The memory of a goldfish

Abravanel is a blog about the Jews of Greece. I have a special interest in the subject because my father-in-law, whose story I mention here, was Greek.

In this post he talks about the shortness of Greek memory and the real historical reason why there are so many streets in Greece named "Palestine Street":

"Cephalonia may not have forgotten but some deem that gratitude may have an expiration date, but ungratefulness never. I am talking about Dionisis Georgopoulos, president of the Teachers association of Cephalonia-Ithaca which asks to “Rename Israel Street in Argostòli in Palestine Street”.

Somebody might ask what do I care: that’s where the memory of a goldfish comes in, which I mentioned in the beginning and the abysmal ignorance which exists for the recent past of our country.

“Palestine Street(s)” already exist and in quantity in our country, Greece. We have them in Volos, in Athens, in Larisa and in other cities. We also had one in Salonica in the Hirch Quartier but the Municipality of Salonica erased all jewish names from the streets in 1943, taking advantage of the opportunity that his undesirable Jewish citizens were murdered in Auschwitz and refused to restore them after the war.

The unsuspecting wayfarer may think that these are the material proof of the muslim-friendly sentiments of our country but alas, they do not know these are the expression of the unadulterated philo-zionism in Greece. Greece philo-zionist and unadulteratedly on top ? Let’s make a small trip into the history of “Palestine Street”."

The rest is here (scroll down for the English version).

Holocaust Memorial Day

Following a post by a drunk trot here, in which Holocaust Memorial Day, is mentioned by remembering the Jews of Greece who perished at the hand of the Nazis, I thought I might talk a bit about my father-in-law. He is ninety years old and lives in Yehud, a town near Tel Aviv. "Yehud", ironically enough, used to be an Arab village, abandoned in 1948. The irony is in the name of the place, of course. Yehud, which replaced the Arab Yehudiyya (in literal Arabic: "place of the Jews").

My father-in-law was the eldest son in a family of ten. He had parents, three brothers and four sisters. They all lived in Salonika, Greece. The mother was either a Bulgarian Jew or a convert to Judaism, upon her marriage to my husband's grandfather. This detail is not quite clear. She had blond hair and very blue eyes, which my father in law inherited from her. My father-in-law , as a young man of eighteen, was conscripted into the Greek army and sent to the front with Italy. He was due to be released in a few days when war broke out, and he was taken prisoner of war by the Italian army. Along with other Jewish soldiers. Two years in an Italian prison camp and then when the Germans invaded Italy, his Italian guards released all the Jewish prisoners, fearful that the Germans would transport them to concentration camps. They advised them to head into the countryside rather than into the cities. My father-in-law attended this advice. He roamed the Italian countryside for four years, working on farms, anywhere he could find some shelter. He spent a year in the basement of a monastery. Some of those who gave him shelter knew he was Jewish, some did not. When the war was over, he headed back to Greece, to Salonika. He found one sister, who had converted to Christianity and married a policeman. She was saved because her husband's family concealed her identity. The rest of the family had been transported to Auschwitz, and that's the last that was known of them.

He boarded a Jewish Agency ship, which was clandestinely taking Jewish refugees from Europe to British Mandate Palestine. Again he had to put on a soldier's uniform and continue to fight. He was not an educated man, and worked wherever he could find someone to employ him. As a cobbler, a gardener, an unskilled worker, even a shepherd, for a time. He always voted for his economic interests. Whichever party offered him to keep a larger part of his meagre earnings, would have his vote. His two sons were named after his father and one brother. He has six grandchildren.

His memory is as sharp as his eyesight. Only in more recent years has he started talking about his family with strange frequency, taking out and showing whatever faded photos he had salvaged from his old house in Salonika. The surviving sister had two sons who immigrated to Venezuella. The two surviving branches of the family have not kept in touch.

In the post that triggered this little history, the author offers a traditional Sephardic romance by way of a tribute to a vanished community. But my father-in-law, who speaks Ladino, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Italian and some French, prefers to listen to rebetico, the music of the Greek urban working class. As do many of the Israeli Sepharadim, such as my parents.

Yehuda Poliker is an Israeli singer of Greek origin, son of Holocaust survivors. One of his first critically-acclaimed musical efforts was a recreation of rebetico in Hebrew. Here he sings "Apple of my eye", a love song, translated and adapted from the Greek.

When I met my husband at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he introduced me to Mikis Theodorakis' "Mauthausen cyclus", a composition describing in music the horrors of the German camp in Austria during WW2.

The ballad of Mauthausen is based on the experiences of the Greek/Jewish playwright Iakovos Kambanellis. He wrote four poems that Theodorakis set to music.

I mention Theodorakis in conclusion to this post and to this day, because it is fitting to do so, because in recent years he went from the gifted and cherished artist who created something beautiful that expressed profound sadness for Jewish fate, to making proclamations of this type:

We are two nations without brothers in the world, us [Greeks] and the Jews, but they have fanaticism and are forceful

Today we can say that this small nation [i.e., the Jews--not Israel] is the root of evil, not of good....

Talking of cycles.

The New Rules of War:

Victor Davis Hanson translates what he calls

".. the Jenin reinvention of the rules of war:

(1) proportionality: Hamas is allowed to keep trying to kill as many Jews as it can to “balance” those lost to far more lethal Israeli countermeasures.

Rule I. War is a tit-for-tat game, where fairness is defined as killing no more than you lose.

(2) Civilians and warriors: there is no such difference. Hamas’s terrorists who shoot rockets against Israeli families burrow into their own civilian infrastructure. They are tragic innocents to the world when they are killed and heroes to their own if can they kill innocents Jews through their barrages.

Rule II. The age of uniforms and battle lines is over, replaced by the civilian shield as the best mechanism of defense against Western mastery of traditional arms.

(3) War that is lost on the battlefield can be won through the international media. The Palestinians have counted on six truths in the international arena:

a. the world remains largely anti-Semitic;

b. the world appreciates the strategic calculus that Arabs are numerous with oil; and Israel is tiny without it;

c. Westerners fear Islamic terrorists, not the IDF;

d. The West is prone to self-loathing, and romanticizes any who best capture the mantel of victimhood; the Palestinians have brilliantly reinvented themselves by claiming a status akin to women, gays, Hispanics, and blacks—fellow victims of rich white male Westerners;

e. Any culture abroad whose hospitals Westerners would not like to be operated in are idealized; any who emulate Western technological supremacy are shunned.

Rule III: Just copy any group that sets up shop on an American campus free speech area, and the resulting sympathy is worth a division.

[-]

A final note: some of the most vicious anti-Israeli sentiment comes from Europe, especially countries like Spain and Greece. Yet I remember Morocco and Spain nearly shooting at each other in 2002 in a dispute over an uninhabited rock in the Mediterranean, and Greece goes ballistic every time Turkey customarily overflies Aegean airspace. Israel alone is not supposed to respond to rocket barrages; our conclusions can only be that the world deems it an illegitimate state worthy of destruction, and will allow its enemies to keep trying until they succeed (Why else would a British television station invite Ahmadinejad to answer the Queen’s Christmas address—a thug who promised the destruction of Israel, is seeking the means to do it, and whose terrorists recently kidnapped British sailors?) (all here)

_________

And once again, proportionality...

Thucydides and Herodotus were Zionist stooges

Two American films provoked official Iranian ire, something that is actually very easy to do. Those are:

The film "300," portrays the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days. It angered many Iranians for the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks.

And

.."The Wrestler" starring Mickey Rourke as a rundown professional wrestler who is preparing for a rematch with his old nemesis, "The Ayatollah." During a fight scene, "The Ayatollah" tries to choke Rourke with an Iranian flag before Rourke pulls the flagpole away, breaks it and throws it into the cheering crowd.

The revived sense of insultedness was triggered by the arrival of

a team of visiting Hollywood actors and movie industry officials, including Annette Bening...

According to the Web site of Iran's Cinema Association, the group arrived Friday in Iran. They met a group of Iranian artists on Saturday, and will be holding educational seminars in directing, screenwriting, acting, producing, marketing and film distribution.

According to this report

Javad Shamaghdari, the art adviser to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadm said:

"We will believe (US President Barack) Obama's policy of change when we see change in Hollywood too, and if Hollywood wants to correct its behaviour towards Iranian people and Islamic culture then they have to officially apologise," he added.

Israel News, which brought us this piece of interesting news, explains the pathology;

The Iranian government has long been convinced that Hollywood, and in particular the Disney studios, are controlled by the international Jew-Zionist conspiracy, and that Mickey and other mice are creations of the devilish Zionists. Add Thucydides and Herodotus to the list of Zionist conspirators. How unfortunate that the benighted Greeks did not appreciate the attempt of the enlightened Persians to bring their advanced civilization to Greece and eliminate the Zionist apartheid regimes there! (H/T: Simply Jews)

Just a taste of the alternative future in store for Western democracies in case the Muslim countries in charge of UN Human rights manage to impose their will.

Ahmadinejad is certainly getting scarier and scarier as President Obama gets increasingly more conciliatory.

Demonising Israel is a lucrative business:

Two stories:

I. Greeks bearing gifts get duped: Here is the report:

The hospital that was the focus of a campaign, which included the participation of Greece’s president and foreign minister, never actually existed.

For nearly a week in February, Greece’s official state television network inundated viewers with news about a telethon that would take place Feb. 9 to raise money to “rebuild the Christian hospital in Gaza that Israelis destroyed with their bombs” during the Israeli army's operation there in January.

In its announcements, the network made clear that it was referring to a specific Christian hospital destroyed by Israel.

The telethon included recorded video messages by Greek President Carolos Papoulias and Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyianni, along with a parade of Greek politicians, singers, public personalities and trade unionists. Many used the telethon to cast broadsides at Israel.

The campaign raised $1.67 million, according to telethon organizers, who said little Greek children had gone so far as to break their piggy banks to offer $14 to Palestinians in need.

[-]

No one was taking responsibility for the situation.

The spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry, Gregory Delavekouras, said, “Along with the Ministry of Health, it was our intention to raise money for the restoration of schools and hospitals, and more specifically for the medical center,” he said. Delavekouras could not say how the “medical center” morphed into “the Christian Hospital of Gaza” on TV.

One thing is certain: In a six-hour telethon loaded with Israel bashing, the Greek public was deceived that money contributed would go to rebuild a Christian hospital destroyed by the army of the Jewish state.

What remains unclear is whether organizers deliberately perpetrated the fraud or the telethon had fallen into the deception by accident.

II. Human Rights Watch fundraising in Saudi Arabia:

A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?

No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations." (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel "human rights" activists"? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)

... some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."

More, here.

Update: Jeffrey Goldberg, having enquired specifically, comes to this conclusion:

In other words, yes, the director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division is attempting to raise funds from Saudis, including a member of the Shura Council (which oversees, on behalf of the Saudi monarchy, the imposition in the Kingdom of the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law) in part by highlighting her organization's investigations of Israel, and its war with Israel's "supporters," who are liars and deceivers. It appears as if Human Rights Watch, in the pursuit of dollars, has compromised its integrity.

*****

"Human Rights" as practiced by these NGO's is a travesty. If they wish to pursue only human rights violations within democratic states then they should re-define their mission statements. If they are only interested in representing the human rights of Palestinians, they should state it, openly. They cannot however pose as a universal human rights organization which cares equally for all and then do something like this:

"Human Rights Watch, which was largely created and funded by Jewish donors to promote traditional human rights concerns, is now cooperating and seeking funding from the leaders of Saudi Arabia – one of the major violators of the norms that HRW claims to promote. This is consistent with HRW’s central role in the demonization of Israel, and based on the exploitation of the rhetoric of human rights. Under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, HRW has been active in the campaigns condemning Israeli responses to attacks from Gaza, as well as during the 2006 Lebanon War, the Palestinian mass terror campaign, and in many other examples, as documented by NGO Monitor.

An article in the Arab News praised Human Rights Watch for “gaining more recognition and support in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world.” The article notes that “[d]uring their recent visit to the Kingdom, senior members of the organization were given a welcoming dinner in Riyadh hosted by prominent businessman and intellectual Emad bin Jameel Al-Hejailan. Other prominent members of Saudi society, human rights activists and dignitaries were invited to the dinner held to honor the guests….Al-Hejailan said the credo of human rights is rising in the Kingdom. He commended Human Rights Watch (HRW) for its work on Gaza and the Middle East as a whole.” Indeed, HRW’s anti-Israel obsession was the major reason for Saudi fundraiser: “The group is facing a shortage of funds because of the global financial crisis and the work on Israel and Gaza, which depleted HRW’s budget for the region.”

blog.ngo-monitor.org/.../hrw-goes-to-saudi-arabia-to-demonize-israel-and-raise-money

_____

Update: July 23:

Amnesty publishes a report on Saudi atrocities. That's great, says David Hazony, but why now?

And I ask: how can they have compiled a 65 page report since May, yet a complete silence characterized their scrutiny of the kingdom before that? Could it be that these incidents recorded in the report were allowed to collect dust in some shelved files somewhere until it became... expedient.. to publish them?

Recognizing Righteousness: Italians and Jews


1. Gino Bartali

Gino Bartali was a famous Italian cyclist; he won the Giro d'Italia three times and the Tour de France twice. But these weren't his only achievements. Described here as 'one of cycling's all-time greats', Bartali is being considered for the honour of Righteous Among The Nations - awarded by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem - for the part he played in rescuing Jews in danger during the Second World War. One of those testifying to his efforts is Giorgio Goldenberg, now 78, whose family was saved by being hidden in Bartali's cellar in Florence:

The cellar was very small... A door gave way onto a courtyard, but I couldn't go out because that would run the risk of me being seen by the tenants of the nearby apartment buildings. The four of us slept on a double bed. My father never went out, while my mother often went out with two flasks to get water from some well. (Via: Normblog)

2. The Greek Lawyer (from "A Tale of Two cities" by Moris Farhi)

To date, the Germans had dispatched most of the men who had assembled on that Saturday to build roads and airfields. What the future held for other Jews, the lawyer dared not imagine. Reports from eastern Thrace and Macedonia augured the worst. The Germans had delegated the administration of these territories to their ally, the Bulgarians, but since the latter kept prevaricating on the matter of surrendering their own Jews, the Germans had decided to deal with the Jews of Thrace and Macedonia themselves. Lately there had been rumours that these unfortunates would be deported en masse to Occupied Poland. All of this made the lawyer look back regretfully to the time when the Italians had been the occupying power. The Italians had been humane, often in defiance of Mussolini's edicts. Throughout their occupation, they had persistently warned the Jews of the Nazis' racist policies and urged them to leave the country; on many occasions they had even granted Italian passports to those who heeded their advice. Ester might remember one Moiz Hananel, a distant cousin from Rhodes: he was now safe in Chile. But, alas, ester's father, Salvador, disinclined to liquidate his considerable investments, had procrastinated. Now the Italians had gone and Salvador's wealth had evaporated.

There the lawyer's letter ended.

3. Peretz

My father-in-law was the eldest son in a family of ten. He had parents, three brothers and four sisters. They all lived in Salonika, Greece. The mother was either a Bulgarian Jew or a convert to Judaism, upon her marriage to my husband's grandfather. This detail is not quite clear. She had blond hair and very blue eyes, which my father in law inherited from her. My father-in-law , as a young man of eighteen, was conscripted into the Greek army and sent to the front with Italy. He was due to be released in a few days when war broke out, and he was taken prisoner of war by the Italian army. He spent two years in an Italian prison camp and then, when the Germans invaded and occupied Italy, his Italian guards released him along with all the Jewish prisoners, fearful that the Germans would transport them to concentration camps. The guards advised them to head into the countryside rather than into the cities. My father-in-law attended this advice. (His fellow Jewish POW's disregarded the advice and decided to try their luck in the cities. as far as my father-in-law knows, none of them survived the Germans).

Peretz roamed the Italian countryside for four years, working on farms, wherever he could find some shelter. He spent a year in the basement of a monastery, urged by the monks not to even step outside for fear that he might be sighted, suspected, and reported to the Germans. Some of those who gave him shelter knew he was Jewish, some did not. When the war was over, he headed back to Greece, to Salonika. He found one sister, who had converted to Christianity and married to a local Greek policeman. She was saved because her husband's family concealed her identity. The rest of the family had been transported to Auschwitz, and that's the last that was known of them.

4. Giovanni

My Italian friend, Giovanni, grew up on a farm in Avelino. At some considerable distance from the farmhouse where the family lives there is a large pit, the size of a very small room, covered by some makeshift trap-door. Giovanni's father remembered working side by side with his own father digging this hole in the ground which was then used to shelter a couple of Italian Jewish families during the time when it was more dangerous to be Jewish and be known for it. Until he told me this story, Giovanni had no idea what an unusual account he was carrying in his memory. Which goes to show that for some people it never occurred that helping Jews avoid or escape the Nazis was the exception rather than the rule.

A pattern of decency emerges from these disparate examples, a certain self-evident and intuitive moral imperative that transcends, discards, disregards, any inclination, fed by millennium of religious indoctrination and antisemitic suspicion, to avert the gaze at one's own convenience. The people involved in these acts of kindness, were not educated on the lofty academic ideals of universal justice and the philosophy of mutual responsibility. They were as ordinary as all the other peoples among whom the Holocaust was taking place.

And this makes you think that if indeed there was a banality of evil loosed upon the world during those benighted years, perhaps there was also a partial antidote, the banality of the good.

Musical break:

Joselito - campanera - (ruiseñor)

It used to be a favourite of my parents, who danced the passa-doble with great skill and agility.

Joselito was a child star in Spain during the late fifties and sixties. Here is what Spain was like during those years:

The Spanish Miracle (Desarrollo) was the name given to the Spanish economic boom between 1959 and 1973. It is seen by some as the most remarkable positive legacy of the regime. During this period, Spain largely surpassed the per capita income that differentiates developed from underdeveloped countries and induced the development of a dominant middle class which was instrumental to the future establishment of democracy.

The boom was bolstered by economic reforms promoted by the so-called "technocrats", appointed by Franco, who put in place neo-liberal development policies from the International Monetary Fund. The technocrats were a new breed of economists who replaced the old, prone to isolationism, Falangist guard.

The implementation of these policies took the form of development plans (planes de Desarrollo) and it was largely a success: Spain enjoyed the second highest growth rate in the world, just after Japan, and became the ninth largest economy in the world, just after Canada. Spain joined the industrialized world, leaving behind the poverty and endemic underdevelopment it had experienced since the loss of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century.

Although the economic growth produced noticeable improvements in Spanish living standards and the development of a middle class, Spain remained less economically advanced relative to the rest of Western Europe (with the exception of Portugal, Greece and Ireland). At the heyday of the Miracle, 1974, Spanish income per capita peaked at 79 percent of the Western European average, only to be reached again 25 years later, in 1999.

The 14 years of recovery led to an increase in (often unplanned) building on the periphery of the main Spanish cities to accommodate the new class of industrial workers brought by rural exodus, similar to the French banlieue.

The icon of the Desarrollo was the SEAT 600 (a license-built Italian Fiat 600) the first car for many Spanish working class families, produced by the Spanish factory SEAT or Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo.

Obama and Obeisance

This story refuses to go away.

Did he or didn't he?

It appears increasingly obvious that he did and is now somewhat embarrassed about it. Why else would his acolytes pretend that it did not happen, or that what we saw was not what we saw?

Is Obama’s deep bow (with slightly bent knee) to the Saudi king as bad as it seems? The White House, apparently forgetful that we live in the Internet age, where everything is swiftly documented and disseminated — or else thinking it leads a nation of the blind — insists the president did not bow. He supposedly always bends in half when shaking hands with shorter people, though he certainly seemed quite erect when saluting the British queen, who is much shorter than the Saudi king.

Raymond Ibrahim of Pajamas Media went exploring a bit about the historical meanings of a bow or a kiss and brings us some interesting insights:

Writing in the 5th century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus explained: “When the Persians meet one another in the roads, you can see whether those who meet are of equal rank. For instead of greeting by words, they kiss each other on the mouth; but if one of them is inferior to the other, they kiss one another on the cheeks.”

This explanation reminds one of Bush’s hand-holding/kissing sessions with the same Saudi monarch, which some insist exonerate Obama’s bow. Not so; as the Greek historian explains above, such behavior is representative of equal rank in Eastern cultures.

As for Obama’s conduct, Herodotus continues, “yet if one is of much less noble rank than the other, he falls down before him and worships him.”

And then goes on to put the matter in the present context:

... Obama’s obeisance should give nuke-seeking Iran even more hope in its endeavors. After all, if the leader of the free West so readily bends the knee to Wahhabi despotism, how long before he bows to Iran, the true heir of proskunesis-Persia? ...

... any would-be “moderates” or assertive governments who may have been serious about combating radical Islam and its attendant humanitarian abuses via Sharia have, through Obama’s bow to the personification of radical Islam, just received a clear message: aside from occasional, perfunctory lip service, you’re really on your own.

...When Alexander the Great, drunk with hubris, took on despotic ways, demanding that others prostrate themselves before him, the Macedonians revolted; some were put to death. What a long way Western civilization has come when today the leader of the free world and heir to democratic ancient Greece, far from despotically demanding that others offer him obeisance, voluntarily opts to prostrate himself — and in essence, all of America — before another. And what another.

It is a strange affair and I have to wonder who it was that gave President Obama such bad advice. Could it be the same source responsible during Obama's campaign for Obama's nontraditional salute to the American anthem and flag?

When I first saw the clip, I thought the notion that Obama would bow to the Saudi king was so outlandish that for sure there must be some other explanation. Maybe his trouser leg rode up and he bent over to straighten it when he realized the king was already extending his hand. So he stopped right in the middle of bending down and awkwardly extended his hand. The whole thing is done pretty gauchely and Obama is usually a graceful man.

In which case, why did the White House spokesman offer his lame excuse for the incident?

Quadruple A (Angry, American, Academic, Arab) doesn't get it

Another verbal "expulsion through the rectum of a mixture of gases that are byproducts of the digestion process of mammals and other animals" (vulgarly known as "fart") from Prof. AbuKhalil:

"There is a movie coming soon to our theaters: a film--an actual film--of a performance of Israeli philharmonic orchestra. I could not believe it when I saw the trailer in the theater. Who would produce a movie of a philharmonic orchestra of any country. There are not even films of philharmonic orchestras of THE US DAMN IT. What is this insane and obsessive love affair with things Israeli in this country?? I mean, if this was the Austrian or German philharmonic orchestras, I would have understood, but Israel's??? Why Israel's?? What is next? A feature film about potatoes in Israel?? "

I believe this is the event that makes his blood boil so:

On Thursday, July 28 at 7:00 pm (local time), NCM Fathom and Mod 3 Live present LIVE FROM JERUSALEM*: An Evening with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Conducted by Zubin Mehta with Soloists Renée Fleming and Joseph Calleja.

Filled with majestic arias and duets, the performance includes a sweeping visual and audio experience that will bring down the curtain on the Jerusalem Season of Culture 2011. Zubin Mehta conducts the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the breathtaking city of Jerusalem with a special one-night event featuring soprano Renée Fleming and tenor Joseph Calleja. This special in-theater event will show in more than 480 select movie theaters nationwide, including 21 theaters in New York tri-state area. Tickets for LIVE FROM JERUSALEM*: An Evening with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Conducted by Zubin Mehta with Soloists Renée Fleming and Joseph Calleja are available at participating theater box offices and online at www.FathomEvents.com"

It is only possible to understand AbuKhalil's outraged howl:

"I mean, if this was the Austrian or German philharmonic orchestras, I would have understood, but Israel's??? Why Israel's?? What is next?"

when you consider that he lives for the day Israel is no more:

"But no, never will we recognize the Zionist State of Israel! We must go back to the 1968 PLO charter, not the one engineered by Bill Clinton in Ramallah. We Arabs, Palestinians, cannot be equivocal when it comes to Israel. The Arab world will never prosper until the Zionist regime is removed!”

He added: “Yes, I am gloating now–Israel sees their ordered world now collapsing before their very eyes. We celebrate the demise of Israel, yes, Israel, your days are truly numbered!”

AbuKhalil got a thunderous, standing five-minute ovation."

Here is another gem.

***

Here are a few AAAA-confounding Israeli Philharmonic moments:

IDF Violinist & Israel Philharmonic in Scud Attack 1991

And this little beauty: Greek Dalaras & Israel Philharmonic in Hebrew Songs

(The last video is a reminder that I must write something, very cautious, about the Israel-Greece spring thaw.)

Hummus and Israel

Hummus, hummus 
everywhere ...  






Prof. As'ad AbuKhalil gets up in the morning and has hummus on his mind. And Israel is never far from his mind. So the two subjects somehow collide in that highly intellectual and sophisticated mind of his, and, presto, a news item is manufactured for his "Angry Arab News Service" (the only news fit to read by the fabled Arab street). As usual, whenever Israel is mentioned, it is a post dripping with venom:

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Hummus and Israel     

It occurred to me that Israel only recently started to claim that Hummus is an Israeli dish. In the Israeli media and (stolen) "culture", there were no references about the Hummus craze until relatively recently the 1980s.  Yet, I grew up with Hummus (and "ful", fava beans) stores all over the cities and towns of the Lebanon.  So how is that explained? Is there a divine explanation for this one too?

I remember growing up in Israel where felafel and hummus stands were to be found at every street corner.  You don't have to take my word for it. Here is Yotam Ottolenghi's own memory of it:

"both chefs got in plenty of trouble as kids for their love of a street-fresh falafel sandwich on the way home from school. Ottolenghi recalls trying to resist temptation:

"You know you shouldn't buy yourself falafel in a pita because you're going to have

lunch served in five minutes, but you really, really must have it. ... You arrive back home, you're so full, your shirt is covered with tahini sauce, it's been dripping all over you ... and we literally had the same experiences, the angry mother, the falafel, the whole thing is so similar in many ways, and we were really living in two separate cultures."

AbuKhalil likes to pretend, I daresay, that all Israelis are of the gefiltefish eating variety. The fact that more than 50% of Israelis are refugees from Arab lands* doesn't jive with his favourite narratives about European colonization.

And "... hummus ... is, of course, an Arab dish that has its variations all over the wider region from Persia to Greece, adopted by the Israelis as one of their national treasures and turned into an obsession."

 AbuKhalil doesn't mind Persian hummus, Greek hummus, Romanian hummus, only Israeli hummus gets his goat! Hummus made by Israeli hands is haram! Why? Need we pry any deeper into that hate-corroded soul for a plausible answer? For the same reason he conveniently forgets that 50%++ of Israeli Jews originate in Arab lands and when their parents and grandparents had arrived in Israel, they did not fall in love with the Yiddish cuisine but preferred to cook and eat the kind of foods they had eaten for many centuries. Somewhat like AbuKhalil himself who prefers to eat, in California of the US of A the foods he had eaten when he was growing up in Lebanon, things like hummus and fried eggplants, or whatever.

Can we suspect AbuKhalil of being racist for pretending Israelis are all white Ashkenazi colonizers who steal  "Palestinian" ownership of hummus? Or a hypocrite, for allowing himself what he denies to others?

From the self-proclaimed anarchist who says: "I don't like flags, and I don't like nationalisms, but...for Palestine and the Palestinians, anything and everything." this is par for the course.

The term 'hypocrite' fails to do justice to this person.

Addendum:

AbuKhalil to the rescue, providing a quote from Ottolenghi, here:

"Chickpeas have been around for thousands of years in the Middle East, says Israeli-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Some scholars even claim an Old Testament passage indicates that Jews ate hummus in Biblical times."

Now where is Hummus mentioned in the bible? Here, Ruth, chapter 2, verse 14:

And Boaz told her at the lunch break: Come here and share the bread and dip your pita in the chickpeas. So she sat with the other harvesters and he served her some of the cooked (roasted?) grains, and she ate her fill and even left some ...

ויאמר לה בעז לעת
האכל גשי הלם
ואכלת מן־הלחם
וטבלת פתך בחמץ
ותשב מצד הקוצרים
ויצבט־לה קלי
 ותאכל ותשבע ותתר׃
 
The Israeli author Meir Shalev explains the linguistic argument for hummus in the Bible.

Bottom line is important, making humus doesn't require great intelligence, it's not quantum theory:

And Professor Felix says that this ? [unclear] hamitz, a mixture of hamitz, is the hummus. And a mixture, it mean something like, like a porridge. Something which is soft, and, and you can...now we know that the plant hummus...himtza in Hebrew...

The chickpea?

...the chickpea was known here for about 4,000 years. The problem is whether our ancestors already knew how to mash it, and add some tahina, and olive oil, and garlic, and lemon, and salt, whatever, you know...the secret form-, formulas of, of hummus. Or maybe they et- [sic], ate it as, as the seed.

You know, maybe they burnt it in fire. Maybe they cooked it. We still cook it today, and eat it with black pepper and, and salt. It's very good.

And, and I feel that it's not such an ingenious unpredictable idea to, to mash the cooked hummus peas, and make it as a porridge, and eat it. We do the same with potatoes. We do the same with, with beans. This is something which is very easy to do.

Israeli hummus recipe:

1 cup dried chickpeas
1/4 cup tahina
1/2 cup lemon juice (or to taste)
2 cloves garlics (or to taste)
1 teaspoon salt
ground pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 Tablespoons pine nuts
2 Tablespoons chopped fresh parsley or cilantro

Greek hummus recipe:

1 (15-ounce) can chick peas, drained
1 lemon
1 sprig fresh oregano, leaves chopped
A handful fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
Salt
2 rounded tablespoons tahini paste
Drizzle extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup kalamata olives, well drained, coarsely chopped
1 sack pita chips, sea salt variety (recommended: Stacy's)
1/2 seedless cucumber, cut into sticks for dipping
A medium red pepper, seeded and cut into strips for dipping

Romanian humus recipe:

• 1 Can White Kidney Bean
• 4 Garlic Cloves
• 2 Onions – Chopped
• 1 tbsp Olive Oil
• 3 tbsp Vegetable Oil
• Salt & Pepper

___________________________

* The mid-20^th century  uprooting of Jews from the Middle East Arab countries was a traumatic event.  Entire communities were dislodged and removed from places where they had dwelt for centuries and even millennia.  Yet this drama remains recondite and often suppressed. There is a kind of collaborative effort at work suppressing the still deeply felt pain of this catastrophe. One reason for the silence is that Human rights organizations fear that recognizing  the mass removal  of Jews from Arab countries as the Arab-ethnic cleansing of Jews may jeopardize the status of Palestinian refugees who claim that they were ethnically cleansed from the land of Palestine with the creation of the state of Israel. (Une si longue présence : Comment le monde arabe a perdu ses juifs, 1947-1967)

Jewnetics

Ami Isseroff writes about a recently published book about the findings of Jewish genetic research and its irrelevance to Zionism.

"There is no way to prove a political thesis from biological
science and no need to do so. Political theories and ideology must prove
themselves in the realm of politics, ideology and history. Zionism appears to
have done so, in a unique way that is not true of any other 19th century ideology except perhaps democratic liberalism.

Zionism proved itself in the way that is accepted for scientific
theories: by making and fulfilling a series of counter-intuitive and unlikely
predictions:

Assimilation in Europe is not possible, despite
appearances.

The Jews of Europe are about to suffer a catastrophe.

The Jews are a people and can organize themselves as a people and an nation.

It is possible to create a viable Jewish state.

All of the above seemed improbable a hundred and ten years ago, and were bitterly
contested.

Even today, anti-Zionists deny the evidence of their senses and insist that the
Jewish state must fall apart because of internal divisions and that the only
future for the Jews is in assimilation or in the most reactionary forms of religious practice. Whatever a nation must be, we are one, and we have proved it.

Judaism is not easily categorizable. Jews have always felt their Jewishness as a religion with the memory of a cherished and a longed for territory. But Jewishness is also an intense sense of historical belonging to a Jewish collective and mutual caring. So much so that even when Jews become atheists, they do not exile themselves from the collectivity of Jews, they don't stop being and feeling Jewish. Even Baruch Spinoza, who was as much of an atheist as could be expected at his time and place, never stopped being a Jew. He was excommunicated for openly defying the rules that regulate Jewish life, (heresy in Judaism is not about what you think in you mind, but how you behave outwardly) but he never converted, been baptised or renounced his own Jewishness. He was also one of the first to fully understand the deep and insuperable affinity that connected Jews to Israel.

Therefore, whether genetics can show blood kinship among the people who call themselves Jews and who live in Israel, a Jewish state, is simply an irrelevant factor and those who either spend their efforts in trying to prove that modern day Jews are not really descended from Abraham are, to all intents and purposes, racists. No other nation has ever been asked to prove any such thing in order to qualify for self-determination.

>>>

And related to the above, here Dr. Alexander Yakobson, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, tackles the highly topical question of the uniqueness of Zionism and Israel:

Some argue that these features of the Jewish-Israeli
national identity are inconsistent with modern civic democracy; many others
defend or even celebrate them, pointing to the uniqueness of Jewish history and
culture. The underlining premise of uniqueness itself is rarely questioned. In
fact, however, it appears that this case is far less unique in the modern
democratic world than is widely assumed. There are numerous other cases where
national identity and religion are officially connected in some way, and where
there are official bonds between a nation-state and an ethnocultural Diaspora.

--The first example is Greece (the Hellenic Republic)--

--Another European country in which a close link between religious and national identity has traditionally existed is Ireland. --

--In Norway, The Evangelical-Lutheran religion shall remain the official religion of the State. --

--In post-Communist Poland, the real power and influence of the Catholic Church is greater than in any contemporary democracy --

-- Bulgaria contains a large Muslim Turkish-speaking minority. The constitution includes the usual provision on the equal rights of all citizens regardless of “race, nationality, ethnic self-identity, sex, origin, religion, education, opinion, political affiliation, personal or social status, or property status”. However, it also connects Bulgarian identity embodied by the State with both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the language of the Bulgarian-speaking majority—--

--Tibetan peoplehood, culture, and society cannot be conceived of without the distinct Tibetan form of Buddhism (sometimes called Lamaism). This state of affairs is more akin to the way some Orthodox Jews would have [End Page 8] liked to see the Jewish people than to Israeli (or Diaspora Jewish) realities. --

--Italy: the Crucifix as a National Symbol in a Secular State --

(The entire article, here, on Engage)

Not with a bang but a whimper ...

According to this report:

"The navy intercepted the French-flagged vessel after it informed the ship that it was nearing the Gaza blockade lines and must change its course to the Ashdod port or Egypt. The ship refused to divert its course, causing Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen Benny Grantz to give the navy permission to take control of the yacht.

The navy told the passengers to prepare for a "calm boarding." There was no resistance and the 15 activists on board were transferred to a naval ship participating in the mission. The passengers were provided with food and water and checked by an IDF doctor. They will be taken to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where they will undergo standard security procedures and transferred to Interior ministry officials and immigration authorities. [-]

Passengers on the ship included citizens of Canada, France, Greece, Sweden and Tunisia, as well as Israeli Haaretz journalist Amira Hass and a team from Al-Jazeera TV.

On Monday, representatives of the ship issued a statement saying "The presence at sea by the Dignity-Al Karama is a setback for the Israeli government who by force and coercion seeks to perpetuate the illegal and criminal blockade to silence civil society movements around the world."

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3048/israeli-navy-stops-french-boat-sailing-to-gaza

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression... subject to limitations

From mediawatchwatch

On December 18 last year the UN General Assembly adopted a raft of resolutions recommended by its Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural). While many of them were progressive - one called for a moratorium on the death penalty - there was also one long campaigned for by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference: “combating defamation of religions”.

Draft resolution VI on Combating defamation of religions (document A/C.3/62/L.35), approved as orally revised by a recorded vote of 95 in favour to 52 against, with 30 abstentions, on 20 November, would have the Assembly express deep concern about the negative stereotyping of religions and manifestations of intolerance and discrimination in matters of religion or belief, still in evidence in some regions of the world. The Assembly would emphasize that everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which should be exercised with responsibility and may therefore be subject to limitations, according to law and necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others; protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals; and respect for religions and beliefs.*

This was adopted with 108 in favour and 51 against:

In favour: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Grenada, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Against: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Romania, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States.

The only religion actually mentioned in the document (PDF download) is Islam, of course. Here’s para 9:

Stresses the need to effectively combat defamation of all religions
and incitement to religious hatred, against Islam and Muslims in particular;

_________

*WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

"Islamic states say such resolutions do not aim to limit free speech but to stop publications like the Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed that sparked bloody protests by Muslims around the world in 2005.

Russia and China joined Arab and some African states in voting for the resolution." (Via: Mick)

It is a relief to know that those who voted for the resolution fully accept the right for freedom of speech. They are merely concerned with "subject[ing] to limitations" the "exercise of those rights".

Well, then. That is a completely different matter.

In her 2000 documentary "Revolutionary Journey" CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour interviewed Iranians of different walks of life. One of them was her aunt, who is an editor and a journalist. I remember her saying: Of course we have freedom of speech in Iran. We are free to write what we want and the government is free to throw us in jail and shut down our newspaper when we do.

Which more or less sums up the spirit and letter of the above referred to resolution.

Thanks to Beryl Wajsman, who brought this article to my attention:

The Education of Robert Kennedy
By DAVID BROOKS

Emilio Estevez's movie, ''Bobby,'' introduces the martyrdom of Robert Kennedy to another generation of Americans, but it was Robert's reaction to his brother's death that is really most instructive to the young.

Robert Kennedy was dining at home on Nov. 22, 1963, when J. Edgar Hoover called. ''I have news for you,'' Hoover began coldly. ''The president's been shot.'' Kennedy turned away from his lunch companions, his hand to his mouth and his face twisted in pain.

In the ensuing months, he was devoured by grief. One of his biographers, Evan Thomas, writes: ''He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt. His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother's old clothes -- an old blue topcoat, a tuxedo, a leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal -- which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame.''
But during March 1964, he visited Bunny Mellon's estate in Antigua, and spent the vacation in his room, reading a book Jackie Kennedy had given him, ''The Greek Way,'' by Edith Hamilton.
''The Greek Way'' contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him. ''When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view,'' Hamilton writes, ''then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.''
Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless ''all the glory that was Greece'' mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy's life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls ''a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.''

Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own -- heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.

Hamilton is at her best describing the tragic sensibility, the strange mixture of doom and exaltation that marks Greek drama. It was based on the conviction that good grows out of bad, virtue out of hardship, and that wisdom is born in suffering. Kennedy memorized a passage from Aeschylus, which Hamilton quotes twice in her book:

''God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.''

Kennedy, recovering from his brother's murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.

Kennedy underlined a passage of Hamilton's book in which she summarizes the rippled nature of Greek optimism: ''Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.'' If they were doctors of the spirit, the Greeks' specialty was to take grief and turn it into resolution.

The story of Kennedy's grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the '60s. He promoted many liberal policies but was never a member of a team since he drew strength from somewhere else.

And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.