All my talk of Shylock below prompted David Hirsh of Engage to alert me to this. Scroll down to the last letter. And fie upon you, Mr. Birnberg. Enough with the “As a Jew…”
Archive for December, 2008
“I am a Jew,” Shylock states, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He continues:
A friend sent me an article this morning which he described in his mail as “interesting”. I think that is indeed interesting, but for reasons which are probably different from his. The article consists of a series of ten affirmations, such as “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”, “There is no racism in Israel.” and “Israel seeks peace with its Palestinian neighbors”. Each affirmation is followed by a paragraph which seeks to show that the affirmation concerned is false and that the real state of affairs in Israel is close to being the polar opposite of that suggested by the affirmations.
Hanukkah (Ben) and Christmas (Eamonn) coincide this year, so Z Word is taking what will most likely be an extremely short break. Enjoy the holidays. We’ll see you very soon.
Below, Eamonn subjects Sara Roy’s apologia for Hamas to a thorough critique. I don’t want to repeat what he’s said; merely to add some context from today’s news from Gaza.
I used to subscribe to the The London Review of Books. There aren’t many other publications for those made happy by uninterrupted hectares of cultural, literary and social criticism. When the Argentine economy went to hell in a handcart at the end of 2001 I had to cut back on discretionary spending and let my subscription expire. When I read articles on its website like this it’s plain to me why I have never gotten around to renewing it.
This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff, Assistant Director of the American Jewish Committee’s Africa Institute.
The reputable International Crisis Group has issued a new report on Somalia, calling for engagement with Somalia’s Islamist insurgency - which now controls southern Somalia - when Ethiopian troops withdraw later this month.
In the last few weeks, we’ve received many comments that we have not published. We’re also mindful that we owe our readers an explanation as to how we decide what gets published and what doesn’t. So here is a statement of our comments policy.
There is an editorial in today’s Irish Times about Gaza and it starts like this,
THE draconian Israeli boycott of Gaza over the last six months was imposed despite the now suspended ceasefire between them and the dominant Hamas fundamentalist movement.
In their book “The Israel Lobby,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt conceded that Israel was not alone in opposing an Iran armed with nuclear weapons. “Many of Iran’s Arab neighbors are also concerned about its nuclear ambitions as well as its growing influence in the region,” they wrote.
“Our friends at Engage have a new blog and a new address,” I wrote earlier. The rest of that short post has been deleted because I jumped the gun. So, with apologies - forget what I said before. But, hey, I’m always happy to plug Engage, wherever it lives.
José Saramago, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature, writes a blog and has posted today about Gaza. In it he lambasts Israel for the restrictions it has placed on the entry of goods into that territory without, of course, making any mention of the nature or activities of the regime that runs it.
More than three hundred news outlets, including CNN, the BBC, the Associated Press and the other majors, have reported the Iranian regime’s closure of a human rights center run by Shirin Ebadi. But there’s one outlet which hasn’t done so, despite its attempt to pass itself off as a legitimate news organization.
Continue reading ‘Iran: Human Rights and Nuclear Escalation’
Writing in El País about the breakdown of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel Ana Carabajosa says,
Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments in the early 1960s were widely regarded as laboratory proof of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Ordinary, unremarkable people will commit terrible acts of violence and cruelty under orders.
