Month: August 2006

This piece of anti-Semitic drivel appears in today’s Daily Telegraph of London. I presume it isn’t parody:

"If we peel back the layers of the Gibson fiasco, we see something much darker and more troubling, not about him – he’s just a fool – but about the society which needs to produce a scapegoat in him. Dangerously worded as it was, Gibson’s drunken comment was, it could reasonably be argued, a statement against the arrogance of the Israeli military: "They started all the wars in the world." Isn’t it that which is making America call for his head? … There’s a problem here. Jews, and by extension Israelis, are un-insultable in ethnic terms, though everybody else is. I know it’s hard to tell a people who saw six million of their number murdered to turn the other cheek, but turn the other cheek they must, unless they want to present themselves as the great unimpeachable race apart."

Clinical. Bill Maher is onto something, isn’t he? More evidence of the anti-Semitism pervading European responses to the war in the Middle East here.

On pay-per-view! Moving the Gibson story forward …

New Haven, Connecticut, two days ago, as the rains came through at 6.30 pm.

A somewhat typical headline:

Iran Leads Islamic Nations in Demanding End to Mideast War

The fourth paragraph of the story? Ahem:

"Although the main cure (to the situation) is the elimination of the Zionist regime, in this stage an immediate ceasefire should be implemented," Ahmadinejad, who previously has said Israel should be wiped off the map, told the closed door meeting.

"Iran Calls For Elimination of Israel" just wasn’t news, I guess, was it? Best to focus on the real issue in the region: Israel’s "aggression".

A revealing exchange:

The differences between the administration and the Senate were most pronounced when Mr. McCain asked Mr. Gonzales whether statements obtained through "illegal and inhumane treatment" should be admissible. Mr. Gonzales paused for almost a minute before responding.

"The concern that I would have about such a prohibition is, what does it mean?" he said. "How do you define it? I think if we could all reach agreement about the definition of cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment, then perhaps I could give you an answer."

Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, said that using illegal and inhumane interrogation tactics and allowing the evidence to be introduced would be "a radical departure" from longstanding United States policy.

We’ve been living through an illegal, immoral and radical departure from long-standing U.S. policy – and values – for almost five years now.

Bill Maher sure is right about this:

As I watch so much of the world ask Israel for restraint in a way no other country would (Can you imagine what Bush would do if a terrorist organization took over Canada and was lobbing missiles into Montana, Maine and Illinois?) – and, by the way, does anyone ever ask Hezbollah for restraint. you know, like, please stop firing your rockets aimed PURPOSEFULLY at civilians? – it strikes me that the world IS Mel Gibson.

Most of the time, the anti-semitism is under control, but that demon lives inside and when the moon is full, or there’s been enough alcohol consumed, or Israel is forced to kill people in its own defense, then it comes out.

Bill is still wrong, I think, to link this to religion. Gibson’s kind of rigid bigotry is more a function of the fundamentalist temptation within all religion – not religion itself, and certainly not all of Christianity. The biggest lie of our time is that fundamentalism is the only authentic expression of religious faith. In my view, it is often the least authentic.

This is drunk:

He was taken to a hospital, where his blood-alcohol level, according to state records, was reported at 0.72 – nine times the legal limit for driving, and almost double the level that is considered potentially fatal for many adults.

For some reason no rants about the Jews. What gives?

A reader writes:

In June, I attended the World Cup in Germany. While there, I visited Dachau. This experience inspired me to send a postcard from the torture museum to my senators. My message was simple: Do not allow the torture of human beings in the name of the United States.

Today I received a letter from Senator Orrin Hatch, who writes that "the Bush Administration acted in good faith on this issue." Regarding the McCain Amendment, Sen. Hatch states that he supported Vice President Cheney’s efforts to gut the amendment because Hatch had "some reservations" even though the amendment would only prohibit the American government from exposing any human being in the custody of the United States to "cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment."

Senator Hatch agrees that our military should be bound by the Geneva Convention and should not use interrogations techniques other than those in the Army Field Manual. But Sen. Hatch draws a distinction between our military and our "intelligence agencies."

Sen. Hatch explains that his reservations emerged from his belief that our intelligence agencies "require more flexibility." Sen Hatch hastens to add that this "flexibility" extends only so far as "[the] techniques [used by intelligence interrogators] do not include torture." This can only mean that Sen. Hatch does not define torture as "cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment." As a result, the ranking majority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee would seem to be on record as supporting "cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment" of human beings so long as the treatment does not fall within his undefined concept of torture.

I have an uncle who serves in the Navy, and my brother serves in the Army and will probably be sent to Iraq within a year. If either were to fall into enemy hands, I would hope and pray for (but probably not expect) humane treatment. I cannot in good conscience expect our nation to fall short of how I would hope my family would be treated.

Senator Hatch suggests that this is "a tremendously complicated" matter.  It is not. Torture is wrong.

It’s amazing that a president who claims to see the world in black and white, and good and evil, sees the question of torture as one full of gray. It speaks volumes. And it behooves us to remember that this was a man who once made jokes about a woman whom his signature had already sentenced to death.

Rumsfeld refuses to attend a Senate public hearing on the war he has mismanaged so spectacularly. He says he’s too busy and the hearings are political theater. Sure they are. And he’s a politician who has managed the worst-run war since Vietnam. Answer to the public? He answers only to the king. (Update: He’s reversed his decision.)

"Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.

Nothing seems to us changed.

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same weairsome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain," – Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray."