The British version of "The Apprentice," helmed by Sir Alan Sugar, a Jew, has an odd source of controversy this week: kosher vs. halal chicken. It also touches on the "who is a Jew" issue, and has us wondering why anyone would put "good Jewish boy" on their resume.
Michael Sophocles: a half-Jewish schmuck
In last week’s episode, two teams were tasked with haggling for various items in Marrakech, including  a kosher chicken.  One team succeeded, but the other ended up with a chicken that was halal. (At the market, they keep asking that the chicken be blessed by someone from the mosque and inexplicably making the sign of the cross. You can watch the video here).

Michael Sophocles was one of the two people sent to look for the kosher chicken, and when his team was called to the boardroom to discuss their loss with Sir Alan, he was called out for his lack of knowledge of kashrut, for not knowing what l’chaim means, and for putting "good Jewish boy" on his CV, which Sir Alan concluded was basically just a method of kissing up. His scintillating response: Well, he’s half-Jewish, and he does know what the word schmuck means.

Sophocles narrowly avoided being fired, but the whole spectacle is really amazing to watch. (You can see the boardroom interrogation here and here). In the boardroom Sophocles also refers to himself as a “nice Jewish boy” which seems in direct conflict with his claim that he “will manipulate others if necessary to get the prize.”

While it’s embarrassing that someone who claims to be a good/nice Jewish boy doesn’t know that there’s a difference between kosher and halal, it’s more depressing that knowing the word schmuck is Sophocles’ main claim to Judaism. And then there’s the issue of “half-Jewish.” Since his last name is Sophocles, it’s reasonable to assume it’s his mother who’s Jewish, and while Sophocles clearly can’t be expected to understand the nuances of Halacha, that would in fact make him 100% Jewish. Can someone really claim membership to Judaism with a line like "good Jewish boy," but simultaneously hide behind a disclaimer of half-Jewishness?

Sir Alan, at least, has a nice way of dealing with the situation. “I don’t give a shit,” he says. “Talk about chickens, I’ve got headless chickens right here.”

• It’s nice to see that there are still some religious figures who can keep their pants on: Prominent cantor of the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, Naftali Hershtik, seems to have been the target of an entrapment scheme that aimed to get him fired for sexual misconduct. Hershtik was lured into the hotel room of a young woman while hidden cameras caught everything on tape. Apparently, though, nothing untoward happened. The plot seems to have been the work of Israel Rand, a former student of Hershtik’s.
  

• Gravestones were defaced and smashed in a London Jewish cemetery, Damaged fences and a small fire were also reported in the apparently anti-Semitic attack. So far there have been no arrests.
  

• Also in England, the Jewish community is catching some flack because several state-aided Jewish schools have been asking parents for inappropriate personal information and/or requesting donations on admissions applications. This is in breach of the government admissions code. The problem seems to stretch to most state-aided Jewish schools, and the Jewish Chronicle reports that some schools have violations in up to seven categories.
  

• The Pope’s big news for Jews again. He’ll be attending Park East Syangogue in Manhattan on erev Pesach. This is the first papal visit to an American synagogue. Meanwhile, the Vatican has just released a statement about the revised version of the traditional Good Friday prayer for Jews. Though some rabbis and Jewish leaders are still not happy with the text, the Vatican maintains that the Good Friday prayer, "in no way intends to indicate a change in the Catholic Church's regard for the Jews."

• On a lighter and slightly bizarre note, this week is the premiere of Margot Frank: The Diary of the Other Young Girl, at Shea Center for the Performing Arts at William Paterson University. The premise is a musical exploration of Anne Frank’s sister’s diary, where Margot reveals that she and Peter are in love, and calls Anne, “a conniving little bitch.” Writers Diana Rissetto and Lori Mooney say that the show is a serious attempt to ponder the voices silenced by the Holocaust and history. Um, okay.

A Scottish friend once told me that as he mountain-biked up in the highlands, he was stopped by a young man telling him that “his Laird” said he couldn’t trespass on his lands (you can pretty much walk wherever you like in Scotland). My friend told the servant in his beautiful Scottish accent, “Tell your Laird: The revolution’s coming,” and biked on. This was in 2000. Welcome to mediaeval Britain, where the class distinction is still somehow accepted by the public, and where despite Michael Moore’s praise in Sicko, national healthcare is still not making everyone happy. (And I do mean mediaeval in the derogatory sense.)

So here’s a compilation of recent feasts of the the British elite.

Racism: Take your pick. Choice is aplenty between the results of the first inquest (one that is not aimed at evaluating the actions of the police officers that shot him multiple times in the head) into Jean-Charles de Menezes’s death, whom the police described as a “Pakistani” (he was Brazilian), and Gurkha veterans having to fight in court to gain the right to live in Britain -on an annual pension worth one quarter of the regular British army one.

Religious discrimination: Better not have any hereditary ambition if you happen to like a Catholic (practicing or not). “The 1701 Act of Settlement bars monarchs and their heirs from becoming or marrying Catholics;” I guess the fact that monarchy is kind of unfair and outdated in the first place cancels out the blatant bigotry. (While on the subject, why not mention free speech? I’m glad I’m not over there right now so I can at least talk about it…)

The original Big Brother: You thought the US was a surveillance state? Think again: the UK has the largest police database of DNA in the world, covering about 5% of the population, including mostly young Black men and an estimated one hundred thousand children. Of course, the bobbies think that’s not enough, and plan to get DNA for speeding offenses, and litterbugs.

• Britain, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ask the U.S. to release five British residents from Guantanamo. [Yahoo]
• "It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers." [The New York Times]
• China launches summer camp to help young Internet addicts. [Yahoo]
• Swimmer dies in 1.5 mile Alcatraz race. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• From the bloggers: Barry Bonds and the Asterisk of Doom. [Slate]
• Iraqis push their cars as they wait in line to buy petrol in front of a gas station in al-Saadun street in central Baghdad. [IraqSlogger]

Regular readers bemoaning Jewcy's descent into Brit tabloid hell this week will be glad to hear that this will be the final Shambo update. Despite heroic resistance from the Welsh monks fighting (non-violently) to protect the TB-infected temple bull from the clock-punchers and pencil-pushers, I can confirm the worst. 

After a dramatic day in which officials had to obtain warrant to enter the Llanpumsaint community, the six-year-old Friesian was eventually removed from the site at around 1930 BST on Thursday night.

In a joint statement with Dyfed-Powys Police, the Welsh Assembly Government said it had been "an extremely difficult operation for all concerned".

And on Friday morning, it was confirmed that Shambo had been put down by lethal injection on Thursday evening.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy T-bone,
Silence the tambourines and with muffled drums
Bring out the burger buns, let the ketchup come.

The barbeques are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the mustard and dismantle the grill;
Pour away the gravy and sweep up the wood.
For no meal now will ever be as good.

Brother Alex examines the government's paperworkFurther to my post a couple of days back on Shambo, the sacred Hindu bull being threatened with slaughter by the remorseless forces of bureaucracy in south Wales due to suspected TB infection, there is further news: not, it has to be said, wholly good.

Shambo's last avenue of appeal exhausted, his plea for clemency heartlessly rebuffed by the Welsh Assembly (who were no doubt thrilled just to have something to do), Shambo was scheduled for execution this morning at 8am local time. When the government veterinarians showed up with their stun guns and A1 Steak Sauce, however, the monks stood firm. Amidst extraordinary scenes, the doctors were confronted by a sea of garlanded, chanting Welshmen shaking tambourines. Typically, it turned out that the bureaucrats did not have the correct paperwork (see picture, above), and so they were forced to get back in their van and head back to the office. However, one fears that this is merely a stay of execution, and that the Community of the Many Names of God will soon be looking for another celebrity spokesbull.

Rumour has it that the government have now got the correct forms filled out and stamped, and are heading back to the sanctuary as we speak. Indeed, by the time you read this, it is entirely possible that the warrant will have been executed. Sources close to Shambo insist that he is in good spirits; last night he apparently enjoyed a milkshake, fries, and a cheeseburger, after receiving assurances that it was no-one he knew.

For readers whose appetite has been whetted by this brief account, the Guardian is liveblogging the proceedings. Really.

Isn't it encouraging when great nations act like twelve year olds on the schoolyard?  (Couldn't Putin have ordered 5 diplomats out? That's the Chicago way.)

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia said Thursday it was expelling four British diplomats in retaliation for a similar move by Britain, as a confrontation mounted between Moscow and London over the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

One of the most hilarious and idiotic claims of those offended at Rushdie's knighthood is the one that begins "we," the British, have heaped scorn on "them," the Muslims. This happens lately when people talk about almost any political event or situation involving Muslims. The implication is always as follows: Islam is a given, bounded entity, with borders determined by a central authority. These borders are not to be transgressed by "us," lest we reap the due punishments of cultural insensitivity. There is no dissent within the "Muslim world," nor are there differing opinions, nor are there Muslims who have a take on the matter. All Muslims think with Muslim brains, which are different than "our" brains, and "their" brains (unless tainted) will invariably turn up a conclusion that is at odds with ours.

Further, we are to respect their irreducible otherness and view any opinion that expresses exaltation of freedom of speech or literature as one colonized by the "Western" mind and therefore not authentically Muslim. The corollary of this line of thinking is profoundly racist: that "we" invented free inquiry and cultural tolerance, respect for art, debate, and difference of opinion. We are free as individuals to question our cultural traditions and institutions of authority, but when they do so, they are merely emulating us because the only "true Muslim" is the stooge of tradition and groupthink. We are allowed to use the wellspring of human thought and the lessons of global history to inform our understanding of our local situation, but they must use only local, indigenous knowledge, otherwise they are collaborators with Western imperialism. This is the new Orientalism.

India Knight, herself a British Muslim and part Iranian, makes the following comments about the way this phenomenon is playing out in Britain:

Union Jacks were burnt in Pakistan, with rioters shouting “Kill him!” If I were Pakistani, I’d be more inclined to riot about the monstrous off-the-scale corruption that riddled my government, and the corrupted version of Islam that brainwashed disenfranchised young men in the madrasahs, but anyway...One might respectfully suggest that if people who seek to impose their grotesque distortion of Islam on their unfortunate peoples will insist on making these inane pronouncements, they might at least do so with a degree of calm and a semblance of rationality, because otherwise it’s hard to take them seriously (assuming one were inclined to do so, which is quite an assumption).

It’s as though the Vatican took such exception to The Da Vinci Code that, instead of putting out composed-sounding statements and seeking (not entirely successfully) to reassure people that super-creepy Opus Dei is not in fact creepy at all, its spokesmen started foaming at the mouth like nutters and ordered crusades against Dan Brown for having the temerity to invent a story and write fiction.

Actually it’s not like that, because Rushdie is a brilliant writer and Brown is a sort of rich monkey with a typewriter, but you get the gist.

From the Times' cover story, "Muslims’ Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance." A number of Muslim women donning the niqab -- the full face covering, which Labor politician Jack Straw said out to be banned in Britain -- are native-born to Britain. What probably won't receive the attention it deserves in that Times article is the following paragraph:

“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. “9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims,” she said.

Interesting that she should feel "solidarity" after 9/11, in'it? Solidarity with whom, dear?

I've never been one for mandating English language instruction in the U.S. or any other means of coerced assimilation. Frankly, I think if a naturalized citizen, or tenured immigrant, wishes to remain a social alien, he or she should be allowed to do so. If I ever moved to France or Russia, I should find it a matter of obligation and courtesy to acquire the language of my adopted country, and I would call anyone who didn't do likewise rude and solipsistic.

However, there is something inherently disturbing and menacing about a head-to-toe black cloth covering teachers, lawyers, IT programmers, etc. They look like ninjas. And they are capitulating to the more primeval tenets of Islam, which say that the feminine enticements of a woman's face are too powerful for men to overcome and therefore all women must go about their public lives in a state of purdah. Whither the cries of patriarchy and subjugation from feminists here? At least the glass ceiling was always see-through. (By the way, and since you asked, I would add that the aesthetic requirements of Orthodox women differ only in scale, not moral legitimacy.)

Modern society doesn't allow nudity on the streets for reasons of indecency and, one might argue, the hazards of distraction. A cracking bust can precipitate a 10 car pile-up; a particularly unfortunate ripple of "back fat" can call up an unsuspecting diner's expensive lunch; the pendulous swing of a middle-aged scrotum can't be good for anybody. Yet nudists are just as entitled to partake of their breezy moments of transcendence and "identification." They have colonies for that.

What happens when -- and it's only a matter of time, statistically speaking -- a niqab-wearing woman in London commits a crime for which she can't be identified as the perpetrator? You'll hear the multiculturalists rushing to her defense then as well, claiming that the real criminals are cultural imperialists who think the Sykes-Picot Agreement mooted the social contract.

Is the niqab antisocial? You bet. Is it possibly dangerous? Yes, it is that, too.

Though official records from the Office for National Statistics list the spelling Mohammed 23rd in its yearly analysis of the top 3,000 names given to children, when all the different spellings of the name are taken into account, it ranks second, only behind Jack, according to The Times.

It'll rank first by the end of the year. Xenophobes, take heart. If you land on almost any random page from, say, Brideshead Revisited, a book that seethes with polite contempt for modernity, and simply swap the names Charles, Sebastian and Hardcastle with Mohammed, Abdul and Tariq (and make a few other nominal changes), it's amazing how well the text still parses:

"Abdul, what in the world's happening at your madrasa? Is there a circus? I've seen everything except elephants. I must say the whole of [the place] has become most peculiar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. You're to come away at once, out of danger..."

[...]

"Isn't it early?" said Mohammed. "The women are still doing whatever women do to themselves before they come downstairs. Sloth has undone them. We're away. God bless Tariq."

"Whoever he may be."

"He thought he was coming with us. Sloth undid him too. Well, I did tell him ten. He's a very gloom man in my madrasa. He leads a double life. At least I assume he does. He couldn't go on being Tariq, day and night, always, could he?"

See? Wait long enough and multiculturalism comes naturally.

France has just elected itself the most philo-American president since... well, since Lafayette, who never was president. And in 2009, whichever way the wind blows, Britain will find itself led by a man asking the question on every beer-warmed tongue: What bloody special relationship? James Wood:

But what would a Cameron government look like? It looks as if, like Brown's, it would retain the pound and give priority to public services. And, like Brown, Cameron speaks an essentially Thatcherite managerial language about making these public services more efficient and consumer-friendly. In a recent foreign policy speech, Cameron laid out his stall as what he calls a "liberal conservative." He would be less pro-American than Blair. (But so would Brown.) At least in tone, Cameron sounds more obviously conservative than Brown. He proposes three principles: "First, a realistic appreciation of the scale of the threat the world faces from terrorism. Second, a conviction that preemptive military action is not only an appropriate, but a necessary component of tackling the terrorist threat in the short term. And, third, a belief that, in the medium and long term, the promotion of freedom and democracy--including through regime change--is the best guarantee of our security." This certainly sounds more bullish and more traditionally Conservative than the old Labour line on foreign policy--a party once committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. But then Cameron goes on to talk about building "moral authority" and "humility," virtues he thinks Blair has lacked, and suddenly he sounds pretty much how one imagines Brown will sound. And Cameron knows perfectly well that talk about preemptive action is just talk: No British prime minister is going to support the Americans in preemptive action for a very long time. 

Blair has died, long live Blair! For whatever the prime minister does in the next year, it seems perfectly possible that Brown will lose to Cameron in 2009, and that the country will be led for several years, perhaps much longer, by Blair's natural heir, rather than the one unnaturally begot all those years ago at Granita.

Royal Navy Officer: Faye TurneyFaye Turney, the one female hostage in the Iran-UK standoff, who was to have been released imminently must apparently pay the price for her country's pointing out the obvious fact that Iran trespassed into Iraqi waters and then kidnapped, at gunpoint, fifteen British sailors. The Islamic Republic's stupidity outdoes itself:

The Vice Admiral also disclosed that the Iranians had changed their account of where the incident had taken place after it was pointed out that the first set of co-ordinates they gave were in Iraqi waters. The Prime Minister, who spoke to George Bush yesterday about the growing crisis, told MPs: 'It is now time to ratchet up the diplomatic and international pressure in order to make sure the Iranian government understands their total isolation on this issue.'

Come to that, why not just ask the Vice Admiral where on the map Britain would have done something illegal and name the spot right there?

More disturbing, however, is how Al Alam media has been parading Turney in a headscarf and citing her obviously coerced admission that it was her side that infiltrated Iran's territory. Frankly, this strikes me as the most hubristic provocation by the mullahs yet. One way not to spell appeasement in the UK is to foist religious head coverings into the conversation.

Now I'd quite like to hear how forcing an Englishwoman into Islamic garb violates the Geneva Conventions as well as all standards of cross-cultural decency. Perhaps the UN Council on Human Rights has a word or two they'd like to share? The Socialist Workers' Party? RESPECT? Anyone?

Oracle of Xenophobia: Enoch PowellMy colleague at Commentary Daniel Johnson has called the English columnist Geoffrey Wheatcroft the "British equivalent of Pat Buchanan" for this hose of abuse turned on the pronounced neoconservatism of the Tory party. Wheatcroft's style has always been one of provocation and an unabashed blood-and-soil Burkean conservatism, which parses slightly better on the other side of the Atlantic than it does over here. However, this latest Guardian essay does paint a baleful portrait of dual or triple national loyalties among the new wingers of Albion that recalls the worst Judeophobic bilge of the postwar English tradition -- a tradition which, it's worth remembering, did not stop Anthony Eden from joining with France and Israeli in a disastrous colonial rescue operation in the Suez Canal in 1956.

Wheatcroft is an odd bird in several respects. He's written a highly engaging book called The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma, which argued that the conventional wisdom of Jewish subjugation of Palestine was far worse at Israel's founding -- when there was wide international support for a Jewish homeland -- than it is today. A distinctly un-Buchananite train of thought, which is perfectly cohabitable with a reactionary's desire not to see his bygone party of isolationism turn into the ward of Yank overseas adventuring. Wheatcroft hates Tony Blair and New Labour with a passionate intensity that overshadows his current intramural scuffles, whereas Buchanan's raison d'etre is to save American conservatism from the dread minions of Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky that have hijacked it.

Here Wheatcroft sounds like Evelyn Waugh declaiming the inability of modern British conservatives to turn back the clock so much as a minute:

There was once a vigorous high Tory tradition of independence from - if not hostility to - America. It was found in the Morning Post before the war, and it continued down to Enoch Powell and Alan Clark. But now members of the shadow cabinet, such as George Osborne (whom even Cameron is said to tease as a neocon), vie in fealty to Washington - and this when US policy is driven by neocon thinktanks and evangelical fundamentalists, with whom Toryism should have nothing in common.

There was once... Lest we forget, lest we forget. Daniel Johnson expends a lot of energy in his contentions post trying to show that Alan Clark was a vicious anti-Semite and Hitler sympathizer. (Not being familiar with Clark's book Barbarossa, which Johnson uses as the basis for these accusations, I'll leave it to others to judge of their merits.) However, Powell is the more intriguing figure of the Tory old guard because he is plainly the one with whom Wheatcroft most identifies.

"Who's this English cunt?" was Kingsley Amis's first reaction upon seeing Powell's clipped and donnish mien turn up at Casa Lucky Jim one day. (Amis was friends with Powell's estranged and more literary brother Anthony, who pronounced the family surname differently -- sounds like "pole" -- and better captured the elegant and elegiac strands of Little Englander syndrome in his gorgeous Proustian novel sequence, Dance to the Music of Time.) That Kingsley was already well into his Falstaffian curmudgeon phase when this encounter took place, and that Powell still managed to come off too fusty by half, goes a long way towards explaining just how retrograde is Wheaty's moist-hanky treatment of the Righties of Old. (Would anyone more conservative than Margaret Thatcher have a penguin's chance in Sicily of getting elected? David Cameron may be an insufferable, eco-friendly wet, but he's no fool as PM-in-waiting.)

Powell was anti-immigrant and anti-"Them" with a bullet. He wasn't quite racist, however. His notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, which presaged a civil war in Britain between Anglo-Saxons and a growing (dark-skinned) immigrant class, has been taken up by much of the Anglo-American right in recent day to account for the very real threat of entrenched Islamism in London. Prophetic in Powell's speech was the following strophe:

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

This is Mark Steyn's America Alone thesis in a paragraph.

Frankly, I much prefer to see the Wheatcroft/Derbyshire trend of opposing an automatic Atlantic alignment with the only liberal democracy in the Middle East than I do to seeing the American Conservative* deal with the issue. Buchanan's rag really does write "neocon" when it means to write "Jew" (how else to account for an entire article, by one Daniel McCarthy, that noted the remarkable fact that some neocons were -- gasp -- Catholics!)

Still, Wheatcroft's vices of hyperbole do him little credit:

Iraq might have made Tories hesitate before continuing to cheer the US, but Stephen Crabb does just that. The MP was in Washington at the time of Cameron's speech, where, he said, there was "disappointment expressed". Many would have taken that as a compliment, but not Crabb, who says in best Vichy spirit: "We do need to be careful about how the Americans see us."

See how the far right and the far left have merged when both openly compare the United States with Nazi Germany. The irony is that this merger suggests we're in a bit of Weimar moment right now, all the more reason to err on the side of political caution and avoid paranoid screeds about an ethnically inflected cabal's takeover of venerable institutions.

*Sorry, originally identified as The American Spectator. This was a mistake.

Actor/Director Stephen FryA new, independent organization has launched in the U.K. committed to the separation of the State of Israel and its policies. Independent Jewish Voices has been also called out for their haute  contingency of mostly writers, actors, doctors, lawyers and among whose prominent list includes celebrities Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh, and Zoe Wanamaker. Ironically enough, IJV's declaration describes the group as "from diverse backgrounds, occupations, and affiliations." Given the running list of signatories, I'm not so sure about the social and occupation diversity factor.

And while the ability to engage in a healthy, intellectual debate on Israel's policies is important and critical, the situation in the Middle East unfortunately can't simply be broken down into a declaration of universal human rights. It's much more complex and it's a Western luxury en vogue for affluent Bourgeois Brits to think differently.

IJV, also coined "Jews For Genocide" by British columnist Melanie Phillips sponsored their first speak-out this past Monday and was met with much controversy, most of which was written up in The Guardian.