Posts Tagged ‘liberalism’
Further thoughts on antisemitism …
I am always a little surprised by how fast professed anti-racists will engage in antisemitism. I have never experienced this phenomenon to the degree I have experienced it here in Iowa City. Most people here are really good people, but there is a small group of very vocal ideologues who are apparently not deterred in their open acts of antisemitism. Here are a few tips for avoiding antisemitism that I have recently considered:
Conspiracies are rare. Most cooperation is in the open. When I say something I am not speaking for any other Jew – either collectively or individually. When I act I am not acting on any other person’s behalf unless I am explicit in doing so. If you are quick to infer a conspiracy between my and other Jews, your inference is antisemitic. I am always shocked when people assume I am part of a Jewish conspiracy and not simply doing what I think is right on my own and for my own purposes.
Members of minority groups usually are angered when they perceive bigotry directed towards their group. Responses to such perceptions are not typically cautious and reasoned and can often appear spiteful or vindictive. Expecting minorities to suppress their anger and respond more civilly is a bigoted expectation. If a fellow Jew gets pissed off at you for your lack of sensitivity I am not going to try to put a leash on them. I do not infantilize Jews or anyone else by pretending my calmer response is more “proper” or “better” than their angry response. It is not my place to tell them how they should respond to your bigotry. Expecting one Jew to prevent another Jew from expressing their emotion in a visceral fashion is antisemitic. Expecting a male to restrain a female is doubly bigoted because it reinforces sexist stereotypes.
There are many individual members of every group who behave poorly at times. Attributing the actions of those individuals to their group, their community organizations or any other member of that group is a bigoted attribution. Minority communities tend to be well connected internally because of their minority status. That one poorly behaved member of a group might have connections to other members of the group is not evidence of general debasement of the group. It is evidence of the group’s normalcy. Expecting otherwise is destructive of minority groups, bigoted, and in the case of Jews, antisemitic.
More locally, there are a few groups (seemingly attended by the same small set of people) that routinely engage in these sorts of antisemitism. They are ostensibly pro-Palestinian in spite of having very few Palestinian Arab members. In practice, they are a lot more anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, and antisemitic than they are pro-Palestinian. What a shame. Don’t be enticed by the superficially tolerant rhetoric of such groups.
Evangelical Christians show more tolerance than the Left.
Pastor John Hagee at the 'Night to Honor Israel' in the Quad Cities.
On Thursday, I went to the Christians United for Israel ‘Night to Honor Israel’ in Davenport. The 2,400 seat Adler Theater was filled nearly to capacity with conservative evangelical Christians. This is not typically my sort of crowd. Conservative preacher Pastor John Hagee, who is among the best known conservative evangelicals in America, was the keynote speaker. The crowd was filled with people who have a strict view of a different faith than mine and who have fairly severe differences with me on a wide range of social policies.
And yet, I was warmly welcomed, as a Jew, among these people. Hagee made clear that his love and support for the Jewish people is not based on any expectation that we convert to Christianity or any other sort of compromise of our beliefs. The crowd echoed that view.
And so, I wonder, why is it that among the supposedly tolerant and accepting people on the left here in Iowa City, I feel no tolerance; while among the typically less tolerant and conservative Christians, I feel real tolerance … even acceptance?
By way of example, a far-left Democrat from here in Johnson County, told me at the state Democratic Convention that I was a disloyal American and that I should leave and move to Israel. I feared nothing like that on Thursday evening. In fact, I experienced the opposite … my Jewish identity was seen as a patriotic expression of my American heritage. God bless these people for showing me real acceptance.
Doubling down on a stupid policy.
My column is up at the Press-Citizen. Here it is:
Doubling down on a stupid policy
Let’s be honest.
The state law that prohibits alcohol for 18-year-olds is stupid.
The federal law that promotes such a policy is not only stupid, but an obscene abuse of federal power.
These laws really do not require sophisticated criticism. The only thing that is difficult to understand about the laws is how they have managed to remain in existence for so long.
Iowa City policy that bars 18-year-olds from establishments that serve alcohol are really just doubling down on a stupid policy.
The prohibition of alcohol for those younger than 21 already creates a rich market in false identification and identity theft. But that market is promoted principally among those who want to exercise the right to purchase alcohol directly. People who want to exercise those rights through the acts of others have little incentive to obtain a false identity.
Current Iowa City policy raises the bar. Now those who merely want to share a social environment with people who are in a drinking establishment must obtain false identification. This sort of identity fraud is bad in itself, but it also creates wider channels for a wide variety of identity fraud-related scams and crimes.
That is a fairly unique problem promoted by the 21-only policy, but the shift in alcohol consumption caused by this policy is troubling on many levels. Of course, some may argue that total consumption goes down because of the policy, but that seems rather unlikely given that most high school students can fairly readily obtain alcohol. College students have many more options.
Bars have incentives to protect their customers that house and apartment dwellers do not have. Bars enrich the nightlife of Iowa City in a way that house parties do not. Bars do not have readily available areas where men can easily rape women; houses do. Bars can be openly patrolled by police without a warrant; houses cannot. Commercial districts are better suited than residential neighborhoods to the heavy traffic and noise that goes with drunken revelry. Where do we want people to drink?
However, none of this addresses the core problem. That is, 18-year-olds suddenly free of parental constraint, 21 year-olds experiencing nominal “freedom,” and a variety of others indulge irresponsibly in their alcohol consumption and cause many problems.
Whether they drink at bars or houses, this core problem remains.
A better solution requires that we, as citizens, as a city, and as a state petition our elected federal representatives to repeal the insane federal laws that promote a 21-year-old drinking age. The best solution, in the long run, might even be to abolish the drinking age entirely or reduce it to, perhaps, 14.
Let’s imagine a 14-year-old drinking age. The first opportunity for a person to drink legally would happen when they are under their parents’ care, without the financial means to buy much alcohol, unable to drive, and generally incapable of creating an environment conducive to irresponsible drinking. The novelty of drinking openly once a person arrived at college would be substantially reduced. The aggressive binge drinking that is the rite of many 21-year-olds would be non-existent.
More personally and locally, I suspect Curtis Fry would not have gotten obscenely drunk on his 21st birthday. He would not have brutally beaten my friend, Patrick McEwen, to death at Patrick’s apartment on South Van Buren Street.
Fry’s parents seem like good people. Had Fry been able to legally drink as a 14 year-old, they would have raised him in a way that prevented him from killing someone.
He would not be in prison today.
For me, imagining an alternate reality where a young man is not a killer and an old man is not brutally killed is compelling enough.
Losing Iowa
The NY Jewish Week ran my piece today on the challenge facing Jews in Iowa over Israel and, to a lesser degree, other Jewish issues. Here’s a taste …
Iowa may be the Achilles’ heel in the fabled power of the Israel lobby. Unfortunately, Jews are losing the state.
…
Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses give it disproportionate political attention. Any serious presidential candidate must make multiple visits to the state to be viable. The lack of a significant Jewish presence in Iowa presents a problem for Jews in this country.
…
Most importantly, anti-Israel activists seek legitimacy for their efforts to delegitimize Israel. This legitimacy-seeking activity provoked candidate Barack Obama to say during the 2008 presidential campaign, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” One of the leading anti-Israel activists in Iowa set the trap with a question and Obama stepped into it. The Des Moines Register dutifully reported the story without important context that would have undermined the anti-Israel framing.…
Read the rest of Losing Iowa at The NY Jewish Week.
Israel is the paragon of religious liberty.
The Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount (courtesy MathKnight, Hebrew Wikipedia & WikiCommons)
In Jerusalem at the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, more than a hundred thousand Muslim worshipers convened and listened to a Friday sermon that attacked not only the State of Israel, but also the very prospect of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority:
Tens of thousands of Muslims poured into the heavily guarded Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem for the last Friday prayers of Ramadan as Palestinians protested against newly re-launched peace talks.
Israeli police put the number of worshippers at 160,000 to 170,000, while Muslim authorities said it exceeded 200,000.
In his Friday sermon Sheikh Yusef Abu Sneineh criticized the re-launch on Thursday of Middle East peace talks in Washington, saying “these negotiations are a joke.”
He went on to accuse Israel of seeking normalization with the Arab and Muslim world while “continuing its colonization” of the occupied West Bank through the building of Jewish settlements.
via The Daily Star – Tens of thousands pray at Al-Aqsa as Hamas calls for more armed ‘resistance’.
When one considers that Saudi Arabia heavily regulates the practice of Islam and that Egypt has a long history of regulating sermons, it makes this kind of liberty, in a place far more threatened by Islamist extremism, all the more impressive. Even liberal Europe fails to display the degree of religious tolerance that exists in Israel.
And yet, if you listen to the European media or the Arab media, only Israel is the world’s oppressor. Perhaps rather than condemning Israel, they should seek to emulate Israel.
State Sen. McCoy goes after Mickelson’s pocketbook.
Sen. Matt McCoy
It looks like my chat with Jan Mickelson is making more waves:
A state senator is organizing a boycott of businesses that advertise during Jan Mickelson’s WHO-AM talk-radio program.
His first target: Toyota of Des Moines, even though he drives a vehicle purchased from the dealership.
“It’s the last one I’m ever going to own, that’s for sure,” Sen. Matt McCoy, a Democrat from Des Moines said Wednesday.
Mickelson said during a broadcast last month that some AIDS education efforts destigmatize the “stupid behavior” of homosexuality. He likened AIDS to lung disease, cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease.
Personally, I am generally not a fan of secondary boycotts. I think one should target the person who engages in the offensive conduct and not the people who do business with such a person. However, Jan Mickelson is broadcast on one of the most powerful AM stations in the country and his broadcast reaches almost the entire state. Boycotting him is not likely to do much any time soon. Boycotting his advertisers is probably more effective in this case.
What is more important is that efforts like this give more opportunity to confront the lies that build gay-hatred.
The Atlantic covers Persian Jews in America.
Cyrus the Great allowing Hebrew pilgrims to return to and rebuild Jerusalem
Jews can trace their history in Persia back at least 2,500 years to the time of Cyrus the Great, who restored the Jews to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile. Sadly, in the last several decades, the Jews in Persia have been reduced to one tenth their previous size. Most Jews fled Iran because of the rising antisemitism and persecution that accompanied the Islamic Revolution and went to Israel. A very large number also fled to the United States.
The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Weingarten has an amazing piece discussing the recent history of Persian Jews in the United States. Here is what she reports on Persian Jewish thought on the possibility of a military strike on Iran:
“Its very difficult for us,” explains Hooshang Nemat, the executive vice president of the Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York. “You dont want to see your nation destroyed, and you dont want to see a conflict between your country of birth and the country that you sympathize with because of religion and because of shared history.” Nemat, a 67-year-old Mashadi Jew an small, ancient group from the Iranian city of Mashad, came to America in 1961 as a student at the University of Miami. He returned to Iran in 1972, and came back to the United States because of the revolution.
Like Nemat, most Iranian American Jews are against a military strike on Iran — whether it is from Israel or from the United States. But while theyd prefer a diplomatic solution, others say they would still support Israel in defending itself against a virulently anti-Semitic, and potentially dangerous, regime. Sam Kermanian, the former secretary general of the Iranian American Jewish Federation, believes that an Israeli strike “would be viewed as a justifiable act of defense,” adding that “the reaction of the Iranian American Jewish community wont be much different than the reaction of the majority of the people of Iran, who view the current regime as oppressive, and in conflict with the interests of the people of Iran.”
via Iranian Jews in America: Torn Between Homelands – International – The Atlantic.
This is just a small sample of what Weingarten shares. The entire piece is worth reading and provides valuable insight on the views of religious minorities from Iran.
cross-posted at The View From Damavand
Schooling 1040 WHO’s Jan Mickelson on gay rights.
I had the chance to talk to Jan Mickelson on 1040 WHO yesterday and lecture him on gay rights. My call begins at 58:40. You can listen to it at this link.
My column in the Press-Citizen: No valid objection to Park 51
My column on the Park 51 project (the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”) is in today’s Iowa City Press-Citizen. Here is the opening:
The so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” is not planned for anywhere on the 16-acre World Trade Center site in Manhattan. It is in the Financial District, but it is at least two blocks from WTC 7 — the nearest part of the massive WTC site.
via No valid objection to Park 51 | press-citizen.com | Iowa City Press Citizen.
Harry’s Place brings us Chavez.
Harry’s Place is an excellent blog that has brought an important liberal voice to many issues that sorely need it. From right to left, it skewers illiberal views wherever they may be. One of its latest posts brings us back to an amazing interview of Hugo Chavez on the BBC:
Last month– before he dug up the bones of Simon Bolivar and broke diplomatic relations with neighboring Colombia– the BBC’s Stephen Sackur interviewed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for the Hardtalk program and, to his credit, asked some difficult questions.
via Harry’s Place » Chavez faces tough questions on Hardtalk.
James Edward Johnson 