A Field of vision

Do you remember the Seinfeld episode "The Shoes" in which George is caught leering in the direction of a young woman's appealing cleavage? It nearly costs him and Jerry the chance of a pilot, since the leeree was none other than the producer's teenage daughter.
__________

MOLLY: Daddy? Are you okay?

RUSSELL (from bathroom): Yeah, sweetie. I'm fine.

Molly takes her jacket off. Jerry nudges George to sneak a peek at Molly's cleavage as she bends over and looks in her backpack. Jerry has a quick look, but George stares, hypnotized. Russell comes up behind George.

RUSSELL (angrily): Get a good look, Costanza?

Later in Jerry's apartment.

JERRY: What were you doing?

GEORGE: Well, it's not my fault. You poked me!

JERRY: You're supposed to just take a peek after a poke. You were like you just put a quarter into one of those big metal things on top of the Empire State Building.

GEORGE: It's cleavage. I couldn't look away. What am I, waiting to win an Oscar here? This is all I have in my life.

JERRY: Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun, you don't stare at it. It's too risky. You get a sense of it and then you look away.

GEORGE: All right. So, he caught me in a cleavage peek, so big deal. Who wouldn't look at his daughter's cleavage? She's got nice cleavage.

JERRY: That's why I poked.

GEORGE: That's why I peeked.
______

A few days later:

"JERRY: You know, it's a funny thing, because after the pilot got cancelled, we hadn't heard from you.

GEORGE: Didn't hear anything...

JERRY: Didn't know...we were wondering...what happened.

RUSSELL: It just didn't seem to be the right project for us right now.

So, what were you saying?

GEORGE: Oh...uh, because if it had anything at all to do with what you perceived as me leering at your daughter, I really have to take issue with that. I did not leer. Did I leer?

JERRY: No leer.

ELAINE (to Russell): Excuse me, are you using that ketchup?

RUSSELL (not noticing Elaine's cleavage): Uh, no.

GEORGE: Because, if I'm looking straight ahead, and something enters my field of vision, that's merely a happenstance.

RUSSELL: Under the circumstances, I don't really feel that we should be in business together.

ELAINE: Here's your ketchup back. You know, I had the hardest time trying to get some out. I mean, I just kept pounding and pounding on the bottom of it. Do you have any trouble?

RUSSELL (still not noticing Elaine's cleavage): No.

ELAINE (leaning forward): Do you have a...ketchup secret?

RUSSELL: No, I... ...don't have a ketchup secret.

ELAINE (flirtatiously): Because if you do have a ketchup secret, I would really, really like to know what it is.

RUSSELL (to Jerry and George, reconsidering about the pilot): Field of vision, huh?
___________

This is what brought that episode to my mind:

"Manolo says,
apparently
the American and French
administrations
share the matters of mutual interest. "

Poor Obama, who did not have the presence of mind to look away immediately. No one minds Sarkozy's appreciative grin, but Obama's fleeting admiration was made much of. After all, this sort of thing is expected from a French guy. But woe to the American President should he get caught ogling.

I Actually find his weakness for the female attractions quite endearing. Of course it happened exactly as George described and he is not to be faulted if something entered his field of vision at an opportune moment ... merely a happenstance.

Overcoming Defencelessness

Posted on Sign and Sight is an interview with Claude Lanzmann, the fabled creator of the 9 1/2 hour documentary film "Shoah" about the murder of the European Jews in the death camps.

Lanzmann, according to the introduction by Max Dax has an impeccable Leftist provenance:

"The 83-year old was a Resistance fighter, a signatory of the Manifesto of 121 against the war in Algeria, he was a member of the red circle surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre, he was Simone de Beauvoir's partner for many years and is currently the publisher of Les Temps Modernes, France's left-wing intellectual conscience."

In 1994 he released another long documentary, "Tsahal", a film about the Israeli army. The new release of this documentary includes a discussion between Lanzmann and Ehud Barak.
I found interesting Lanzmann's sober look of appreciation and respect for Israel's military power and ethos. I recommend reading the whole interview.

Here is a key passage:

In "Tsahal" I also knew exactly what I wanted to tell: the creation an army, the construction of an army, the creation of courage. This army represents a victory of the Jewish people over themselves. There had never been a Jewish army before. My film tells how Jews took their fate into their own hands to avoid ever become victims again. I show how they overcame the victim role and overcame a mental predisposition.

In the Israeli army life is valued higher than anything else. And yet every soldier in the Tsahal is prepared to give his life. Unlike other armies of the world, the soldiers of the Tsahal do not die for the glory of their fatherland, they die for life alone. You should not forget that the genocide of the Jews in the Second World War was not just a murder of innocents. It was also a genocide of the defenceless. My film describes the path to overcome defencelessness. It describes how the Jewish people empowered themselves with weapons and it describes the psychological metamorphosis that the people had to undergo, in order to build an army like the Tsahal, in order to be able to defend themselves, to be able to kill.

For decades, young Israelis have been growing up with the insecurity of knowing that no-one can guarantee that "Israel will still exist in 2025".

In this interview Lanzmann clarifies in no uncertain terms the repeated mistake made by nearly everyone who cares to weigh in on the I/P conflict, that Israel seeks to justify its very existence by making political fortune out of the Holocaust. Not so. Says Lanzmann, and I agree. Israel has vowed that the Holocaust was the last time the world witnessed the extermination of defenceless Jews. Israel makes sure that Jews living within its borders will never again be victims.

I know this is a troublesome concept for many Far Leftist Jews, represented by the likes of Rabbi Lerner, Richard Silverstein, Norm Finkelstein, Jerry Haber, Jews Sans Frontiers, to name but a few. They appear to prefer, seriously, the diasporic Jew. Hannah Arendt was sympathetic to this hankering for righteous powerlessness, up to a point, as she elaborated in her 1964 interview for German TV:

"..one pays dearly for freedom. The specifically Jewish humanity signified by [Jewish] worldlessness was something very beautiful... it was something very beautiful , this sundering aside of all social connections, the complete open-mindedness and absence of prejudice that i experienced... Of course a great deal was lost with the passing of all that. One pays for liberation. I once said in myLessing speech. . .

Gaus : Hamburg in 1959 . . .

Arendt: Yes, there I said that "this humanity... has never yet survived the hour of liberation, of freedom, by so much as minute" You see, that has also happened to us.

Gaus: You wouldn't like to undo it?

Arendt: No. I know that one has to pay a price for freedom. But I cannot say that I like to pay."

Arendt is a courageous thinker who is not easily frightened by the cards dealt by reality. Surely it is not a desirable condition for Jews, or any human group for that matter, to live in a state of perpetual guardedness, on the cusp of existential disaster, the way Israelis are required to do. But, she says, this is the price payed for the loss of the condition of defenceless victimhood. In a way, once Israel has lost its victim status, it has also lost what Bertrand Russell called the fallacious claim to the superior virtue of the oppressed.

French Justice

Nidra Poller (Via: The Iconoclast)

Choosing a Jew because he is Jewish, torturing a Jew day and night for 24 days while purportedly negotiating for ransom, seeing a young man reduced to nothing, beating him, starving him, tormenting him--or knowing about it and not tipping off the police--letting the whole mess degenerate, preparing the creature to be finished off by Fofana…well, in the eyes of the court, it’s no big thing.

The accomplices were at home in their banlieue, at home as the verdict was pronounced, and it looks like they will be at home in jail. Youssouf Fofana, who shouted Allahu Akhbar at the first hearing, repeatedly insulted the victim’s family, and proudly admitted he stabbed Ilan five times, poured flammable liquid over him, and set him on fire, will have endless opportunities in prison to exercise his charismatic charm and train new barbarians.

They killed him because he was Jewish

Via: the Iconoclast:

Gregory Rabinowitz, 56, a taxi driver whose body was found in May near the community of Gan Yavne, east of Ashdod, was killed in a terror attack.

A joint investigation of the Shin Bet and Lachish Subdistrict Police revealed that Rabinowitz, a resident of Ashdod, was mugged and strangled to death by two Palestinians.

Mahmad Maraneh and Muhammad Khaledi, two residents of Arranah, a Palestinian village near the West Bank city of Jenin, were arrested and later confessed to the act.

Rabinowitz's body was found bound on the city's outskirts, with evidence suggesting he was subjected to severe violence. The state of his remains suggested a nationalistically-motivated act.

Maraneh and Khaledi confessed to the act during their interrogation, telling security forces that they entered Israel as illegal aliens, "picked" Rabinowitz as a random target, had him drive to a secluded location and murdered him.

Their motive, they said, was the fact that he was Jewish and that they wanted to avenge the death of a relative – an Islamic Jihad operative who was killed by IDF forces in February 2007

Iranian Nightmares

From Sign and Sight

Die Tageszeitung prints excerpts from the diary of the Iranian blogger "anonyma":

"Sunday 28 June, just after midnight, I wake from a nightmare. I've just heard that a crowd of people has gathered in front of Evin prison, to try to find out what has happened to their friends and loved ones. They have obviously set up camp in front of the prison. I will go there in the morning myself to find out more. A friend told me they are taking prisoners to Karaj, where thousands of demonstrators are already behind bars. He said they are putting them in cells with brutal criminals to make their stay a horror trip."

Broken Wills

From Selma in Tehran:


Rumors, you’ve rejected with hope…‎

What will you do with them, when they become news?‎

‎“Confirmed” becomes an axe…hitting you on the back…resting on your shoulders…‎

And when you breathe ‎If you breathe

Life burns a whole into you

Mourn, mourn, mourn

Hear their shrieks in your sleep…See their faces covered in blood …‎

When you look into the mirror…It’s batons and fragile bones

Walk around like wandering ghosts…worn away by memories that once, where reasons ‎to live

Hear your self cry, from far far away… hear yourself beg ‎‎

“Please! He is not strong enough…”

‎Sleeping on concrete floors, dark cells jammed with bodies, swollen, aching, bleeding…‎

Broken bones, broken jaws, broken hearts…broken wills.‎

‎ Hear your self cry, from far far away…

‎Where are my friends?‎

_______

Update (Comment left by Selma):

Sitting here in Tehran, I feel even more useless. ‎
My boyfriend and five other friends were arrested 5 days ago, midnight, at their homes. ‎For 5 days we didn’t know if they were really arrested or were they hiding. The news is ‎confirmed now. They were arrested. ‎
The mere thought of them being tortured is crushing. I can’t sleep. I can’t think.‎
And there is nothing I can do. I don’t even know where they are. ‎
Every night I sit in the dark wondering whether I’m next. ‎
Wondering where he is sleeping tonight… Is he hurt? Is he getting anything to eat? Are ‎they going to keep him for days? Months? Years?‎
What will happen to them?‎
I’ve heard of some families who were called in to collect the bodies of their loved ones. ‎
I live here, and yet there is nothing I can do.‎
Walking the streets of Tehran for five hours…As if in a coma… looking around, i ‎wondered why the shops were open, why people were going about their daily business, ‎why nobody did anything to help my friends … but then, there is nothing we can do … ‎
I shouldn’t mention his name anywhere, because they’d put him under more pressure if ‎they assume that he is supported by people outside Iran. ‎
It’s crazy!‎
__________

Update 2: Wednesday, July 1:

For anyone who imagines the fears expressed by Selma are exaggerated, read these latest reports:

Iranian authorities hanged six people in Tehran on Wednesday, state media reported.

All six were hanged in the morning, according to Esmatollah Jaberi, a judiciary official. The state-run news agency ISNA, which did not identify the six, said they were hanged in Tehran's Evin Prison. All six were accused of murder.

Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug trafficking....

***

As the Iranian authorities warned the opposition on Tuesday that they would tolerate no further protests over the disputed June 12 presidential elections, a report emerged of the hangings of six supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Speaking after Iran's top legislative body upheld the election victory of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sources in Iran told this reporter in a telephone interview that the hangings took place in the holy city of Mashhad on Monday. There was no independent confirmation of the report.

Underlining the climate of fear among direct and even indirect supporters of Mousavi's campaign for the election to be annulled, the sources also reported that a prominent cleric gave a speech to opposition protesters in Teheran earlier this week in which he publicly acknowledged that the very act of speaking at the gathering would likely cost him his life.

"Pray that God will accept my martyrdom."

From The Iconoclast, comes this report of the Mumbai killers as they were recorded during their murder spree:

At the other end of the line, 500 miles away, Akasha, a 25-year-old Pakistani, is squatting on the floor inside a besieged building in the centre of Mumbai with a murdered rabbi's mobile phone in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. He knows with complete certainty that this will be his last night on Earth. For his mission to be a success, he must be killed.

The two women hostages are on a bed nearby, trussed up and blindfolded. Another gunman, Umer, is dozing.

Now Wasi comes back on the phone. His manner is warm and paternal - the kind of calm, commanding voice you instinctively trust.

Wasi: 'Listen up...'

Akasha: 'Yes sir.' Akasha speaks in a gentle, dopey murmur. He sounds exhausted.

Wasi: 'Just shoot them now. Get rid of them. Because you could come under fire at any time and you'll only end up leaving them behind.'

Akasha: 'Everything's quiet here for now.'

Wasi: 'Shoot them in the back of the head.'

Akasha: 'Sure. Just as soon as we come under fire.'

Wasi: 'No. Don't wait any longer. You never know when you might come under attack.'

Akasha: 'Insh'Allah' (God willing).

Wasi: 'I'll stay on the line.'

The whole thing is here, including the deed itself.

Havel Havalim

assembled by snoopy the goon.

About a dead celebrity, camels, humps and irony

I have nothing to say about the death of Michael Jackson. I think this post says pretty much all. However, I could not resist bringing you this snippet of a conversation I overheard on the Internet (as I sometimes do...) on the subject of Jackson. Not because there is anything valuable to be learned from it about Jackson. It caught my eye because of its exemplification of irony in its purest sense. I am very interested in irony.

In drama, irony is created when in a conflict, the spectator is provided with an item of information --an argument, a claim, an accusation-- that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of, but the contrary of that item of information is known to be true. It is doubly ironic when the provider of that information actually passes judgment on himself, unaware that he is himself behaving in exactly the same way he accuses the other. Or more succinctly put, the camel never sees its own hump, but that of its brother is always before its eyes.

So here is the exchange. I changed the wording a little so as to prevent detection by google of the source:

__________________

Poster A: He was accused of something as disgusting as pedophilia. There wasn’t a shred of proof to support this accusation. That isn't just loony. That is an appalling accusation

Poster B: He paid off several parents of young boys in private settlements in the 7 figures to pre-empt their going to court. Do you think he just wanted to be nice to them? That’s quite apart from the evidence presented by the prosecution when he was brought to trial.

Poster A: He was found not guilty.

Poster B: That he got away in court does not mean that he was not guilty. Think OJ!

Poster A: Yes, so he paid them off. What of it? Those parents saw a good opportunity to make a little cash out of a big star, and succeeded. Give me a break. Why must you always think the worst of everyone?

Poster C (unaccountably): It's essentially the same argument that's raged over the Iraq invasion and the use of torture. If good comes out of Iraq, does it compensate for the present death and mayhem?

____________

Pogroms and Death Camps

On Sign and Sight website:

Frankfurter Rundschau 23.06.2009

The author Isabel Fonseca reports on the scandalous treatment of the Roma in East Europe (also Italy), but primarily in Kosovo. Ten years ago when the Roma were driven out of their settlement areas by "ethnic Albanians", the UN refugee commission put them up in provisional camps, which just happened to be next to an old lead mine. They are still living- or rather dying - there today. "Ten years after the UN took over Kosovo, and after a series of unnatural deaths, miscarriages and countless newborn babies suffering from chronic brain damage (over half of the Roma living in the camp are under 10, every child born in the camp has some form of brain damage) there are no more than 700 Roma left. In 2007 the UN cancelled all medical supplies for cases of poisoning" and it has done nothing to get the Roma out of the death camp.

The anti-Roma plague does not remain on the Balkan outskirts of Europe. It can be found in different shape in such a place as Belfast, as we can see here:

One house in Belgravia Avenue was attacked by crowds of up to 15 on three separate nights, with police response times being hours later, and in one case, lunchtime the next day. The police have been heavily criticised for their failure to respond to the numerous calls the family and concerned residents had placed. The residents have since abandoned the house. Families at two other houses on Wellesley park and Wellington Park had also been targetted, with reports of one house being threatened with a gun, that family had also chosen not to stay in its house last night. The crowds that had gathered to attack the houses have been reported to have been posting literature containing passages from Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Friends of the Ayatollahs

It looks like Selma was right. The world, Western media and American media have found a new toy to play with. Iran has grown silent over the recent few days, and the interest has waned. But some of us are still looking, and finding out, about the kind of thug who is now installed for a second term in Iran and the regime that sustains him.

Here is an article by Karl Pfeifer on Z-word blog:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was part of a death squad that killed three Kurds in Austria, according to Green party security spokesman Peter Pilz. He said Ahmadinejad had been involved in the killings in Vienna in 1989 and may have pulled the trigger on one of the guns used to kill the men. [-]

Khatami justified those executions like this:

“We’re at a university, the cradle of science, so we can speak of it scientifically. In all schools of thought and in all religions there is punishment and punishment is not a form of violence. Punishment is seen as a response to violence or deviance in society and if there is no punishment in a society a society cannot run effectively (…) As an expert of Islamic sciences I tell you that capital punishment is accepted in Islam (…) So yes you are correct homosexual activity is a crime in Islam. And crimes are punishable. (…) And that we must differentiate between punishment and violence.”

Khatami has also spoken out against women’s emancipation:

“One of the major mistakes in the West has been women’s emancipation which has disintegrated the family… Staying in the home does not mean being pushed to the sidelines. Looking after the home does not prevent one from a say in the destiny… We must not think that being social beings means having work outside the home. Housekeeping is among the most important tasks.” Salaam, May 11, 1997

Khatami described Israel during a meeting with Jordanian politicians when he was president as a “plague” and “the greatest enemy of Islam and humanity.” Iranian state radio quoted the president as saying during the meeting that in order” to resist this plague there is no solution except for unity among Muslim countries.”

Ben Dror Yemini, an Israeli journalist, asks:

Tell us, where is everyone? Where did all the people who demonstrated against Israel's brutality in Operation Cast Lead, in the Second Lebanon War, in Operation Defensive Shield, or even in The Hague, when we were dragged there unwillingly after daring to build a separation barrier between us and the suicide bombers, disappear to? We see demonstrations here and there, but these are mainly Iranian exiles. Europe, in principle, is peaceful and calm. So is the United States. Here and there a few dozens, here and there a few hundreds. Have they evaporated because it is Tehran and not here?

All the peace-loving and justice-loving Europeans, British professors in search of freedom and equality, the friends filling the newspapers, magazines and various academic journals with various demands for boycotting Israel, defaming Zionism and blaming us and it for all the ills and woes of the world -- could it be that they have taken a long summer vacation? Now of all times, when the Basij hooligans have begun to slaughter innocent civilians in the city squares of Tehran? Aren't they connected to the Internet? Don't they have YouTube? Has a terrible virus struck down their computers? Have their justice glands been removed in a complicated surgical procedure (to be re-implanted successfully for the next confrontation in Gaza)? How can it be that when a Jew kills a Muslim, the entire world boils, and when extremist Islam slaughters its citizens, whose sole sin is the aspiration to freedom, the world is silent?