Open Letter to the White House - Border Patrol

Dear Mr. President:

Honestly, I try to understand the statements you make and the principles that lie behind them, whatever they may be. I've been trying my best for the past five years, really I have. Your record remains perfect, though; I can't make head or tail of what you want when it comes to America's border with Mexico.

Let's see - you want more fencing, cameras and patrolmen on the border itself. You want more jail cells. You want a "hard" border, through which no illegal immigrant can come.


You want amnesty for illegal immigrants to stop, but you want some sort of limited legal status for certain workers, who will arrive here for a limited period of time to "fill jobs that Americans will not do."

And you want more green cards issued for legal immigrants interested in pursuing citizenship.

You call this a "comprehensive" overhaul of the immigration law, but your press secretary denies that it signals any change in focus for you.

Got it. Here are a few thoughts:

More jail cells, more cops, more technology, more green cards, more programs, more bureaucracy - in short, more money. Did you notice that there's a pretty expensive war going on? Did you know that the United States is borrowing billions every month to keep it going? I know you grew up rich, and your family has bailed you out of every financial squeeze you've ever experienced, but are you sure this is the best use of your money? Didn't you used to be a conservative once?

That goes for the border, too. Back in February 2004 you said you were a "war president" and that you made policy decisions with war on your mind; has that changed? If the border with Mexico is so porous, shouldn't you have that big expensive Department of Homeland Security patrolling it rather than a bunch of brand-new immigration officers with service revolvers? And if the border isn't really all that dangerous, why are you making speeches in El Paso about immigration when there's a war on?

Speaking of war, some of your allies cry "class war" whenever someone suggests that people in your income bracket should pay their fair share of taxes; I hope you won't take it amiss if I turn that strategy around and point it at you, sir. You want illegal immigrants smacked down as hard and as quickly as possible, you want control over the flood of Mexicans coming here to clean our houses and pick our crops - those peons fit only for those "jobs Americans will not do" - and you want to dangle citizenship like a carrot, presumably in front of those who will fit whatever immigration profile you care to come up with. Some of these notions contain a surprising amount of common sense, Mr. President, but taken together, what are you really doing if not dividing the whole population of a sovereign country into "good Mexicans" and "bad Mexicans"? What is that if not a "class war"? I guess you really are a war president, after all - just not the sort you claimed to be.


And then, with all this guff grabbing front-page headlines at a time when your approval rating approaches terminal velocity, your press secretary claims that this is not a change of focus.

Now, really, Mr. President - not a change of focus when we haven't heard a peep out of you on immigration in years? Not a change of focus when your Social Security "reform" program, that you claimed would be the major thrust of your second term, floats like a dead fish in the political waters? Not a change of focus when Americans continue to die every day in the Middle East, your advisers face grand jury investigations and indictments, and your Congressional allies embarrass themselves by accusing decorated and hawkish war veterans of cowardice? Not a change of focus when the only thing you've done correctly in years is pardon a couple of Thanksgiving turkeys? Not a change of focus - is that some kind of joke? Just how stupid do you think we are, sir?

That's a lot of questions, of course, and I don't suppose you have time to answer me, busy patrolling the Mexican border as you are at present. I understand; playing cowboy like that has got to be more fun than confronting your endless failures. Tell you what, sir - since you seem to enjoy it so much, why don't you just join the border patrol full-time and let someone run the country who knows how?

Fill the Empty Center

No one can figure out Israeli politics, least of all the Israelis, but it may be that Ariel Sharon knows precisely what he's doing. At this point, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. He's just asked the president of the country to dissolve the Knesset, agreed to early elections, and announced that he will form a third party to the right of Labor and the left of Likud.

Ariel Sharon, a centrist? Is there a new world order or something?

I yield to no one in my support of Israel. Supporting Sharon is another matter entirely. This man's political career outstrips almost everyone else's in point of years, he was a military careerist before that, and through all that time he insisted that Israel's Arabs ought to be expelled. You can imagine what he wanted to do with the Arabs outside of Israel - in the occupied territories, for instance.

This made him very popular in the earlier parts of his career, but as time went on his extremist attitude marginalized him more and more, until by the turn of the century he was done, finished, kaput. Then, when the land-for-peace deal got signed, Sharon publicized his objections by visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a move that so infuriated the Arabs that they immediately gave Sharon all the legitimacy he could want by starting another intifada. As usual under such circumstances, the Israelis responded to this violence by electing a real hardliner to the Prime Minister's seat - in this case, Ariel Sharon.

Well, all right, Sharon spends a few years at his usual strong-arm game, and then suddenly last year he decides to go unilateral, withdraw from the conflict altogether. He starts building a fence between Israel and the occupied territories, and then -

Against all precedent -

Contrary to everything he has ever preached -

He closes up shop in Gaza and pulls every Jew out.


Many of his biggest fans are hugely disappointed, and some even suggest that the army should disobey any order to take Jews off any land. Despite this, the withdrawal goes off without a hitch - a few people are shot, but consider what could have happened.

Nevertheless, his right-wing backers and rivals in his own Likud party conclude that this would be a good time to outflank him, and the other major party, Labor, concludes that this is the time to show who the real liberals are. So Labor leaves the governing coalition, Benjamin Netanyahu makes noise about how Sharon's gone soft, and everything's getting very messy when Sharon decides to cut them all loose and go out on his own.

He used to be a militarist. Then he became a pragmatist. Now he's a centrist. What's going on in that head of his? Is he an old man flailing around? Is he desperate to hold onto power at any cost? Or did he cleverly maneuver the left farther left and the right farther right so he could take over the middle, where most people live?

And what's this going to do to Israel's future and the possibility of peace?

Ariel Sharon used to be the most predictable of Israeli politicians. I can't imagine that anyone, Jew or Arab, will easily believe that he's changed. Maybe he's just playing games. But then again, after all this time in power and after all the blood he's allowed to be shed, maybe he's actually turning into a statesman.


Benshlomo says, When both extremes think you're evil, you may be on the right track.

Notes on the Semi-Literary

One hundred and forty years ago today, Mark Twain published his first nationally-popular story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," in the Saturday Press. Everybody go read it right now.

Wasn't that great? It was a huge smash back in 1865 and Twain was on his way to a career as an American icon.

Now, there are those who might not consider "Jumping Frog" to be great literature because it's funny. Those are the same people who never vote for comedies at Oscar time, and scoff when museums put up exhibits of comics; they believe in ART, by God, and have no truck with anything so populist as humor.



I'm sure those types will be happy to know that today is also the 77th anniversary of Steamboat Willie's release, and the twentieth anniversary of Calvin and Hobbes' debut. After all, since the three anniversaries occur on the same day, the Mrs. Grundys of the world can ignore them in one fell swoop.

Well, let them. More for the rest of us. It's all great literature.


No, really.

As for the title of this entry, the epithet "semi-literary" does not refer to the works in question, you know. Rather, it refers to those who ignore them, and it's the back 'o me hand to the lot of 'em.

Benshlomo says, A good laugh will teach you a lot more than a lecture.

Open Letter to the White House - Talking Tough

Dear Mr. President:

I'm getting a little worried about you, sir. Over the last few days you've attacked your opposition and two foreign governments with more viciousness than in just about any rhetoric we've ever heard from you, even during the 2004 campaign. And on Veteran's Day to boot. Are you feeling all right?

I know it's been a rough time for you lately, what with your officials being questioned and indicted, your Congressional allies getting into legal and moral trouble, your top advisers silenced, your war going badly, your Supreme Court nominees buried under heaps of Senatorial procedure, your own party turning on you and your approval rating lower than ever. The world you're living in now must not look very friendly, and I suppose it's only natural to lash out.

Let me advise you, though, to restrain yourself if you can. This sort of anger isn't good for you or your poll numbers; it can lead to high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and worst of all, maybe even losing control of Congress in next year's midterm elections if you're not careful.


What's more, there's no point in letting yourself go when your brain trust is otherwise occupied; Karl Rove has clammed up in the face of being called to testify to the grand jury in the Plame matter, Vice President Cheney is apparently on the point of a stroke, and Condi Rice traipses around the other side of the globe. Under the circumstances, this is no time for you to break all precedent and say what's really on your mind, without spin control; you have a tough enough time when you let others tell you what to say.

You're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble if you keep this up, Mr. President. Remember what happens when you try to handle your own business affairs. We don't want your presidency to turn into just another item in your long list of past failures, now do we?


All things considered, this would be a good time for you to head back to your Texas ranch, hop on the old bicycle and do some serious relaxing. It's what you do best anyway, seemingly. Don't worry about your privacy; Cindy Sheehan won't be coming round this time, I suspect. She's too busy talking to people who actually have some respect for war casualties' families, she won't bother you anymore. And don't worry about us, we're getting used to you taking more than one day in four off work. Besides, everyone knows the country does much better when you don't mess around with it anyway.

Do Fence Me In

Here's an interesting little item from the London Times of a few days ago. Seems that India is worried about possible terrorist incursions from Muslim Bangladesh, a nation with an increasing fundamentalist presence in and out of government. Al Qaeda allies there recently set off a clutch of bombs all over the country at once.

So what's India doing about this? It's building a security fence, that's what. Remind you of anything?

Yeah, Israel's security fence is an eyesore and a huge inconvenience to those who wish to travel between Israel and the West Bank (to set off bombs or for some legitimate reason), but it has prevented a great many bombings and at least some Arabs like it. It's temporary, adjustable and easily removed.


I have not been able to find a picture of the India-Bangladesh security fence, so I can't tell if it has the same flexibility as the Israeli fence. I do notice that the London Times story makes no mention of attacks within India by Bangladeshi fundamentalists; those terrorists seem to have restricted themselves to attacks within Bangladesh itself.

So let's review - Israel suffers massive terrorist incursions from a fundamentalist Muslim neighbor, builds a temporary, adjustable and removeable barrier to prevent those incursions, it actually works, and the nations of the world kick up an enormous fuss. India suffers no reported terrorist incursions from its fundamentalist Muslim neighbor (it may have suffered a few unreported ones), it builds a barrier of unknown quality as a preemptive measure, there's no report as to what effect that barrier has whether positive or negative, and the nations of the world utter not a peep. (Yeah, the border between India and Bangladesh is well-defined and that between Israel and the Palestinians is not; that's why the Israeli barrier is removeable, dumkopf. It's a non-issue.)

So what else is new?

Benshlomo says, Oh, George Harrison, if you had any idea what your friends are up to...

Cars, Girls and Science Fiction

Today is J.G. Ballard's 75th birthday.



I first ran across his work in a London airport bookstore - an odd place to find work like his, which isn't exactly aimed at a mainstream travelling audience (although come to think of it, much of his work is about finding the bizarre in the mundane and vice versa, so maybe a run-of-the-mill convenience store servicing those who are really doing something else is just the thing). Anyway, there I found two thin paperbacks, one about a world inundated with too much rain and one about a world lacking any rain at all. I didn't buy them because they looked like good books, you understand; I bought them because they were a matched set. I do things like that. You can read the details of his biography here; suffice to say that history seems to have knocked him off the normal path of life in his early teens and he never bothered to climb back on.

Michael Moorcock started up the British New Wave in science fiction as editor of New Worlds magazine, but Ballard was probably his most important writer. He was certainly the most inventive, kicking off his career with four deeply experimental disaster novels. Read the titles - The Wind from Nowhere, The Drought, The Drowned World and The Crystal World - and you can easily tell what they're about. Read them and you'll find yourself wondering what the landscape of your mind really contains.

That was just the beginning, though. In 1967, Ballard wrote a story called "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," ostensibly for a project that Harlan Ellison was working on at the time called Dangerous Visions. How the story missed being in the collection remains something of a mystery - you can read Ellison's version in the introduction to Again, Dangerous Visions - but the story itself, remarkably, is exactly what the title says it is, and it bumped Ballard onto one of the most bizarre tracks sf has ever seen. The New Wave was in full swing by then, and Ballard was able to bring out a collection called The Atrocity Exhibition, his first exploration of the nexus point between sex, violence, modern medicine and automobiles. That pathway led Ballard to story titles like "Love and Napalm: Export USA," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy," and especially "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and culminated with Crash a few years later. In short, Ballard's the one who introduced the sf audience to the notion that some people might get sexually aroused by automobile crashes. Once an idea like that makes the rounds, it has to be dealt with, and we've been trying to do that ever since. That alone makes Ballard a writer worth reading.


His more recent autobiographical novels wrestle with his years in prison (Empire of the Sun) and his explorations of and with sex and relationships (The Kindness of Women), and he continues to provide a bracingly imaginative and sometimes optimistic view of the world's end. He thinks about things we'd rather ignore, and while that's not as remarkable now as it was when he got started, it's still a service I'd rather was available than not.

Happy birthday, James Graham Ballard.


Benshlomo says, Anything you can't let yourself face will eventually get your attention somehow.

What God Can Do

Saturday night is Havdalah, the closing of the Sabbath. The word means "separation". The blessings involved honor God for making distinctions between things - between Israel and the other nations, between light and darkness, between the Sabbath and the six working days. We also say blessings on a cup of wine, a container of spices, and the light of a candle that looks like this:



Someone once told me why the candle has to have more than one wick, but I've forgotten the reason. We can, in a pinch, use two regular candles, as long as we hold them in such a way that the flames merge into one.


Well, this past Saturday, Little Miss asked if we could go to the beach in Santa Monica and make havdalah there. Sounded like a good idea to me, so we packed up and drove down. When we got there, though, we discovered that we had forgotten the candle.

Oh well. Cold night, dark beach, no one anywhere within eyeshot. We lay down in the sand and watched the planes go by and talked about this and that, figuring we'd enjoy the view for a while and then go home for havdalah.

Suddenly we hear this voice: "You guys need candles?"


We sat up, and there was another couple standing over us with two regular candles and one in a glass bowl. By their accents I could tell they were from Israel.

Little Miss asked, "Did you do havdalah?" They looked a little confused, like they didn't know what that was, so Little Miss explained it. They still looked confused.

Well, we took the candles, the other couple wished us "Shabbat Shalom," and we made our havdalah.

I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation for this incident, but I'm not at all sure that the rational explanation is the true one. Two people suddenly appear out of nowhere with exactly what we need, without apparently realizing why we might need them, and ask us if we need them without any evident way of observing that we need candles specifically? Rational explanation or no, I say God was watching out for us right then.

And who knows, maybe they were angels.

Benshlomo says, Don't let's ignore the possibility of miracles.

This Ain't No Party

Whew. Those asinine initiatives on the California ballot got themselves Terminated last night, and our Governator is looking less like Conan the Barbarian and more like a tired old man. There's fight left in him, I imagine, but he lost on parental consent for abortion, lost on executive domination of redistricting, lost on written permission for union monies to be used in elections, and lost on the five-year wait for teacher tenure.

(I'm not too happy that the loss on prescription drug benefits is drawing next to no coverage, but you can't have everything.)

And, of course, we're all delighted that Democrats won in New Jersey and Virginia, despite a lot of Republican smear tactics and one last-minute Bush appearance. Yeah, Democrats slung their share of mud, too, but what do you expect? Remember what happened to the war hero John Kerry when he tried to maintain some moral perspective in the face of Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth"?



Anyway, there's Kaine of Virginia on the left and Corzine of New Jersey on the right. Congratulations, boys.

And what's the result? Progressive pundits loudly proclaim that this is the end of Republican domination - that the American people are sick of this administration's corruption and bullying. Conservative pundits (and Scott McLellan) loudly proclaim that these election results mean nothing, since (for example) New Jersey "leans to the left" anyway and Kaine in Virginia ran on a conservative platform.

And blah, blah, blah.

I'm a liberal and delighted with these results, but it's a long time until November 2006. Don't let's let the girdle out now, folks.

Benshlomo says, We won. They lost. Next.

When Is Torture Not Torture?

Someone is going to have to explain this to me.

Everybody knows of the disgusting events at Abu Ghraib prison by now, where American "service" people subjected Iraqi prisoners to all kinds of humiliations. At least one Iraqi prisoner has died in U.S. custody. That's not to mention all the prisoners being held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay without being charged or tried, or these rumors (so far they're just that) about secret CIA prisons in Europe where our spy apparatus, in our name, can allegedly do whatever they want to prisoners without any oversight, by the Red Cross or anyone else. (I have my quarrels with the International Red Cross because of their treatment of Israel, but that doesn't alter the fact that they have a job to do and the U.S. apparently isn't letting them do it.)

With all that going on, Senator John McCain has amended some appropriations bills to disallow any mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Sounds reasonable enough, yes? Not to George W. or to Dick Cheney. They want an exemption from any such mistreatment injunction for the CIA.


Let me repeat - George W. and Dick Cheney want permission for the Central Intelligence Agency to do whatever they want to prisoners in their custody.

Why? Because, according to our President:

Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture.

Notice how subtle? Does he mean that the United States always obeys international law? Or does he mean that when the United States does something, it's legal by definition? The first is an obvious lie, the second a totally specious argument. It's like what former Attorney General Ed Meese said about suspects in criminal cases. Clever, isn't it?

Now, the United States currently faces a destructive, highly motivated and fanatical enemy, and to defeat it we may have to do distasteful things. Israel has had to face that reality for quite a while, and Amnesty International has made quite a stink about it over the last few years. To learn about terrorist activities, Israeli police sometimes use something called "mild coercion," if memory serves. This involves picking up prisoners and shaking them.

If that's what the President has in mind, let me remind him that there's a big difference between that and this:


Benshlomo says, If it looks like a terrorist, walks like a terrorist, talks like a terrorist and goes steady with terrorists, I guess we'd better cut it to ribbons first and ask questions later.

Never Forget

Today is the anniversary of the day that the elephant was first used to symbolize the Republican Party. It appeared in a cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly.



As you can learn from the link above, this cartoon was Nast's way of scolding Republican voters for letting themselves get frightened into voting against the party by an opposing newspaper. Ulysses S. Grant was running for another Presidential term, and this paper screeched that if he was elected it would be a victory for "Caesarism". Remember last year when papers faithfully repeated the Republican line that if George W. wasn't elected it would be a victory for terrorism? Remember how the Republican party, and a number of Democrats, let themselves be frightened into stampeding toward a narrow Bush victory?

Harper's Weekly published the above cartoon in 1874, and evidently not much has changed.

Benshlomo says, You can lead an elephant to slaughter, but you can't make him think.

Doll Face

Last night I went and saw New York Doll, which as everyone knows by now is about Arthur "Killer" Kane, the New York Dolls' bass player. He's the tall blonde guy in the middle.

There will be time to write a review of the movie when it comes out on DVD. For now, I'd like to take this opportunity to mention something about pop music that has intrigued me for a long time.

According to New York Doll, Arthur Kane spent the 30 years following the New York Dolls' breakup in a swirl of alcohol, self-destruction and bitterness at the success (to one extent or another) of his bandmates. After a fall from a third-story window, he converted to Mormonism and got a job in the genealogy center of the temple on Santa Monica Boulevard. The movie shows a soft-spoken (actually stuttering), often confused, even lost-looking big guy riding the bus to work and wondering what the dickens happened to him, until the surviving Dolls (minus the deceased Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan) get an offer to reunite for the big Meltdown show in London. This is the last guy in the world you would ever expect to be playing rock and roll, particularly New York Dolls rock and roll.

On the other hand, the movie's website (see above) tells stories about Arthur back in the 70s stealing bikes with a friend, wrecking hotel rooms, nearly getting his thumb sliced off by a jealous girlfriend, and generally cutting such a threatening figure that he nearly scared the hell out of Johnny Thunders merely by approaching him to see if he was interested in forming a band. In short, just about what you'd expect from a rock star.

It's in pop music more than in anything else, I think, that this kind of radical change takes place. I find myself imagining Arthur Kane, or Stu Cook or Mark Lindsay or even (dare I say it) Cat Stevens, catching a glimpse of one of their early publicity photos, then looking at themselves in the mirror and asking "Am I still that person?" I suppose everyone gets that feeling periodically throughout life, but because pop music has been such a young person's game, I imagine that pop stars whose fame has ended get pulled up short like that most often. Their youths, in some cases, still exist on thousands of photographs and recordings. They lived their early maturity in public, surrounded by people and traveling all over the world. Even Arthur Kane, whose band did not get all that famous, got to go to London. And let's not forget that in some cases, they moved through that very large youth in a drug-fueled haze. I just wonder if they look back on that time and wonder if it really happened, and who they are now.

By the way, there's an essay by Robert Christgau in a book called Stranded, in which he says that if he had to spend a year on a deserted island and could pick only one album to take with him, New York Dolls is the one he'd choose.
(Other rock writers picked things like Astral Weeks and Something Else by the Kinks and Sticky Fingers and even Trout Mask Replica, all good responses to a question that I'm SO glad I don't have to answer.) Christgau said he'd take New York Dolls partly because it contains such a variety of skills. According to him, David Johansen and Jerry Nolan had the most professionalism, which is to say consciousness about what they were doing. Sylvain Sylvain, he said, was a perfectly good rhythm guitarist but not particularly original. Johnny Thunders was an amateur, which was a good thing because it meant he produced truly inspired riffs and lines that a polished professional never could, and that his guitar was therefore the sound of pure inspiration direct from the unconscious. Arthur, on the other hand, lacked both professionalism and inspiration. It was a good thing for the Dolls' sound, said Christgau, but nevertheless what you hear Arthur do on New York Dolls tracks is the sound of an enthusiastic but totally ordinary guy just trying to keep up.

Well, David Johansen (a pretty unimpeachable source) disagrees. He wrote, from a tour stop in Europe, "[Arthur's] bass playing and presence were the heart & soul of the NY Dolls and the secret ingredient of our sound." Maybe that's why he rarely moved or let his face assume any particular expression onstage; he didn't have to.

Benshlomo says, Some things change and some don't.

The Grumpy Peacemaker

This is the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.



He spent 27 years in the Israeli army, eventually becoming its Chief of Staff. He also served as Minister of Labor, Ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister twice. He's the one who authorized the raid on Entebbe Airport on (I had forgotten this) America's 200th birthday. He's also the one who signed an accord with Yasser Arafat during the Clinton administration, and later negotiated a peace treaty with Jordan.

Some traditional Jews thought that Rabin's efforts toward peace, which involved the establishment of Palestinian autonomy in certain territories as a first step toward establishing a Palestinian state, endangered Jewish lives, and that therefore Rabin was a criminal according to Torah law.


Talmud describes a certain sort of person called a "rodef", or pursuer, in the volume called Sanhedrin, Chapter 8; someone running after another to kill him. It is a Jewish duty to prevent the rodef from doing this, even if it means killing the rodef himself. What's more, if one causes damage or even kills an innocent bystander while going after the rodef, one is not liable for that damage.

As I say, because Rabin's efforts toward peace could have endangered Jewish lives, some rabbis said that he was a rodef, as though he were actually pursuing certain parts of the Israeli population with the intent to commit murder. I don't know that any rabbi came right out and said Rabin should be killed, but some religious student named Yigal Amir took them seriously and assassinated him ten years ago today.

God knows whether the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians would have been better if Rabin had lived (I'm inclined to doubt it), but I'm still sorry he died, and I'm even more sorry that a Jew killed him.


I can't remember the Hebrew word for the characteristic that endeared him to Israelis; it refers to that look of distaste on his face as he shakes hands with Arafat. He doesn't like what he's doing, but he knows it's necessary and he's not pretending that it's anything more. Israelis, unlike Americans and many other peoples, prefer it when their politicians don't pretend to enjoy things they'd rather not do. It's a kind of rough-edged sincerity that Rabin had in spades.

Benshlomo says, We may never love the Palestinians, but one day we may be able to live with them in peace.

Washington Stunt Show

I love this - the Democrats grow some balls at long last, corral the Republicans in closed session to demand some answers on Iraqi intelligence finally, and Pat Roberts calls it a stunt.



Remember a couple of weeks ago, the Republican "leadership" in the House held a vote open way past deadline so they could pressure representatives into voting their way? Plus all the other legislative folderol we've been treated to over the last five or so years? Remember why they refer to Tom DeLay as "the Hammer"? I suppose that, rather than a "stunt," we're to call this normal behavior?



Call me old-fashioned, but this seems a little inverted to me.

Benshlomo says, Bring on the stuntmen.

Who Gets into the World to Come?

I just received this dispatch from MEMRI, and it's worth a response.

This isn't the place to discuss the Sheikh's entire interview, nor his own office's denial (wow). What brought me up short was this statement:

Al-Qaradhawi further claimed that Christianity and Judaism, like Islam, maintain that members of other religions will not enter Paradise. But Islam places certain conditions upon this fate of non-Muslims...

Needless to say, I do not speak for Christianity. Parts of the Christian Bible lend credence to what the Sheikh said; on the other hand I've heard rumors that some Christian leaders allow for the possibility of non-Christians entering Heaven.


I do, however, know something about Jewish belief, and the Talmud clearly states that the righteous of all nations have a share in the World to Come. That's precisely what the Seven Laws of Noah are for - check them out.

Clearly, I am ignorant of Islam, though I hope to remedy that circumstance with the help of the MP. Equally clearly, the Sheikh is ignorant of Judaism. And if he is ignorant of Judaism, what can we expect from lay Muslims?

Benshlomo says, Know your enemy, and maybe you'll make a friend.

How Not to Watch a Movie

As I often do after watching a DVD, last night I looked up Maria Full of Grace on Roger Ebert's website, on the L.A. Weekly, and on Amazon to read the reviews and see what others thought.

The movie is about a young Colombian woman, dissatisfied with her lot in life (as any sane and semi-intelligent person would be). She quits her job on a flower plantation, dumps the young man who impregnated her, and stumbles into employment as a "mule," smuggling heroin into New York by swallowing sixty-odd pellets of the stuff and hoping she gets to her destination before they start emerging, or worse, breaking open.

James Marston's script carries its politics lightly; this is a story about people, not policy. It's not a masterpiece, but I was quite moved by the look into what forces (from economic desperation to personality flaws) might push people into endangering themselves like that. Then I turned to Amazon and found this. (Don't read it if you want to see the movie.)

In close to two hours, D. Holte failed to notice anything about the characters, the theme, the plot, the cinematic design, or anything other than the last few minutes. Why? I suspect it's because he's on the lookout for anything that will confirm his political point of view, whether it makes sense in context or not.

SPOILER:

Having undergone a terrifying, lonely few days in which she learns that her actions have consequences, Maria decides to remain in the United States and try to make a better future for herself and her child. Yes, she lacks the proper visas and is therefore here illegally, but she has seen that life in New York is not so very different from life in Colombia, that people exist who will help her lead an honest life, and that there is hope for her.


D. Holte notices only that she remains in the country illegally, declares that for that reason she has no sense of responsibility, and even goes so far as to speculate (against all the evidence of plot, character and theme) that she intends to set herself up independently in the smuggling business. He doesn't see a human being when he looks at the character of Maria, he sees only his own biases.

That's a shame, and the fact that he decided to share his shortcomings with the Amazon-reading public is even more of a shame.

Benshlomo says, Some people should stick to political pamphlets and avoid anything with more nuance (yes, that word).

Saint Ann

Here's the latest piece of nonsense from that demure, wholesome Christian girl, Ann Coulter.

You can read her dyspeptic utterances for yourself, of course, but the gist of it seems to be that the evil shmoo Karl Rove is a now-unnecessary burden to the utterly innocent Bush administration and a man to be pitied, that the liar Scooter Libby dropped suddenly out of nowhere, and that the legal attempt to put a stop to the criminal Tom DeLay proves nothing about his bullying and blithe disregard for the law, but rather proves that liberals are a bunch of - get this - fascists.



We'll get to our logical refutation of this delirium in due course, but for now, let's consider Ms. Coulter's alleged Christianity, shall we? How do we know that she is a Christian, other than by her own declaration?

She advocates not only war, but as vicious a war as can be prosecuted.

Her fame is based almost entirely on her ridicule and hatred of her political, cultural and religious opposition.


You can see for yourself that she loves immodest clothing, and she certainly loves to express herself in the strongest (not to say rudest) possible terms. Not that I'm complaining about her appearance, necessarily, but it's not what one expects from a woman who claims to follow Jesus.

In short, like so many members of this administration and their apologists, she professes one thing and does something quite different.

With apologies to those who believe in the living Christ, I think Jesus is probably spinning in his grave every time this woman opens her mouth.

Benshlomo says, I'm a better Christian than Ann Coulter, and I'm Jewish.