Weekly Items of Note (2/17)
David Shasha
1. Last week’s episode of Saturday Night Live – a particularly poor one featuring the no-talent teen-idol Justin Bieber – had scheduled a skit parodying Chuck Hagel’s recent congressional appearance:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/10/snl-takes-on-chuck-hagel-israel-comments_n_2657770.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/unaired_snl_sketch_spoofs_the_chuck_hagel_hearings/
The skit was performed in the show’s dress rehearsal with full costuming and graphics. It is an extremely elaborate run-through and not just an offhand rehearsal of a raw sketch.
The video has been posted to You Tube and is essential viewing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gynby-0kkTg
As those who have watched the video will know, the sketch revolves around the fawning and obsequious behavior of the Senators in their support for Israel and their berating Mr. Hagel for a perceived lack of support of that country.
The key moment in the sketch comes when Senator John McCain proposes that Hagel show his fidelity to Israel by insisting on a hypothetical commitment for him to perform Oral Sex on a donkey live on Israeli television at the request of Prime Minister Netanyahu. The off-color joke is then affirmed when other senators loudly chime in to state that they would indeed perform the lewd sex act.
The elimination of the sketch from the live broadcast raises many questions about how the corporate American media industry sees Israel and criticism of it. Even in an outlet like Saturday Night Live which is known for its outlandish form of socio-political satire, such a parody of Israel’s American supporters is deemed to be out of bounds and is to be suppressed.
The removal of the skit speaks to the great anxiety that surrounds all discussion of Israel in the United States and the fears that its supporters engender in our corporate media.
From what we are seeing with the current blocking of the Hagel nomination, the SNL skit has proven prophetic.
The following piece by Zionist radical Jonathan Tobin from Commentary magazine is quite curious:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/02/14/jewish-groups-must-end-silence-on-hagel/
Tobin acts as if there has been no pressure from Jews on the Hagel nomination. Given the sensitive political nature of the matter it is perhaps to be expected that the groups mentioned are not making official pronouncements, preferring instead to work behind the scenes where the attacks on Hagel – as SNL writers seem to know – are coming fast and furious.
2. With this week’s resignation of Pope Benedict it has become clear that his legacy will be permanently marked by the pedophilia scandals that continue to engulf the Church:
And there are more scandals and missteps documented in the following article:
For those who may have missed it, I have discussed the matter in comments to the recent HBO documentary “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”:
https://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/37e36ebb7678ebf4
It is a sad and troubling take of a situation that has stained the Church and shown the inability of Pope Benedict to properly address the pain and suffering of the many victims of this heinous sexual abuse.
Given the depth of the scandals and the cover-up, it is interesting to read this:
With all the lawsuits currently pending – and those yet to be filed – the Vatican Bank will take on an even larger role in minimizing the financial damage to the Church.
Our friend Paul Brandeis Raushenbush of the Huffington Post has written an excellent review of the Pope’s tenure that provides context and nuance:
Here is a rather scathing assessment from former priest Matthew Fox:
Gary Wills, another dissident Catholic, puts it well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/new-pope-ive-given-up-hope.html?ref=opinion
Right Wing pundit Brent Bozell does what any rational person would do when facing the Church’s scandals – attack the filmmaker:
And, of course, ignore the scandals.
And it should come as no surprise that the hard-line Zionists have expressed their love and respect for this Pope whose ideological background is rooted in the most extreme and radical racial and religious lines:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=7363
http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=303011
Love for the Pope is coming from rabbis as well:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4343944,00.html
http://blog.beliefnet.com/truthsyoucanuse/2013/02/a-rabbis-thoughts-on-the-popes-resignation.html
It seems that the Pope’s policies have found favor with Jewish religious and political leaders.
The Pope is said to be a “friend of Israel” and this is supposed to make us all feel better about him. For blind supporters of the Jewish state this is not the first – nor will it likely be the last – time that they will be forced to show their admiration for people whose public record is less than stellar when it comes to human values.
3. Britain’s Channel Four has aired a documentary on child sex abuse scandals in the Orthodox Jewish community:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4343454,00.html
It once again shows us the deeply hypocritical aspects of religious extremists in our time and their need to protect themselves rather than providing justice and security to the community.
4. Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Sunday Book Review and a prominent Conservative pundit. He wrote the excellent book The Death of Conservatism which remains one of the best assessments of the problems of the movement:
His new article in The New Republic provides more important insights on the collapse of traditional Republican values in America:
Tanenhaus provides critical insight into the emergence of radical ideologies that have threatened to disrupt our politics, culture, and society. He lays out a case that these atavistic movements represent a great threat to freedom and tolerance in America. His historical analysis is an essential tool for those who seek to better understand current events and the emergence of extremism in our civilization.
Not to be left out, the radical Right Wing website Pajamas Media sent Roger Simon out to beat Tanenhaus down:
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/02/11/sam-tanenhaus-meet-dr-benjamin-carson/
Let it not be said that the White Conservatives are asleep.
And they even have African-Americans to use as poster children of their radical beliefs.
5. The question for many Sephardim is: How low will our religious leaders sink? How Ashkenazi will they become? How long will it be until we come to the realization that there is no Sephardic culture and no Sephardic leadership?
I was reading the following item that was just re-posted by the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and was struck by the way that influential Sephardim like David Suissa turn to Ashkenazi Jews for their knowledge of Judaism and the Sephardic tradition:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/david_suissa/article/lonely_man_of_thought_20101110
The late Rabbi Hartman, a devoted disciple of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, presented the Maimonidean tradition as if it was born and nurtured in Eastern Europe and, in turn, marked Jewish knowledge as an Ashkenazi preserve. Many Sephardim would, sadly, assert that the most intelligent Jews today are Ashkenazim and that Sephardim are way behind the curve.
Evidence of the debasement of the Sephardim is all around us – it is hard to avoid.
The following interview with SHAS’ Eli Yishai, who shows absolutely no signs of understanding a single thing about the intellectual heritage of Andalus, gives us more than we need to process how low we have sunk:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=7324
We already know that Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom is deeply antagonistic to the Ultra-Orthodox and very much supportive of the militant secular elements in Israel. So it is little wonder that the interview with Yishai is confrontational and bitter.
What we learn from the interview is just how deeply connected SHAS is to the Ashkenazi Haredi world. They are the House Negroes of the Ultra-Orthodox.
Just as we have messianic Settler Sephardim who support the warped apocalyptic visions of Ashkenazi Zionist extremists, so too has SHAS – in spite of the clear signal being sent by the Haredi world which has no respect for Sephardic Judaism and Sephardic rabbinical tradition – served to carry the water of the majority Ashkenazi Haredim. The refusal to serve in the military is a double-edged sword: It ties Sephardi Haredim to the do-nothing Yeshivah world of stipends and dependence. It also decouples these Sephardi Haredim from the larger Israeli society of brutality and cruelty.
On this last point it is critical to realize that this position has not brought SHAS to the Left Wing peace camp, but has only served to immerse it further into the backwardness and anti-Modern values of the Ultra-Orthodox extremists. Authoritarian structures and fundamentalist religious obscurantism with its emphasis on ritual matters now mark a Sephardic Orthodox community that is anti-intellectual, corrupt, and desirous of the perks of political patronage.
The actual problems faced by Sephardim – and other less-well-off Israelis – relating to wages, housing, healthcare, civic welfare, and culture are ignored in favor of the Haredi agenda. Those Sephardim who buy in are grandfathered into the corrupt patronage system and take their privileged place in the cult of Bnai Brak and the Moetzes Gedoilei Torah and BADATZ. All they need to do is abdicate their heritage. Indeed, a small price to pay for security and prosperity.
Members of the SHAS contingent know nothing about the classical Sephardic heritage but can follow the complex PILPUL of the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition. Lacking any proper knowledge of intellectual matters as defined in the Maimonidean tradition, their only desire is to avoid the depredations of Israeli society and get paid as much as possible. There is little sense that a more focused struggle against cultural racism and economic deprivation is needed in order to properly serve the Sephardic community.
But after reading this interview with the benighted Yishai it is quite clear to us that SHAS has no interest in pro-Sephardic advocacy and even less interest in the humanitarian values necessary to create a peaceful future for Israel in the Middle East.
The irony of this cultural holocaust rests in the fact that for many centuries Sephardim held aloft the banner of Jewish creativity. Sephardic Religious Humanism, as I have written over and over, was the most effective synthesis of Talmudic tradition with the intellectual and moral values of Humanism.
I have expressed the matter more fully in my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardic Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction”:
Whether Sephardim embrace radical Orthodoxy or radical Zionism, they remain alienated not only from their own heritage, but from the most important principles of civilization. By playing the part of the House Negro, such self-hating Sephardim have done nothing to advance their own interests and have contributed greatly to the ongoing Jewish dysfunction.
6. Alan Dershowitz remains completely out of control:
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3586/brooklyn-college-first-amendment
Never willing to let others he does not agree speak freely, he now takes his opponents’ Free Speech rights and turn the whole thing upside down. In fact, according to the mighty legal mind Dershowitz, the Brooklyn College event was actually not an example of the freedom to speak and assemble, it was a violation of the First Amendment.
I will leave it to our readers to figure out what lurks in the head of Professor Dershowitz. But I do know that whatever is in his cranium is fueled by PILPUL.
7. Here is yet another interesting story that speaks to the invisibility of Arab Jews:
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/02/birthright-attraction-lebanese.html
Looking at the contentious nature of Israel-Arab relations one would never know that Jews did in fact once live in Lebanon. The matter has been reduced to who owns what land. Israel has been promoting the tourism of what it has called “heritage sites” while Israel’s critics have continued to see its encroachment on Arab land and culture as a violation.
The story of Misgav Am highlights this contentiousness while ignoring the recent existence of Jewish life in Lebanon and the possibility that this could help us deal with the purportedly primordial hatred between Jews and Arabs. The current reality of “heritage” and “history” elides the actual history of Jews in the Middle East who remain completely invisible to both pro- and anti-Israel partisans.
8. This past Tuesday’s State of the Union address by President Obama continued the strategy of going after Republican obstructionism without ever addressing the primary issue that has destroyed the American economy: the malfeasance of a predatory Wall Street and greedy corporate elites who have drained our economy of its value.
We now live in a complex global economy that far outstrips in human destructiveness that of the Industrial Revolution. Labor has been progressively eliminated due to technological advances which makes Middle Class existence precarious. Wealth has been monopolized by the elite 1% that has increased its share of the financial pie at the expense of workers. Wall Street has gleefully partnered with the corporate titans by manipulating financial markets and cutting off a slice of that lucrative pie right off the top by means of their inexorable “fees.”
Workers have been eliminated, wages suppressed, while all the time the industry of moving money from one place to another – once called “investment” – has generated billions of dollars of profit that has gone directly into the pockets of those elites lucky enough to remain entrenched in the exclusive club of the 1%. Crumbs are parsimoniously sprinkled here and there to keep the masses at bay. These masses remain trapped in a state of docility generated by a profound confusion over the process.
For those who can stomach it, here is more on the criminal actions of the banks by Matt Taibbi, one of the few heroes in this saga:
Fundamental banking and financial principles have given way to a casino atmosphere where betting has become the standard practice on Wall Street. It is a hermetic world which excludes actual production and wage-earning as we once knew it. Making things has been out-sourced to a Third World which has no fair labor practices or living wages. Money is moved off-shore so that taxes do not have to be paid. Local municipalities have seen their coffers drained and have cut their expenditures to the bone.
It is a circular system that shows no sign of reforming itself so long as the elites continue to tyrannize the process and design laws and guidelines that protect their immoral and deeply destructive criminal activities.
Obama has consistently refused to deal with the financial malfeasance and has little chance of creating a transformed American workforce given the abysmal state of education and culture in this country. He rightly points to Republican obstructionism, but neglects his own critical role in the problem. Rather than seeking to re-align and re-structure the financial system, he has doubled-down on the policies of George W. Bush and removed any accounting of Wall Street and its crimes from the agenda.
Robert Scheer has reinforced the point in a post on Chuck Hagel and Jack Lew. Lew is sailing through the confirmation process in spite of the fact that he, like the rest of Obama’s financial team, is the worst sort of Wall Street insider. With his certain installation as Treasury Secretary we will get more of the same anti-99% policies that favor the banks and will surely turn a blind eye to their continuing crimes.
While the president duplicitously speaks with love and support of the Middle Class, we see the “banks” continuing to run amuck in ways that continue to undermine Middle Class interests:
On the very day of the speech, the Dow Jones hit near-record levels:
Rich people cannot even get their Range Rovers!
http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/sold-2013-range-rover-unavailable-months-article-1.1262209
Watching both the Obama apologists and the Obama haters in the discussions that followed his address I was struck by the way that language plays an important role in the process. We seem to be hearing the same tired words to describe the mess we are in. Budget deficits, entitlements, job creation, government overreach, and the rest of the clichés appear with numbing regularity while the deep structural issues of financial criminality and the perils of technology are set aside as if they did not exist. There is no money for poor people – that is pejoratively called an “entitlement” – in this discussion, only money for Wall Street bailouts and corporate welfare which is seen as a necessary tool to protect our economic health.
Particularly offensive was the “expert” panel on the Charlie Rose PBS program:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12772
The predictably trite and hackneyed discussion – the “brilliant” Rose has never met a corporate titan or Wall Street gangster that he does not fawn over like a besotted schoolgirl – displayed an endless parade of these clichés and tired re-hashing of the talking points promoted by insider Washington officials. By ignoring the real issues that face our economy moving forward, the idea is to structure a debate that marks the crimes of Wall Street and corporate elites – who are making out, literally, like bandits while everyone else is struggling to keep their heads above water – as a dead issue. It is government spending, social welfare entitlements, and job training that are being discussed and fought over.
Amazingly, the following night’s Rose program featured a one hour interview with former vice president Dick Cheney.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12773
The interview, as usual for Rose, is completely benign and does little to confront Cheney on his many violations of law and ethics. It is truly unfathomable how Cheney, perhaps the most debased American politician of our time, continues to appear in public and spout his very dangerous rhetoric with its vicious diatribes against those who he does not agree with. The current decline of America is ironically tied to the very policies that Bush and Cheney imposed on us; policies that accelerated the rise of the 1% and let the banks get away with untold violations of our economic system.
Until Wall Street and corporatism are addressed in a serious way – which is highly unlikely given Obama’s firm support for the institutional leadership and his catering to their demands – we have no real chance to improve a society that is sinking deeper and deeper into the financial abyss.
9. Convicted felon and Hip-Hop icon Lil Wayne is receiving criticism for a song called “Karate Chop” which references Civil Rights legend Emmett Till in a very rude and disrespectful manner:
It is yet another example of the degenerate ignorance and vile brutality of a culture that does not seem to have any sense of self-respect and decency. Given the widespread ignorance of history by young people today, the insult to the memory of the fallen martyr Emmitt Till is a particularly egregious and painful act.
African-American music legend Stevie Wonder has also weighed in on the matter:
Community pressure has forced the artist and the corporate executives to relent on the offensive lyrics:
10. As a prime example of the disunity and infighting that is a regular feature of the Jewish community, see the following:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york-news/fresh-rift-opens-over-tactics-bds-campus-fight-0
I applaud those who reject the extremism of Dov Hikind, and yet looking at all this I come away with the feeling that incivility and dysfunction has become the hallmark of a Jewish community that has lost its moorings.
Sadly, this is the way that things have worked in the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition for many centuries. It is about who can yell the loudest. Such behavior was not at all typical in the Sephardic world where internal unity was always held as the highest civic value. With the loss of the Sephardic heritage and its ethical character, this sort of nonsense is what the future of Judaism and the Jewish community will look like.
11. M.J. Rosenberg has an excellent piece on the Chuck Hagel nomination that continues to develop new twists as I write this:
http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=855aabd7ccd7a77e987004677&id=3af1801979&e=9017b3ca6e
Rosenberg shows us the bullying way in which the Israel Lobby operates. The fear the Lobby generates remains a part of every American politician’s daily existence. It should be remembered that Hagel is not some Liberal idealist. His foreign policy views are very much in line with the old Henry Kissinger-Realist school.
12. Here is one more rabbi charged with sex abuse of a minor:
When we read the following report on so-called “Modesty Squads” in New York, the whole matter takes on another meaning:
The relation between a repressive sexual atmosphere that goes way beyond the bounds of Halakha and crimes of a sexual nature is, as we have seen in the Catholic Church, to be expected.
With the continuing successes of the Ultra-Orthodox I suppose that this is the sort of thing that we will sadly be seeing more of in the future.
David Shasha