Christopher Hitchens wants to know why Nelson Mandela hasn't denounced Robert Mugabe, and insists that "[b]y his silence about what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit in the pillage and murder of an entire nation, as well as the strangulation of an important African democracy." The most generous interpretation of this sentence is that Hitchens doesn't know what 'complicit' means.

The thing is, Mandela has denounced Mugabe. He has described Mugabe as aMadiba With Springbok Captain Francois Pienaar: The founding image of the rainbow nation paradigm example of African "'tyrants' who cling to power...'who have made enormous wealth, leaders who once commanded liberation armies.' They had come to 'despise the very people who put them in power' and 'think it is their privilege to be there for eternity.'" For good measure, Mandela added that "'we have to be ruthless in denouncing such leaders.'"

That denunciation of Mugabe came a year into Mandela's retirement from politics, when he was already eighty-two years old, at the height of a political, agricultural, and financial crisis in Zimbabwe. It made no difference in Zimbabwe whatsoever. So Hitchens' notion that "the smallest word" from Mandela would make a "huge difference" is patent nonsense. His complaint amounts to accusing Mandela of being culpable for "the pillage and murder of an entire nation" because he hasn't denounced Mugabe frequently or recently enough to satisfy Christopher Hitchens, regardless of the negligible practical effect of such a denunciation. Which is a distinctly less compelling indictment.

Incidentally, Hitchens' failure to give an answer to his own question isn't for lack of having received one. George Bizos told Hitchens that Mandela is "a very old man" whose "doctors have advised him to avoid anything stressful." Well, that just won't do it for Hitchens, who insinuates that Bizos—the heroic human rights activist and counselor to the defendants in the Rivonia trial as well as (more recently) to Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai—is prevaricating to cover up for Mandela's "squalid compromise."

It can't be that Bizos is stating the simple truth that Mandela is a frail ninety-year-old man whose body has been wrecked by decades of abuse and malnutrition and who lives in constant pain. It can't be that finally after all these years, his mind is beginning to show signs of what happens to a human mind after enduring for so long: Just before the Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and England last year, Mandela mistakenly called his beloved Springboks 'the All Blacks,' the nickname of their arch-nemesis New Zealand. That's not a minor lapse. It would be like a passionate fan of the Red Sox inexplicably calling them 'the Yankees,' at least if his support of the Red Sox were a profound symbol of his nation's post-apartheid reconciliation with which everyone from his country is intimately familiar.

South African blogger Michael Trapido puts things more politely than I can: "Madiba, of all people, has merited his greatness and earned his rest. While we would all love to see him as much as we can, exerting pressure will only shorten his time with us and be of benefit to nobody." Less politely, Hitchens believes Mandela owes it to Hitchens to give himself a coronary episode. Otherwise he's a squalid moral compromiser with Zimbabwean blood on his hands.

Next week in Slate: Christopher Hitchens explains that Martin Luther King's silence on genocide in Darfur proves that the once great man has descended into the squalor of moral relativism.

Asking the big questions: The ad campaign for Satyagraha It's become a cliché to search for Jewish influences or themes in works by Jewish artist. Generally the effort is one of overzealous interpretation, if not projection. Consider the following, then, not a reading of Philip Glass's Jewish opera Satyagraha, but a Jewish reading of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha—a work which evokes both the pride and anxiety of contemporary Jewishness.

The pride came not from "one of our boys done good," although such a sentiment might be excused in this case. When Satyagraha was written in 1979, Glass was still an up-and-comer; he'd only recently made it big, was only a few years away from having been a starving artist, and was still regarded, by many, as part of the avant garde. No longer -- for better or for worse. Satyagraha opened at the Met April 11 after a bombastic ad campaign. “Could an opera put virtue back on its feet?” asked posters around New York City. “Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?”

These questions are as yet unanswered, but the New York Times did call Satyagraha “a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity.” Glass is probably the most widely-heard composer active today, and while some of his later works have begun to seem rather derivative, the Met’s enormous production, brilliantly [re]conceived by Phelim McDermott with sets by Julian Crouch, shines. It reminds us why we loved Glass in the first place: the repetitions are haunting, not tedious; the melodic and conceptual reaches soaring, not pretentious.

Satyagraha tells, in non-linear and largely non-verbal fashion, the story of Gandhi’s struggles on behalf of South Africa’s Indian population. During the course of this twenty-year fight for civil rights, he developed the philosophy and political tactics he would eventually use to liberate India from British colonialism. These tactics went on to inspire Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other liberators around the world. But in this period, they were still a work in progress, paid for in risk and blood.

Satyagraha juxtaposes symbolic stagings of key episodes in Gandhi's struggle with Sanskrit quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, among the most sacred texts of Hinduism. While to some this may seem an obvious choice, it is actually a curious one, as much of the Gita is about why its hero, Arjuna, must go to battle. It's hardly a nonviolent text.

Puppets for peace: The British staging of the opera Yet it is a text, perhaps above all, about knowing and fulfilling one's holy mission, of virtue in the face of adversity, of duty and moral responsibility. This is why Satyagraha appealed to me as "Jewish": not because of its composer's ethnicity, but because it captures the power of sacred text to inspire sacred action.

Gandhi was, after all, a holy man. In his later life he was an ascetic, fasting regularly and relinquishing all possessions. Like Dr. King, he regularly used not only religious language but religious spirit to motivate and comprehend his work—and to stir up his audience. Satyagraha is an opera about the power of spirit and word to require us to be our best selves -- which is also what Judaism does at its best.

It is a message we need to hear today. Just as Satyagraha's provocative marketing campaign asked us if an opera could inspire us to stand up for truth, we need to ask whether the Torah can inspire us to take a stand for justice, economic fairness, equality, human rights, and peace? Can it move us to oppose appalling injustices in Tibet, Darfur, and around the world?

The questions are not entirely rhetorical. There are those today who think religion is at best a superstition, at worst a force for ill, and should be kept entirely separate from any notion of political engagement. There are others who think that the Jewish religion is mainly about aggrandizing and protecting the Jews. Those of us who disagree, who believe that our Jewishness compels us to fight torture, unnecessary war, environmental irresponsibility, and economic oppression by our own elected officials, may be inspired by Satyagraha even if we don't speak a word of Sanskrit.

(Indeed, since few audience members do, the opera inspires by musical and visual gestures, like the sight of a hundred lanterns being lifted in protest, or remarkable outsized puppets symbolizing collective action against greed.)

At the same time as Satyagraha evoked this pride in the possibilities of a prophetic tradition, it evoked in me a feeling of shame. It's impossible to watch hordes of second-class citizens standing up for their rights against an occupying regime and not think of Israel and Palestine. To be sure, the opera never draws that connection -- it is explicit in linking Gandhi and King, and some of the new production's imagery suggests Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but nowhere does it reference the Israel/Arab conflict. Yet to my eyes and ears, the parallels were unavoidable.

Behind the scenes: Set elements backstage (photo via the New York Times) This is not because the Palestinians are in the same position as the Indians (or black Africans) in South Africa, or that Israel is a colonial power. They are not. But the contours of popular struggle against a better-armed adversary are unmistakable.

Let us grant that there may be many differences. Yasser Arafat never was Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela for that matter. The Palestinians were not a nation in the same way as India or Tibet is. And of course, Israel's safety is at stake in a way that Britain's and China's never have been, and violent, rejectionist Palestinian factions enjoy considerable power. Let us grant all of these distinctions. There are still the brute facts of checkpoints, separation barriers, closures, and settlements. There are still the day-to-day realities of people living under occupation.

If we grant all these differences, we may well end up with a political program not so different from that of the current Israeli government. Yet at the very least, the brute facts demand that such a program be pursued ambivalently, even regretfully—not with the sort of reflexive, defensive cheerleading one finds in many Jewish quarters today. If indeed these policies are necessary, then our own support of them must be tinged with the awareness that every day, they place the Jewish state on the wrong side of justice. Perhaps these "costs" are justified by a higher good—but let's not pretend that they don't exist.

This was the ambivalence I felt watching Satyagraha, the title of which means "truth-force." One of the blessings and curses of Separation-Wall Israel is that the Palestinian crisis is more invisible than ever to visitors. We can stay at the Dan Pearl, visit holy sites, and once again promenade down pedestrian malls with comparatively little fear of violence. But if we take our sacred texts as seriously as Gandhi did, they must remind us of the costs of our freedom -- in this case, costs borne largely by people who do not enjoy the benefits.

Hopefully I have been clear that neither I nor Satyagraha advocate a particular policy position. But in reminding me the beauty of religious consciousness, Satyagraha also reminded me of the responsibility it demands.

The Passover/Exodus Narrative: a universal tale of freedomPassover is a time of asking questions, and I have a few. This year, though, the furor that surrounded Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his sermons that dared to suggest that this Christian nation may actually be earning God’s wrath and damnation for some of its behavior, reminded me of an issue I’d first encountered in South Africa: The idea that the Passover/Exodus narrative of the Hebrews’ flight from Pharaoh and slavery doesn’t belong exclusively to any tribe, but is a universal tale of freedom into which suffering people everywhere are able to insert themselves. And also that even if your forebears were victims of injustice, you’re quite capable of being a perpetrator of injustice.

I think the Rev. Wright furor offered many white Americans an introduction they found shocking to the reality that the black Church in America has always connected viscerally to the liberation narrative of the Biblical people of Israel, making that narrative their own as a source of succor for their own struggles and trials. Martin Luther King, remember, spoke of going to the top of the mountain and seeing the promised land, knowing that he might not make it there. In other words, casting himself as Moses. And it’s an ongoing, vibrant tradition that gives the African American church its special vitality.

The ability of oppressed people to find themselves in the Exodus narrative of liberation is, of course, precisely the point of that narrative. The problem in Egypt wasn’t simply that it was the Jews who lived in slavery; the problem was was slavery itself. And the antidote to slavery advocated in the Torah (the five Books of Moses) — human community constituted on the basis of law and justice rather than political authority claimed on divine grounds — is a universal one; it applies, absolutely equally, to everyone, and everyone is invited, as Moses did, to challenge authorities that offer anything less.

The God of Abraham, proclaimed as the one true god, is obviously everyone’s god; he’s not a tribal fetish; he’s been invoked precisely to challenge the sort of tribal fetish deities that the Egyptians had used to rationalize their system of oppression. So, the Passover/Exodus narrative has powerful resonance to all people of the Abrahamic faiths (and possibly others) who may find themselves confronting oppression.

But those who feel threatened by others' demands for justice -- oppressors who cloak their own abuses of others in pieties of Christian soldierhood or the Star of David as the brand icon of an occupation -- get very uncomfortable when they realize that others see them as inheritors, not of the righteousness of the Biblical Hebrews' flight to freedom, but of Pharaoh's attempts to suppress the Israelites.

But throughout the Old Testament, the Jewish prophets are warning the Israelites to take nothing for granted. The mantle of righteousness cannot be inherited genetically (surely, the God of Abraham is not a racist who judges people by their DNA) or claimed simply through vigorous prayer and observance of ritual; it must be earned in one’s conduct in relation to others. Thus Hillel’s famous definition of Judaism while standing on one foot: “That which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others; all the rest is commentary.” In other words, it is only via the decency of your behavior in the world that you can be a good Jew.

Jews who commit injustices against others would be unequivocally condemned by the Jewish prophets, just as those who drop bombs on others or sentence them to death are plainly deluded when they claim to be guided by the inspirational example of Jesus. That, I think, is the essence of what Reverend Wright was saying in those passages that caused so much controversy — that God would damn, not bless, an America that committed injustices. To which I’d add, in line with Rami Khouri’s profound challenge to Israeli journalists at the height of the last Lebanon war, an injustice committed under a flag bearing the Star of David would be fiercely condemned by the Biblical Jewish prophets.

It was easy to see how little our Jewish genetic lineage did to make us really Jewish in the South Africa of my youth, where every Passover, we sat around seder tables singing, in a barely understood Hebrew, of the days when we were slaves, while the black women who lived in our backyards under a domestic labor system not that far removed from slavery, carried in steaming tureens of matzoh ball soup and tzimmes. We may have convinced ourselves that our DNA entitled us to claim this story as our own, but it was abundantly clear that in the South African context, most Jews had thrown in their lot with Pharoah, while the Israelites were working in their kitchens.

The mantle of justice associated with the Torah prophets, it seemed to me later, was nobody’s birthright; it had to be earned.

As a young activist heading out into the townships every weekend to meetings where communities were planning to resist eviction or burying those who had fallen in the fight against the regime, I was intrigued to hear the preachers and ordinary people couch their own struggles firmly in the narratives of the Exodus.

But around my own seder tables, the descendants of Pharoah’s slaves paid scant attention to the plight of those in their kitchens. They were discussing real estate and accounting scams — and, of course, how long it might be before “the schwartzes” (yiddish for “blacks”) would rise up and spoil the party.

If Hillel was right (and I believe he was) that Judaism is less about rituals and the minutiae of halachic law than it is about the ethical treatment of others, I can safely say that I learned very little of Judaism in the more than 200 hours of family Seders I sat through in South Africa. In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, we always kept a chair empty and a glass full in case the Prophet Elijah showed up. Looking back, I shudder to think what he would have made of the spectacle had he actually accepted the invitation.

I suspect he’d have dragged us over the coals in language not unlike that used by Reverend Wright. A friend once told me that his father, an Anglican priest, believed that whereas Christians had to work their way into heaven, Jews were basically on the guest list; our entry to Paradise was assured, by virtue of the fact that we’d been born Jewish. I thought that was a remarkably silly idea. Not only that; it’s remarkably dangerous, too, because it rationalizes moral laziness and injustice and violence committed in the name of a false righteousness. Unfortunately, I suspect, my friend’s father’s belief that as Jews, we are genetic entitlement to God’s favor, is all too widespread. Passover, and the universal tale of oppression and freedom it celebrates, is a good opportunity to burst that bubble.

[Cross-posted from Rootless Cosmopolitan]

Madame Mayor: Helen ZilleIn addition to supporting dictators and illiberal elements around the world (from Iran to Venezuela to neighboring Zimbabwe, and calling for the recognition of Hamas), South Africa's ruling party--the African National Congress--does not much like democracy at home. While it curried the image of a multiracial liberation movement during the years of apartheid, since coming to power in 1994 it has increasingly shown signs of being just another black nationalist party, the likes of which have littered the African continent since de-colonization in the 1950's and 1960's. Were it not for the country’s large industrial base and reliance on international trade, not to mention a history of English parliamentary government and an independent judiciary, contemporary South Africa would not be the success story that it is so often made to be.

There is a liberal alternative in South Africa, and has been for decades, despite the attempts of the ANC to smear this opposition as apologists for apartheid. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Kaminski profiled Helen Zille, the recently-installed leader of the Democratic Alliance—the official, and liberal, opposition to the ANC—who also doubles as the Mayor of Cape Town. Zille won the mayoralty with a plurality of votes in the spring of 2006, but since that time, the ANC has tried to remove her—through chicanery allegedly reaching all the way up to President Thabo Mbeki’s office—no less than 7 times. The ANC’s inevitable attempts to fob off accusations of racism and white supremacy on Zille will ring hollow: she made her name as a journalist for exposing the state’s murder of black consciousness leader (and subject of a classic Peter Gabriel protest song) Steve Biko and made a name for herself as a crusading journalist for the legendary anti-apartheid Rand Daily Mail.

One of the more vile, historically ignorant slanders to come from Jimmy Carter's mouth these days has been the comparison of Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. This false contrast, of course, forms the title of Carter's latest, sensational book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. It’s a bit surprising that Carter would ever want to draw attention to southern Africa, considering his administration's disastrous policies there (Zimbabwe's starving millions can thank Carter and his former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young for Robert Mugabe). But let’s forgive Jimmah’s invocation of the South Africa-Israel comparison, because it can still be useful. The simple fact is that democracy in Israel—where Islamists calling for Israel’s dissolution sit in the parliament--is far more vibrant than it is in the Rainbow Nation.

Fifteen years ago, before the death of irony and cassette tapes, I fell in love with a girl while living on a kibbutz in Israel. At least it felt like love at the time. Like the affair itself, my arrival in Israel was an act of happenstance. I had just dropped out of law school, veering from a path that had been carefully cultivated by my parents since I was in the fifth grade. This semi-rebellious act left me rootless and ready to take on the world. I was looking to travel to any place, so long as it was away from home. Israel was not the only foreign port that beckoned me forth, but it was warm and far away and full of Significance. At the time, it existed for me more as a mythic abstraction than a geographic reality.

The start of the affair: Slacker + international intrigueFor years my father had been keenly focused on this tiny sliver of land, though I never really understood why. As is the case with many American Jews, Israel influenced his voting behavior, his philanthropic choices and even the books he read. Any decision was justifiable so long as it benefited the Holy Land. Thanks to this cultural cover, it was an easier sell to my parents than Telluride or Prague, other favored destinations for clichéd wanderers at the time. But my decision to move to a kibbutz wasn’t motivated by my father’s political myopia. I was just after the Zionist dream of living communally, turning the desert into a garden, and hooking up with adventurous young Scandinavians who volunteered for kibbutz life as a cheap way to extend world tours.

As it turned out, I never had the chance to enjoy that last rite-of-passage. On nearly my first day on the kibbutz, I fell madly in lust with Leah, an outspoken South African with pale blue eyes and lustrous auburn hair. She was fresh off six months of teaching art to Palestinian children in the West Bank, and her Johannesburg accent gave her an exotic, sophisticated air. This was a woman who had spent a year touring Europe as a member of a punk trio after graduating from one of England’s finest boarding schools. Had Graham Greene been asked write a sequel to Slacker, Leah could have been his female protagonist. I was in love with her at first sight—or with the idea of her, which was, frankly, the same thing to me back then.

As in college and prison, time spent on a kibbutz is catalyzed by severe insularity. Leah and I were together nearly every hour of every day. There were few literal or figurative walls of any kind, so our relationship simply leapt into existence without the incremental steps of courtship. Within three weeks I had moved into her living space, a large cabin at the far end of the volunteers’ compound. Luckily, she had not been assigned a bunkmate, so we pushed two rickety twin beds together and built a makeshift honeymoon suite.

This spontaneity was exactly what I was looking for after the bloodless experience of law school, not to mention my previous relationships. The girlfriend I’d had prior to leaving for Israel wanted nothing more than to settle down and live in a midwestern suburb. Leah was different from the other women I’d been with, most of whom didn’t own electric guitars or the complete works of Hunter S. Thompson. She was uninterested in defining our relationship, and she seemed unburdened by the concept of dating with a specific end goal in mind.

Nice work if you can get it: An avocado fieldThanks to the sub-tropical heat of the Israeli summer, clothes were optional, a situation that was tailor-made (so to speak) for young lovers anxious to explore their “cultural commonalities.” Leah and I formed a community of two, falling into a shared life. Our work took us to different parts of the kibbutz—she toiled in a dog food factory while I had to good fortune to work in the sun-drenched avocado fields—but in our free time we were inseparable. We tended to skip the group social activities in favor of our cozy co-habitation, reading, playing “shesh besh”, and indulging in the kibbutz’s main source of live entertainment: drinking cheap vodka while sitting around a bonfire.

But all was not milk and honey in our enchanted garden. Leah was a diehard proponent of Palestinian liberation, and she felt that any Israeli presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was illegal, immoral and unjustified. She also contended that the military support provided by the United States to Israel made America, and all Americans, complicit.

At first I simply nodded at her passionate pleas without giving them much thought. But eventually the fruits of the political discussions my father had endlessly belabored began to rise to the surface. I started to assert my own views, or at least those that were then popular in The Jerusalem Report. But when I tried to suggest that Palestinian violence had helped create the current situation, or that there were viable scenarios that would allow for the creation of Palestinian state, she would label me a “lie-spouting bourgeois jackass,” which is an argument that was hard to counter intellectually.

My opinions on the complicated subject were irrelevant, really, because my nationality had, in her eyes, pre-determined my complicity. Had she listened to me, she might have learned that although I had been raised to view Israel as the righteous defender of its land, actually being there had broadened my perspective. I didn’t agree entirely with her arguments, but I saw merit in some of them.

Complications in love and war: Israelis protesting the war in Lebanon, May 2006But I was not bothered by the name-calling. As far as thickheaded zealots go, Leah was captivating and cute. In fact, the furious verbal sparring gave our evening liaisons an intense additional jolt. I don’t know how Arafat was in bed, but to do this day I say there is no better aphrodisiac than political disagreement. Still, her inability to see any side but her own made me worry about our long-term compatibility. Compromise is a necessary ingredient in any relationship, whether between mismatched lovers or ethnic factions that have been warring since the biblical age over a landmass the size of Maryland. Extremism, on the other hand, is a dangerous portent, in both love and war. It got to the point where we couldn’t read the newspaper in the same room. The only solution was to avoid the subject of politics altogether.

Avoidance was a skill I had in surplus as a young male, but something about our purposeful lack of communication felt false. How could we be so synched in every aspect but this one? Leah often spoke of “the privileged blindness of Americans,” but I never felt it applied to Americans like me. Perhaps, in truth, I was not as worldly as I imagined myself to be. For all of the open-mindedness I thought my time spent traveling had engendered, was I simply another over-privileged suburbanite with a well-stamped passport and a worn North Face backpack? I was living with a woman to whom my very nationality was an affront. For a person who claimed she preferred to live without borders, Leah had defined ours pretty sharply.

The détente we’d established went on for a few months, until one night when we were camping on a desolate Mediterranean beach. As we cuddled in one large sleeping bag beneath the stars, she said that, as much as she cared for me, she couldn’t be with someone who didn’t share her worldview. I had seen this coming, but it still sent me reeling. I’d been dumped in the past, but usually for reasons that related to my own personal shortcomings. Leah and I were splitting up over a geopolitical morass that the best minds in statesmanship had been unable to solve for several millennia. Like the peace process itself, we had apparently taken the middle road off the table.

Even Bill couldn't have helped: Clinton encourages a peace-process handshakeBreaking up on a kibbutz is impossible. I moved out of her cabin, but we still slept less than fifty feet from each other and ate all our meals in the same cramped cafeteria. Somehow we managed to tap into a wellspring of maturity that allowed us to weather the proximity, establishing a cordial acquaintanceship but avoiding any prolonged interaction. Heartbroken, I took solace in the consistent regimen of workaday kibbutz life, turning myself into the fastest avocado picker in the Middle East. My downtime was spent clutching dog-eared volumes of Rilke, which didn’t help my cause much. Taking the advice of my male bunkmates, I tried to woo several of the Danish volunteers, who were especially receptive to male attention. But I was “Leah’s ex,” and nobody wanted to make time with a marked man.

The ever-popular Leah had no such problems. She was quickly pursued by a soft-spoken Argentine named Luis who also lived on the kibbutz. With his laissez-faire South American attitude, Luis offered her political commiseration, not to mention a long-term commitment. They ended up getting married, making aliyah and becoming permanent members of the kibbutz. As far as I know, they’re still there today. I came back to the States a year later, after long stops in Morocco and Mexico, to begin graduate school.

I’ve thought about Leah a lot in the interceding years, but any feelings of loss have always been buttressed by the fact that we broke up for external, impersonal reasons. It never occurred to me that she had merely used our political differences as a means to let me down gently. Or that my tendency to mythologize certain geographic regions had also extended toward the concept of Love itself. But apparently the same blind passions that keep nations divided prevented me from seeing what was happening right before my very eyes.

A good friend of mine e-mailed me a link to a story in the Foreign Policy blog about a new device being used to fight rape in South Africa. It’s called the Rapex.
My, my: What Sharp Teeth You Have

The rapex, shaped like a female condom, is worn internally and equipped with 25 teeth in its lining. The razor-sharp teeth fasten on the attacker's penis if he attempts penetration. Since the device does no lasting damage to the attacker, it is completely legal and will sell for 1 Rand (around 14 cents) when it hits stores. The majority of women surveyed about the device said they would be willing to use it.

The inventor of Rapex, South African Sonette Ehler, a former medical technician, got the idea when a traumatized rape victim lamented to her, "If only I had teeth down there."

Later in the article there’s discussion of Rapex detractors who say:

The idea places the burden of stopping rape on the victims rather than the perpetrators. But the reality, according to Ehler, is that "[n]obody can make you safe except you." Given that South Africa has the highest per capita rate of rape of any country in the world, at a reported 119 per 100,000 people (which translates to around 1.7 million women raped each year), she may have a compelling argument.

I’m looking into what, precisely, Jewish law would have to say about something like this. As a rule, rape is more widely defined in Jewish law than it is by the American legal system. A woman is usually presumed not to have consented to the intercourse even if she enjoyed it, and even if she consented after the sexual act began and declined a rescue. Rape within marriage is also halachically recognized and prohibited, largely because sex within marriage is considered the woman’s right, not the man’s.

The question becomes: how offensive can we be in our defense against rape?

I’m going to ask some rabbinic authorities, but I suspect one of them will quote Deuteronomy 22, which is the chapter where rape is discussed and prohibited, and the chapter with the famous ruling that requires a fence built around the roof of a new house to ensure that no one falls off. This is the source for a vast number of protective measures we take both physically and spiritually. The key is only to build fences around roofs where someone is likely to go wandering and take a fall. South Africa is clearly a place where one runs a great risk of being raped. But what about Nashville, or Chicago, or New York, or Jerusalem?

In the US, a study conducted by the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 6 women is the victim of attempted or completed rape. 1 In 33 men have experienced sexual assault. (View more statistics here).

Those numbers are pretty high, but are they high enough that I want to run out and buy a Rapex? Not really. The idea of walking around with that thing in is both yucky and sad. And while I’m reassured that it exists, and I’m glad to see women are building their own fences in the face of real threats, this fence doesn’t seem like the most effective or practical device. Anyone have a brilliant idea that doesn’t involve sticking a toothy device into a poor girl’s vajayjay?

Could South Africa intervene in Zimbabwe to rescue Robert Mugabe? Both countries train each other's military forces and, as James Kirchik points out in The New Republic,

As members of the SADC, South Africa and Zimbabwe are also signatories to that organization's Mutual Defense Pact. Article 7 of the agreement stipulates that "No action shall be taken to assist any State Party in terms of this Pact, save at the State Party's own request or with its consent." Thus, Mugabe can continue to run a police state and his neighbors can't do anything about it without his permission. Conversely, if Mugabe feels that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), his opposition, poses a threat, he could theoretically ask SADC members to help him stamp it out. 

ANC MP, Farida Mahomed, has been gaining her share of attention for the comments she made at a recent Iranian-sponsored conference in which a Jewish Seminar delegate posed a question to her on South Africa's role in global democratic efforts and the need to discard Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.

Mahomed validated the The Protocols of The Elders Of Zion as a legitimate source on the subject of Jews. And then posed the following question to Jewish delegate Claudia Braude:

Are the protocols still relevant to you in today’s time? How do we apply this balanced approach to reconciliation when we read them and they are totally the opposite?

Asked in an interview about the Protocols' cred (since it' a well-known that they were largely a vehicle for Nazi propaganda aimed at anti-semitism), Mahomed claimed that she was "unaware" that they were a "hoax." She also said re: The Holocaust:

I don’t want to comment on something that I haven’t done research on. I wouldn’t want to be influenced by any scholar

In the words of my Israeli boyfriend, "Oof!"