Politics

After years of being constantly annoyed and often angry about the historical denial built into Thanksgiving Day, I published an essay in November 2005 suggesting we replace the feasting with fasting and create a National Day of Atonement to acknowledge the genocide of indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States. I expected criticism from right-wing and centrist people, given their common commitment to this country's distorted self-image that supports the triumphalist/supremacist notions about the United States so common in conventional politics, and I got plenty of such critique. But I was surprised by the resistance from liberals -- even some on the left, including a considerable number of my friends. The most common argument went something like this: OK, it's true that the Thanksgiving Day mythology is rooted in a fraudulent story -- about the European invaders coming in peace to the "New ...

First it was the sight of leftist organizations and middle class liberals marching in “peace” parades alongside Islamic thugs calling for the murder of apostates. Then there were the formerly progressive gazettes like The Nation and The Guardian championing corpse-mutilating theocrats like Muqtada al-Sadr and the suicide bombing “resistance” in Iraq. And the coup de grace: London’s Labor party mayor Ken Livingstone graciously welcoming Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a cleric who called for the murder of

Last week Democratic Senator Barack Obama made headlines by suggesting that public schools teach “age-appropriate," "science-based” sexuality lessons to kindergarteners. He later clarified that "age-appropriate" means teaching children how to avoid predators, not how to unroll condoms. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to sensationalize Obama’s position —formerly Romney’s own position, but what isn’t?—saying, “We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in.” There are few statistics for how many of ...

When Karl Marx famously said that events and figures appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, he might have been referring to today’s glut of hand-me-down Marxist kitsch. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, pseudo-radicals had long prostituted the socialist revolutionary tradition as a cheap reference for bumper sticker fatuities. The revolution will not be televised. Yes, well, it wasn’t ever supposed to be. The situation is even worse now that so-called “anti-globalization” activists blithely don Che Guevara t-shirts yet think Das Kapital – the most pro-globalization text ever written – is the latest post-punk sensation out of Hamburg. Fascism in its worst, most medieval form is once again an ideological menace, and indigence has kept apace ...

Denis Leary once suggested Iran and Iraq be combined into a country called Irate. Not a bad idea given the news out of both Shia-dominant cynosures for misbehavior. But after the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, there's no doubting which one constitutes an "imminent" threat to the Middle East--and no, by that we don't just mean Israel. We've focused a lot of editorial attention on what to do about the Islamic Republic's mad dash toward nuclearization. No one, with the possible exception of Justin Raimondo, considers such a prospect with equanimity, and yet our writers have been passionately divided over the subject of a preemptive strike on Iran's (known) uranium enrichment facilities. Contributors have also offered comical and grave alternatives for how to engage the would-be American pen pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in one of our most popular "Letters" series. With the U.S. presidential election looming, ...

By now, most of us have seen or heard about the billboards: a smiling “ex-gay” man or woman announcing “I chose to change!” followed by a phone number or website for an “ex-gay” ministry or conference. This movement is big business, targeting young people—kids whose desperate parents fear they’re gay—through organizations like Love Won Out, Exodus International, and various unlicensed reparative therapy camps. It’s a religious war, whose controversial “experts” define homosexuality as a purely negative behavioral choice that can only be cured by submission to Jesus. Ex-gay campaigns led by Protestant evangelicals differ from Catholic teachings, which acknowledge homosexuality as inborn, but construct behavior as choice: since celibacy is a respected alternative lifestyle, you can feel gay as God created you; but never act on it. Just don’t do it. Striving to demonstrate compassion even while labeling homosexuals ...

As much an annual Passover fixture as horseradish or bad wine, every Jewish family has an Uncle Ron. He is, in fact, at most every holiday gathering, but with Pesach’s prescribed overindulgence, he’s in rare form. After tipping back the fourth cup of wine, his mix of arrogance and outrage boils over. Uncle Ron’s been ruining American seders for a century, but over the decades—depending on the context—his diatribe has changed.In generations past, Uncle Ron was the seder socialist, crying for world revolution and railing against the piecemeal reforms pushed by FDR and his labor union boss. But with today’s Uncle Rons inhabiting the upper socioeconomic echelons of American society, the seder rant is more likely to critique welfare queens than corporate fatcats. “Look, I didn’t get to Scarsdale by hanging out on street corners,” today’s version might go. “The Asians study, work, and get ahead. But don’t hold your breath for the Puerto ...

An overlooked enigma of political life is why there are distinct ideological groupings at all. We take the liberal/conservative divide for granted, rarely pausing to contemplate how mysterious it actually is. The Hebrew Bible solves the mystery. The solution can be found in the unexpected context of the Torah's seemingly primitive and bizarre laws of ritual contamination. The relevant material is laid out in dense detail mainly in Leviticus, a.k.a. the stuff most Jews skip over in shul (as Christians do in church). If you don’t see the mystery, consider the following: Doesn’t it seem equally if not more plausible to imagine a scenario where people’s opinions on the top-20 hot-button political issues formed no patterns at all? For example, there seems to be nothing that links Al Gore–style worrying about climate change with favoring state-sanctioned gay unions. Yet somehow, to ...

Mahmi—Every year I look forward to your holiday letter—and every year you do not disappoint! This may have been your best letter since ’79. (Somewhere I still have those pictures you sent of you and your college buddies playing Pin the Tail on the Camel with those silly gooses at the American ECrazy Kids: Mahmi and Yankee imperialist buddy enjoy game of Pin the Tail on the Camel in American embassy in Tehran ...

26 January 2007 Dear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, In your letter, you claim that both the U.S. and Iran are justice-seeking nations. Justice must have a different meaning over there. Your legal codes place the value of a woman’s life at half that of a man’s, forbid a woman to leave the house without her husband’s permission, and offer 74 lashes to those who appear in public without a hijab.Sought Progress, not Purity: The Founding Fathers But it’s your claim that both nations “seek ...

Dear Mahmoud (if I may),I thought of you recently. I was at my cousin’s house for a Hanukkah celebration (you know, the Jewish holiday celebrating freedom and liberation from oppression, a topic I know is important to you) in Los Angeles, California, a place that you must also know well given that it’s the largest Persian community outside Iran. My cousin, who is Jewish, is married to an Iranian Muslim. You must find that difficult to imagine, but in my world of cosmopolitan California, it’s the beautiful standard. Our huge family celebrates Passover and Hanukkah as well as Eid together—although to be honest, my Muslim relatives are not very observant, and they sometimes forget exactly when Eid falls. Jews in America who don’t ...

Dear President Ahmadinejad, Your recently arrived letter to “the American People” will get sympathy juices going among some of our journalists and politicians. You invoke honored buzzwords such as “human dignity” and “compassion,” and you talk about “respect for the rights of the human being.” In so doing you link yourself to nice people everywhere. You are distinguished from nice people, however, by your apparent intent to develop atomic weapons for

Dear Executor of Rhetorical Strategies Designed to Exploit Feelings of Self-Hatred Native to a Whole Bunch of Lefty Jew Americans: Hi. I was reading The Rings of Saturn when your letter came in. Baking honey buns, too. So there was this cloying smell borne aloft on the draft that tours my apartment, and a section in The Rings of Saturn about the miserable fate of the herring fish.

January 23, 2007 To: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tehran, Iran Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim, blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and upon his House, peace. I write in response to your letter dated 29 November 2006 and directed to the people of the United States. As an ordinary American citizen, with no official responsibilities, I will address you ...

Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I received your letter. It is eloquent and sometimes cogent. Even those who will believe you are grandstanding cannot avoid the contradictions in American policy that you note. You know how to push people’s buttons. It’s the next best thing to having a nuclear arsenal.You address the American people, and I am American by default. I have no Ellis Island stories or

In late November, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad penned an open letter to the "Noble American People." This week, noble American people respond. Below, author Edward Schwarzschild introduces the Iranian president to Jewcy's "Letters to Ahmadinejad" feature. Greetings, President Ahmadinejad, and may peace be upon us all. My name is Ed Schwarzschild, and I was once a president, too. More than thirty years ago, when I was in the sixth grade, I was elected student president of Rowland Elementary School (now closed, alas) in the northeastern suburbs of ...

Virtually everyone agrees that the president’s proposal for Iraq is doomed to failure, a hopeless effort to save the lost cause of nation-building in the Middle East. Whether this view is driven by ideological opposition to the war or fear of a Vietnam redux, the truth is that the surge holds out the very real promise of resolving what might otherwise come to be the most catastrophic foreign entanglement in American history.Mission Accomplished: Sort of. Bush's notorious photo op

Writing in Time a few months ago, Andrew Sullivan coined the term “Christianism” to describe the archconservative evangelical wing of the Republican Party. Sullivan distinguished Christianists, who traffic in a malign fusion of scripture and public policy, from Christians, who follow the teachings of the Gospels but respect the separation of church and state. As the non-violent ideological twin of Islamism, Christianism has been endlessly dissected in polemical new books, like Sullivan's own The Conservative Soul and David Kuo's ...