities, and I will put them on my blog as soon as I receive them. It would indeed be good if there could be a public discussion of what SFS does to share its bounties.

Three Athletic Fields, Five Tennis Courts, and a Six-Lane Track

2008-11-25T17:21:00.008-05:00

Facilities on the fifteen-acre Wisconsin Avenue campus ... include the Earl G. Harrison, Jr. Upper School Building; the Middle School Building; Kogod Center for the Arts; Richard Walter Goldman Memorial Library; Zartman House ... three athletic fields including one with all-weather turf surface; five tennis courts; and a six-lane track.

The five-acre Edgemoor Lane campus in Bethesda includes the Manor House ... and athletic fields and two playground areas with climbing equipment.

So who wouldn't want to go to Sidwell Friends School in Washington, the new center of learning for the Obama girls ? Can you imagine, three athletic fields, and all those tennis courts, and six whole lanes of track ? Or rather, who couldn't go ...

For starters, those not judged "academically talented" cannot go. The school says as much. Moreover, there is a requirement to submit to intelligence tests as part of the application process: the WPPSI, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence for the youngest, then the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children), and then on to the SSAT, etc. etc. Sidwell demands (conventionally defined) intelligence and rejects those who do not perform well on standard tests. What of the "Quaker values" of the school, proclaimed on its website, that would require a more egalitarian approach ?

The Quaker belief that there is "that of God" in each of us shapes everything we do at Sidwell Friends School. It inspires us to show kindness and respect toward one another. It motivates us to recognize and nurture each person's unique gifts. It teaches us to apply our talents in service to others and to work courageously for peace.

So there is a disjunction between what is professed (egalitarianism) and what is practiced.

The (in my view) immoral notion that power and the good things of the world should be distributed unevenly to those judged to have "merit" -- i.e. the advocacy of a "meritocracy" -- was savagely satirized by the most profound sociologist I ever met, the late Michael Young, in his widely quoted but rarely appreciated "The Rise of the Meritocracy," 1958. Forty three years later he revisited the topic in an op-ed piece, "Down With Meritocracy."

Back to the Sidwell Friends School admissions. Doing well on conventional tests is a hurdle, but, so it would seem, is money. It costs around $30,000 in tuition and fees, and even those who have benefited from financial aid, roughly a third of the student body, still pay an average of $10,000 per annum.

Finally we come to the problem of the race of the students. Does it matter ? Well, according to the professed "Quaker values" all races should have equal access to all those athletic fields and tennis courts. The school prides itself on its "diversity," and has in fact appointed a number of "diversity coordinators" (at least one of whom has a Ph.D.). But in fact the school equivocates more than a little on how racially diverse it is.

We are told on its website that "39% of the student body [2008-9] are students of color." "Of color" is not a census term, so it's a little difficult to evaluate exactly what it means. We do know that the US Census reports the current population of D.C. as being 34.5% White, and 63.6% as belonging to other races. So, as a first approximation, we know that a white child has almost twice the chance (1.76 times) of going to Sidwell as someone "of color."

But what exactly does "of color" mean in the Sidwell context ? The Census categories are white, black (African American), Asian, and "other races." Now there is a world of difference, from the point of view of educational opportunities, between African Americans on the one hand and Asians on the other. I would suspect that Sidwell's "students of color" include Asians and children of diplomats, among others. To know just what Sidwell's profession of diversity means in practice, we would need to know the percentage of African Americans in its student body. I have written to Sidwell's administration and my inquiry was duly acknowledged, but I have not yet received the figures. If and when I do, I will report them here.

A Modest Proposal for the Sidwell Friends School

2008-11-22T19:32:00.017-05:00

Washington's Sidwell Friends School

The Sidwell Friends School in Washington is in the news: once more, important and powerful people are sending their children there. It is by all accounts an excellent school. It has the resources to assure the best in teachers, in equipment, in curriculum, and in caring parents. In all these areas Sidwell, like other such private schools in the District, stands in sharp contrast to the public schools of the nation's capital. These are struggling, and, the affluent and influential having deserted them, are now ghettos for the non-white and non-privileged.

Like other non-profit institutions, Sidwell would be exempt from local taxes, and contributions to Sidwell would be deductible from income taxes. So taxpayers, including the poor who cannot afford to send their children there, are nevertheless asked to pay for some of its costs.

But many of Sidwell's parents are on record for improving the lives of the poor. This is certainly true of the powerful politicians that are now preparing to send their little ones to Sidwell in the coming year. Sidwell's own Board of Trustees has voiced similar sentiments:

We cultivate in all members of our community high personal expectations and integrity, respect for consensus, and an understanding of how diversity enriches us, why stewardship of the natural world matters and why service to others enhances life

It isn't cheap to go to Sidwell, in fact it's downright expensive. Tuition and fees come to over $30,000 per child per year (with twenty-two percent of the student body receiving some degree of financial aid). At these prices, "service to others" means, primarily, others who are well off.

And here is another disquieting thing about the Sidwell philosophy:

We seek academically talented students of diverse cultural, racial, religious and economic backgrounds.

Those who are not "academically talented," whatever that term may mean, what are those students, chopped liver ? Is that the meaning of the "Quaker way" that is so proudly touted by Sidwell ?

In other words, there is a bit, more than a bit, of a disjunction between the high-minded sentiments of parents and Board on the one hand, and the elitist nature of the program on the other. It doesn't look good.

But wait... this blog has some solutions.

Sidwell and its parents have tremendous resources that they could make available, to some extent at least, to that vast majority of District children who have no hope of ever becoming Sidwell students. Here are some ideas, submitted with all the humility for which this blog has become justly famous:

● Sidwell parents could be asked to make financial contributions to enrichment programs at the public schools. Whenever a Sidwell parent makes a tuition payment, a "Service to Others" (STO) surcharge could be added.

● At least some of Sidwell's resources could be made available to all students in the District. Perhaps there could be classes in art appreciation, or college-entrance preparation, or music, or whatever, free of charge to all children. Perhaps the STO funds could be used for these services.

● Some of Sidwell's parents command considerable venues on their own. The White House itself will soon be one. Perhaps such facilities could be used for regular enrichment programs for all of the District's children.

P.S.: How many of the Sidwell folk can be found in this part of Washington ?

Truxton Circle, Washington DC

How the Jews Voted: Exactly 78 Percent for Obama ?

2008-11-17T17:23:00.010-05:00

Hasidim of Brooklyn: Strongly for McCain
photo by wayupnorthtonowhere

Upper Westside: Probably Obama Country
photo by Ed Yourdon

My friend was an Obama supporter. "Seventy-eight percent of the Jews," he told me, "voted like me." How did he know, how does anybody know anything ? The New York Times. Of course. All the news that's fit to print.

Nobody in authority asked me my religion when I voted. That doesn't happen, and if it did it would be illegal. But it appears that there are "exit polls" in which professional pollsters place themselves in front of polling places and importune voters who have just voted. I myself have never encountered such a pollster in more than 60 years of voting, but I have been told that this is, roughly, how the conversation goes:

Sir, would you mind telling me for whom you have just voted ? Thank you so much. Just a few more questions .... years of education ?, occupation ?, etc. etc., and yes, "religious preference." And then of course there is a quick peek to ascertain race.

As a result of such exit polling, we have information on a national scale that has been shown to be more-or-less accurate for the broad demographic groups. We know that McCain, like Bush before him, received a convincing majority of the white vote. And, this time round, we know that Black people voted Obama in overwhelming numbers. The same reports that tell us these well-established things also purport to tell us about the Jewish vote: 78% for Obama. The trouble is that unlike the large demographic groups, the small minority of Jews in this country (between one and two percent of the population) make any such precision illusory.

The New York Times, for example, carried a report on the exit poll that was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky on November 4. It seems that 17,224 voters, at 300 polling places nationwide, were interviewed that day by E/M. Among these there were about 350 Jews, of whom 78%, or about 270, said that they had voted Obama, with almost all the rest having voted McCain.

To what extent can these 350 individuals be said to be representative of the American Jewish electorate ?

The sample of 300 polling places, or about 5 per state, represents about one quarter of one percent of the nation's voting districts. It was drawn as a random sample of all the nation's districts, and, for purposes of the larger population, can yield reliable results. But to accept its validity as representative of the Jewish population, we have to assume that the Jews of the country (roughly one or two percent of the population) are randomly distributed, more or less, over all the voting districts, all over the country. The proportionate size of the Jewish communities of Williamsburg and Borough Park would have to be similar to those of Idaho and Utah. If that assumption does not hold, there is no validity in the result. (There are statistical techniques -- oversampling -- used for the larger minorities, to correct for some of these problems. There is no indication that such techniques have been used for the Jewish population. I have written to Edison/Mitofsky to get details of their methods, but so far I have had no reply.)

The Brooklyn Paper has reported overwhelming support for McCain in Hasidic neighborhoods. No doubt there was heavy support for Obama on the Upper West side. The Jews of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah ? It is doubtful that the national pollsters ever encounter any of these at all. A valid sample of the American Jewish electorate would have to encompass such diversity. A national sample of all American voters, if it is of practicable size and complexity, cannot do this.

These exit polls almost certainly overstate the extent of Jewish support for Obama, for this reason: since they are based on methods that seek to create representative samples of the American population as a whole, they may do an adequate job of reaching Jews who are well dispersed in that population. But they cannot adequately reach those dense pockets of Jewish population that consist, to a large extent, of Orthodox Jews. And it is probable that these Orthodox pockets were much more favorable to McCain.

Did the Jews generally favor Obama over McCain ? Probably yes. But to the extent of 78 % ? Not likely.

Sarah Palin and Her Cultured Despisers

2008-10-26T23:05:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska

In the City of New York, the enlightened are smarter, more cultured, more couth than the Governor of Alaska. The woman is a redneck ! Could you find her at MOMA ? Could you see her reading The New Yorker ? Or, for that matter, The New York Times ? Would you find her at a parents' meeting of Brooklyn Friends ? None of the above, obviously.

And she is not an Episcopalian, not a Reform Jew, not a member of Ethical Culture. She does not attend mass at St. Patrick's. Her religious affiliation, Pentecostalism, can be found in Spanish Harlem, but since when is that part of New York, part of Culture ?

Way back in 1799, the German theologian Schleiermacher had a message for the "cultured" of his time. But did this put an end to mindless, ignorant, snobbish judgmentalism ? What do you think ?

Friedrich Schleiermacher, author of
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799)

The ideology of Trinity United

2008-10-11T21:11:00.008-04:00

Stanley Kurtz

The ideology of Trinity United, the Chicago church in which Obama was an active member for twenty years, is not at all representative of Black churches. It is a strictly minority view in Black American Christianity. It is the brain child of the radical "Black Liberation" theologian James Cone of Union Theological Seminary with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as his most prominent disciple. "Black Liberation Christianity" proclaims that Jesus was Black, that only Black Christianity is authentically Christian, that White Christians should be ashamed of their skin color, and so forth .

The black intellectual's goal, says Cone, is to "aid in the destruction of America as he knows it." Such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt. The black-power theologian's goal is to tell the story of American oppression so powerfully and precisely that white men will "tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil." In the preface to his 1970 book, A Black Theology of Liberation, Wright wrote: "There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: 'How can we become black?'"

This quotation is from a thorough explanation of Black Liberation theology by Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz's piece, in my view, is absolutely required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the folks that Obama worked with for those twenty years. Click here to get the full text.

Barack and the Sonim

2008-10-02T14:40:00.006-04:00

Washington Post

mlive.com

Bill Ayers by edexcellence.net

My neighborhood -- Downtown and Brownstone Brooklyn -- is graced by diversity of commercial and religious enterprise. Restaurants of high and low quality, stores (ditto), and of course people. So it's not surprising that you can buy, no trouble at all, copies of the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," both in the street from vendors and from a number of bookstores.

Now one of these stores that has featured this work in its shop window has just begun to display a great big sign: Obama Needs You, Sign Up to Help as Volunteer, or words to that effect. This particular store is run by "Afrocentric" sonim, haters of Jews. (There is now an absolutely hair-raising account of "Afrocentric" sonim at Wellesley College, of all places, by Mary Lefkowitz: "History Lesson.")

I do not for one minute believe that Obama shares the views of these sonim, nor do I think that he would be aware of what they do in his name. But, as I have pointed out before on this blog, it is a curious fact that haters of Israel and of the Jews endorse him. Why ? Do they know something that the rest of us don't ?

By and large, the media and even the McCain campaign have given Obama a free pass on his twenty years in a Church of Hate and on his connections with other extremists. Now Commentary Magazine, God bless it, has broken this silence and has published a comprehensive (almost) account of these matters in an article by Joshua Muravchik in its latest issue.

I do not endorse the doctrines and dogmas of Commentary, which to some extent inform this article. Nevertheless, I think that the factual account is sound (except that it leaves out, surprisingly, the Hamas connection with Trinity United Church). I do hope that the article will find the readership it deserves. Some material on Obama's connection with the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, for example, has not been widely known before.

Hating Israel, Loving Obama

2008-08-21T18:28:00.010-04:00

The Frozen Smile

Barak Obama has said, more than once, and in unmistakable language, that he supports Israel's right to exist and Israel's right to defend itself. But the funny thing is that (at least some of) those who hate Israel and who don't think that it has any right to defend itself nevertheless love and endorse Obama. Do they know something about Obama that perhaps Obama himself either doesn't know or doesn't want to say ?

First and perhaps foremost, there is Jimmy "Frozen-Smile" Carter , who thinks that Israel practices "apartheid" and is solely responsible for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It has been announced that Carter will be one of the main speakers at the Denver convention to endorse Obama, although, as of this writing, it appears that he has been told not to mention the word "Israel." The Soviets, before passing out of history, experienced a thaw. Can we hope as much from Carter and/or his smile ? Hope again.

[Update, Aug. 28: In the end, the Forward reports, the Dems decided to honor Carter by showing a video of him but not allow him to speak at the convention.]

The Nation magazine, something of a voice of twenty-first century American Communism, gives a little more hesitant endorsement of Obama, all the while blaming Israel for everything that is wrong in the world, or at least in the Middle East.

And then there is the poor little Communist Party of the USA. It has seen better days -- say those of Earl Browder and William Z. Foster. But it still soldiers on as a ghost of a ghost, somewhere halfway between being moribund and dead. It endorses Obama (with some hesitation), but never misses a beat in beating down on Israel.

But wait, there is hope for those who want to dismiss everything I say in this posting. There is at least one enemy of Israel (not counting Pat Buchanan) who will not support Obama. That is the estimable Cynthia McKinnon, who is running for President all on her own.

On Vanity and Pride and Bragging

2008-07-20T11:27:00.009-04:00

All is Vanity
Painting by Charles Gilbert (1873-1929)

Praising oneself (or one's children) inordinately is something that is frequently practiced but never condoned. All the sacred sources that I could find, religious and secular, with the only possible exception of Ayn Rand, condemn the practice. "Pride cometh before the Fall," or words to that effect, expresses the professed attitudes. Our language generally implies a negative evaluation of "braggarts," of "vanity," "vainglory," and "boasting," with positive evaluations of the "unassuming" and the "modest." But practice, as I said, is often different.

The question is, in a world that depends so much on selling and buying (of goods and esteem), could we do entirely without just a bit of exaggeration, say just now and then ? When I want to sell, say, a new automobile, can I say that what I have to offer is just about as good, or maybe a little inferior, to the wares of my competitors ? American law allows "puffery" in advertising, defined as an exaggeration that no reasonable person will take literally, but it does not allow misrepresentation, which, presumably, may mislead. Some "exaggeration," when it does not mislead, is something we seem to have accepted and are willing to live with. (Of course outside the sphere of advertising legality, or even within it, the line between "puffery" and misrepresentation may often be far from clear.)

Granted that bragging is something we all do to some extent some of the time, at least three important questions present themselves. First there is the extent, insistence, and sheer volume of claims made at any one time. A second question is how customary or expected an incident may be, considering community standards. Finally, there is the question of the veracity of the claims. I am mostly interested in claims that are 1) insistent and shrill; 2) relatively rare, i.e. not customary in the given circumstances, and 3) essentially lacking in veracity. (Lawyers might see a three-prong test here for what is flagrant bragging.)

Disclaimer: My observations and conclusions are not based on systematic research. Nor have I been able to find such systematic research in the literature, pace Erving Goffman and his school of "ethnomethodology."

The Groves of Academe

To some extent, self-promotion by academics is as necessary as self-promotion in any other field. It's hard to imagine a scholar advancing in his own field -- receiving necessary research grants, obtaining good graduate students, achieving promotions in the academic ladder, etc. -- if he does not spend a certain amount of time informing others of his accomplishments. As long as the interactions take place among peers, who can be assumed to understand the difference between meaningful accomplishment and embroidery, there is little opportunity for vainglory. But when self-promotion is directed to people outside academia proper, the door opens to claims that are no longer veracious, or are, at least, borderline veracious.

Before the internet, it was difficult to see who does the unacceptable bragging. Information tended to remain local, or confined to small circles of insiders. But now, when so many professors have their own websites, the braggarts -- for better or worse -- can be observed far and wide. I will give just one case study to illustrate what can go wrong. Although I don't cite the name of the individual, the details are all based on the information given by the person's websites.

Professor X. is at a large denominational university. He is the chair of his department and he also holds other administrative posts at his university. He has at least three websites, which, in addition to the more customary material of such sites, also feature

a. "downloadable publicity shots of Dr.[X]"
b. the claim that he is frequently consulted by the media on matters of public interest
c. the claim that he has had "conversations" with a former president of the United States
d. his schedule of occasional lectures at other universities now and in the future. (One such appearance, claimed by X to have been a "Keynote Address" to a learned society was listed on the website of that society as no more than an address.)
e. the fact that one of his books had "forwards" (sic) by two well-known (but controversial) men
f. testimonials of his work by a number of well-known (but controversial) public figures
g. laudatory descriptions of these public figures
h. details of X's travels in various parts of the world
i. nomination for a prize that he did not ultimately receive
j. lavish self praise ("Professor X's work extends beyond the ... analysis usually offered by the media to encompass the essence of spiritual evolution...")

This material, as I see it, adds up to the portrait of a flagrant academic braggart, using the three-prong test that I have suggested:

1. There is high "volume;" the claims are shrill, insistent, numerous
2. The claims, taken together, do not seem customary in academia
3. They lack veracity, at least by implication. Professor X. claims, by implication, that praise by the cited well-known personages is relevant to his own scholarly merit. Of course other scholars in his field cannot be misled by such claims, so to them the claims may be no more than "puffery," material that reasonable men will ignore. But Professor X. addresses himself, by his own insistence, to people outside the scholarly community. When addressing this larger audience, Professor X's claims lack veracity.

Professor X is a braggart, flagrantly so.

The Synagogue World

I know very little about Orthodox and Reform synagogues. I have been a member and guest at a number of Conservative groups over the years, and find, when it comes to a bar or bat mitsvah, that every one of these youngsters, to believe the rabbi, is always the brightest, the best, the most learned, the most selfless of all creatures. The volume of this praise is high and the veracity, obviously, is low. But here is the problem: this bragging seems customary in the Conservative community. Which community standards should be operative: that of the Conservative world, or that of the larger community ? In other words, is this synagogue practice an instance of flagrant bragging ?

I will end my little disquisition on boasting on this uncertain note, just to prove my own modesty: I don't have all the answers.

It is clear that flagrant bragging, as the Parsonian sociologists used to say, serves important "functions." The world would certainly be different without it. But I myself think that it is at least useful to identify bragging, especially flagrant bragging, because the practice impinges so importantly on the ethic of truth. Even if we do not wish to be "moralistic" and condemn bragging (God forbid !), we should at least know the difference between a braggart's account and that of someone more restrained by the truth.

The Volkswagen and I

2008-06-15T13:11:00.002-04:00

We have had Volkswagens off and on since the 60's. They have been more or less OK as automobiles, although it's hard to forget the company's origins in the Nazi period. The very name "Volkswagen," after all, is a piece of Nazi-German.

Well, this is the end of my relationship with this company. We have just traded in our '99 New Beetle. During the nine years of misplaced pride of ownership, it was hard to see its inexcusable downsides. I did, and still do, love the looks of the car, but not enough to overlook its grave defaults:

1) It sits too low off the ground. This caused us at least two expensive repairs because the car could not avoid objects and curves on the ground.

2) The visibility from inside the car is worse than in any other car that I have ever driven. It's very difficult to see what's coming from behind, and even difficult to see what's on its sides.

3) The service, as exemplified by the local VW dealer, is poor. Service hours are scheduled to accommodate the dealer, not the customer.

4) The inside space is cramped, the space in the trunk is laughable.

5) Repair history, as reported by Consumer Union, is below average.

I am now driving a Honda Civic, and driving has become a pleasure once again.

Auf Wiedersehen.