The Dish

A bill to ban infant circumcision will have a hearing in Massachusetts soon. The bill is S-1777, and people can submit written testimony to Michael.Avitzur@state.ma.us and Gene.Oflaherty@state.ma.us. There will be a public hearing on all miscellaneous bills, including this one to ban infant circumcision, sometime in January 2010. The text of the bill is here.

Although the genital mutilation of infants is, to my mind, barbaric, I wouldn't go so far as to ban it under law. It is too integral to the religious identity of Muslims and Jews for that. But I would like to see it banned in public hospitals outside of religious rituals. Men have a right to grow to adulthood without having their bodies permanently altered without their consent. If they wish to do it to themselves as adults, fine.

Today on the Dish we saw Iraq take a big step towards democracy and US withdrawal. We also discovered more gruesome details on the Hood massacre and saw how it's playing in the Arab press. Jay Newton-Small and some readers offered some parting perspective on Cao's role in the healthcare vote, and a few more readers followed up on the Bishops' embrace of the bill. Get your Palin fix here, here, here, and here.

Andrew, Tom Friedman, and Joe Klein called for a firm reevaluation of US aid to Israel.  The Dish commemorated the Berlin Wall anniversary with some stunning views from Germany here and here. We also featured a photo essay of a young Army recruit in training, triggering this emotional email.

Big news on the Dish home front: our long-awaited View From Your Window book is finally for sale. But before you buy, check out the details of our crowd-sourcing scheme, which will surely get the price low enough to allow this guy to enjoy the book as much as we do.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

Thank you so much for sharing that riveting photo essay of the baby-faced, tattooed soldier.  It made me want to weep.  I cannot help feeling guilty, and angry and sad, but proud and admiring at the same time.  I am an utterly privileged person, and the idea of enlisting to make something better out of my life simply never occurred to me. . . and my kids won't have to do so either.  But where I teach, at a college where many students need help to pay for their education, a significant subset of these young people enlist in the military.   They are so admirable, many of them my best, most motivated students.  But I ache for them, too, and worry like a mother about them going off to war.  Face it: the children of privilege do not have to make this choice.

A reader writes:

Honestly, much as I loathe the Christianist right, it's not really accurate to cite the Westboro Baptist Church as even their fringe.  The WBC is more like the LaRouche cultists—so far off in a world of their own that categorizing them as right or left doesn't make sense.

In fact, their move off the map is something of a fascinating story—in the early aughts, they could have hitched their star to the rising Christianist movement.  But instead they started protesting military funerals, a move seemingly calculated to alienate them from the white southern populists who seem like their natural allies.

And I've always thought it *was* specifically calculated to that end.  One of the most interesting things about the BBC doc on the WBC is seeing how their organization thrives on alienation and humiliation—whenever someone attacks on of them at a protest, via shouts or thrown Slurpees, everyone in the group comes together in a way people only can when they feel mutually threatened.  In that sense, they are like Glenn Beck—people who deliberately provoke outrage, because the outrage of their enemies strengthens group solidarity.

Daphne Eviatar sorts through the documents released on Friday:

The most recently released memos have not gotten much attention, as torture fatigue sets in and the Bush torture program becomes old news. But the FBI memo is important because it adds to the growing body of evidence that senior defense department and CIA officials deliberately ignored the opinions of the best trained and most experienced people in the government about interrogations that abusive interrogations would not work and were not legal. Add that to the rest of the evidence that senior Bush administration officials did not act in good faith in relying on the Office of Legal Counsel memos that justified the techniques the Defense Department and CIA were using, and this latest declassified memo adds weight to the argument that something fishy was going on at the highest ranks of government that demands further investigation.

(Heavily redacted page from an interrogation document released last year.)

A reader writes:

The New York Times reported today that the Catholic Bishops rejected the segregation plan as an accounting gimmick.  They have a point.  The private pot of money can be easily subsidized by the federal pot of money.  The federal pot of money will buy items that the private pot would have bought, thereby subsidizing the private pot of money.

This is the same method that is used when tax dollars go to parochial schools, many of which are Catholic.  Tax money can buy pencils and desks, but not Bibles.  Catholic schools do not have to spend money on books because the taxpayer chips in for those.  This leaves more money to spend on religious activities.

I wonder if the Catholic Bishops even considered this point when slamming the abortion-segregation device as an accounting gimmick.

Marc Lynch puts the new Iraq election law in context:

[T]he deal getting done is clearly good news — and demonstrates that overall Obama’s Iraqi strategy is going well even if it doesn’t get much attention. The election law deal has obvious implications for Obama’s commitment to withdraw combat forces. The American withdrawal timeline was long ago pegged to the elections, with force levels kept relatively high in order to provide for security during the elections and in the immediate aftermath. If the elections had been postponed, it would have posed a major problem for the withdrawal planning. So from that narrow perspective, getting the elections done in January under any laws was really important – and Obama today affirmed that the deal keeps the withdrawal on schedule. Getting a law which seems to include most of what the U.S. wanted substantively is a bonus.

At War explains how the Ft. Hood shooting is playing in the Arab press:

While the American press has largely been consumed by the mass killings at Fort Hood on Thursday, Arabic-language news outlets have put far less emphasis on the story. Moreover, the ethnic and religious identity of the suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, which has been addressed in the American media as a possible part of his motivation in killing 13 people and injuring at least 30 others, is imbued with much less meaning in articles on several Arabic news Web sites…

[T]he headlines alongside the article on the Al Jazeera site are of other crime stories, including the discovery of eleven bodies in the home of a convicted rapist in Ohio and recent the murder of a priest in New Jersey. This signals that the killings at Fort Hood are seen less as part of the ongoing conflict between America and the Muslim world, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more as part of a larger context of violent crime in the United States.

Miguel Lopez, largely paralyzed from the chest down, lies in his bed at home on November 9, 2009 in Denver, Colorado. Lopez, a Mexican immigrant whose three children were born in the United States and are American citizens, broke his neck last summer while playing with his daughters on a backyard trampolene. Formerly a construction worker, Lopez had no health insurance when the accident occurred. He receives home health care visits from Dominican Sisters Home Health Agency, a non-profit that performs some 25,000 home visits each year in the Denver area. It provides free home nursing care to patients with chronic diseases, helps them to better manage their disabling illnesses and provides custodial services with the aim of keeping patients in their homes and out of more expensive nursing home care. By John Moore/Getty.