Wed, Jan 07, 2009

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Jewcy Book Club

Welcome Authors
Rachel Kramer Bussel
&
Stephanie Klein
who are posting all week.
Coming up:
  • 01/12:
    Bob Morris
  • 01/12:
    Lily Koppel
  • 01/19:
    Peter Manseau
  • 02/09:
    Tania Grossinger

TAG:

Washington Post

Men Versus Men: Why Is That Gender Always Bickering?

Izzy Grinspan
 

Feministing points to rumors that male Democrats are split between voting for Obama and McCain. Given the way The Washington Post has handled comparable news about female Democrats and the Obama/Clinton split, they came up with this totally hilarious mock-up for next week's Post:


 
DAILY SHVITZ

The Washington Post Perpetuates a Destructive Myth

Khatchig Mouradian

The Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106) has attracted enormous media attention since it was passed by the House International Affairs Committee on October 10. However, the content of many of the articles, columns and stories make one thing clear: Writers across the United States were ill-prepared to tackle the issue of the Armenian genocide, simply because they knew very little about it.

One case in point is Richard Cohen's article in the Washington Post, titled "Turkey's War on the Truth" (Oct. 16, 2007). Cohen makes arguments based on false premises. After conceding--with condescension--that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was "plenty bad," he concludes that it falls short of genocide "because not all Armenians...were...affected." Clearly, if we follow his train of thought, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and several other cases should not be labeled as "genocide."

Cohen's standards are clearly different from those of the UN Convention defining genocide, but Cohen doesn't just introduce his own novel definition of genocide, he also creates his own facts. He suggests that jurist Raphael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention, coined the term "genocide" based solely on "what the Nazis were doing to the Jews." This is blatantly wrong. Although this factual error was pointed out by many--including myself--to the editors of the Washington Post, no correction was issued and, to this day, no letter to the editor on this issue has appeared in the paper.

To set the record straight, the horrors of the Armenian genocide--and not only the Holocaust--played a central role in Lemkin's lifelong pursuit to find a name for the ultimate crime against humanity--the cleansing of a group--and to incorporate into international law the prevention of this crime and the punishment of its perpetrators.

The destruction of the Armenians came to Lemkin's attention when, in 1920, Soghomon Tehlirian--an Armenian whose entire family was killed during the genocide--assassinated Talaat Pasha, the mastermind behind the Armenian genocide, in Berlin. Lemkin read about Tehlirian's trial and, during a discussion with his professor at the University of Lvov, asked, "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?" His professor argued that states are sovereign and they can do what they want to their citizens. "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing," his professor argued. Lemkin was proud of Tehlirian for defending "the moral order of mankind," but wanted international law--and not individuals--to punish the perpetrators.


Continue reading...

DAILY SHVITZ

WaPo on Pelosi

Michael Weiss

What's more worrisome -- at least to me -- than Pelosi's politics is her IQ. She's a twit. How did she think she'd possibly pull something like this off? Imagine Newt Gingrich trying to establish peace with Saddam Hussein in 1998, fresh off Clinton's aerial bombardment campaign of Iraq. Can you picture it clearly? How about the probable reaction of les bien-pensants?

The Washington Post editorial board gets it right:

Ms. Pelosi was criticized by President Bush for visiting Damascus at a time when the administration -- rightly or wrongly -- has frozen high-level contacts with Syria. Mr. Bush said that thanks to the speaker's freelancing Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from the United States. Ms. Pelosi responded by pointing out that Republican congressmen had visited Syria without drawing presidential censure. That's true enough -- but those other congressmen didn't try to introduce a new U.S. diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. "We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.

Never mind that that statement is ludicrous: As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush's military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi's attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.


DAILY SHVITZ

Jeffrey Goldberg on Jimmy Carter

Michael Weiss

Jewcy editorial advisor Jeffrey Goldberg, whose lecture at Natan will be broadcast from our site this Thursday in our first Moving Pictures feature, eviscerates Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in a WaPo review:

Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities -- the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier."

There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis -- in their deviousness -- somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry.

Goldberg deftly shows how Carter's book was precision-timed for coaxing evangelicals out of the deadly GOP-AIPAC embrace by showing them how (wait for it) secular the Jewish state is. (Golda Meir's Menshevism can't have played well in Georgia.)

That Carter is still consulted or read on any matter of foreign policy is almost as funny as the Nobel Peace Prize he recently won. The left's favorite ex-president is actually a scripture-drunk nitwit who encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1979 and who lost the White House to a candidate whose IQ was only a biscuit higher than his own.

It's not the first time les bien-pensant have been duped by a closet reactionary, and it won't be the last.