Grave Error

Today I was reading an article (that I cannot find at this time) about the large number of Internet searches for the meaning of the Arabic phrase “as-salam alikum” after it was used by Obama in his recent Cairo speech.  The article correctly explained that the phrase meant “peace be upon you” but then went on to translate another sentence in Arabic but leaving the word “Allah” untranslated.

Why is “Allah” not translated? Allah means “God” in Arabic. Not the Muslim God, just God plain and simple. Christian and Jewish Arabs say “Allah” when they refer to God, so why does the press always insist on giving the impression that Muslims pray to a different Allah? And the name Abdallah (literally, “servant of God”) historically was both a Christian and Muslim name, just as the name Jihad is very common amongst Arab Christians. Did the genius writing the aforementioned article bother to explain that the Arabic word “salam” actually comes from the same root as the Hebrew “shalom” or that all Arabs, regardless of religion, address each other with the exact same greeting?

Another good example would be the word “madrasa”. We are led to believe that a madrasa is a religious school where some odious form of extremism is taught to Muslim jihadists. Actually, madrasa is the generic word in Arabic for school. Evangelical Christians from America established missionary schools in Syria and Lebanon in the 19th Century, all called madrasas. And today, A Christian school in Bethlehem, for example, would be a madrasa. A public school, a private school, or a religious school — like the ones that Republicans would love to give tax-payer funded vouchers for — would all, in Arabic, be madrasas. And guess what? The great majority of suicide bombers, jihadists and Al Qaeda members, like Osama himself, have no formal religious training from madrasas or elsewhere.

So why the insistence on creating differences where they simply do not exist?

We’ve got Christian terrorists, killing in the name of the Lord (on Sunday at Church no less), to round up, detain, waterboard, and deny due process to before Obama puts our national security at risk. There’s a fatwah against abortion, with scores of Pro-Life jihadists, not in caves but in the heartland calling for the deaths of the unholy doctors, and we need all the illegal interrogation tools Dick can fathom to prevent, God forbid, Christian assassins from getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

Would it be racist to assume the obvious: that just one single non-white justice during the Supreme Court’s first two hundred years would have reached a better judgment, say, in Dred Scott or Plessy than the Court’s first 100 exclusively all white male justices had?

I was trying to watch yesterday’s Meet the Press when I kept feeling woozy each and every time David Gregory either aided in promoting a baseless claim or failed to ask the obvious question, perpetuating the farce that has become our political dialogue.

This week it was about Judge Sotomayor and whether, according to a bunch of unelected white guys, she is racist. Gregory allowed Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions to talk about the nation and its Supreme Court’s long heritage of blind justice in contrast to Sotomayor’s alleged judicial philosophy without bringing up the obvious: in its entire history, the Supreme Court has only had two female justices and two African American ones. Not until the second half of the 20th Century did our beloved legal heritage, embodied in an activitist Court, rule that separate was not equal. And in the entire history of the United States of America, Alabama has one of the worst records on civil rights. Why is a white southerner from a state with a well documented history of lynchings and injustice be permitted to make such a claim completely unchallenged? Furthermore, why are all these white guys so upset?

To be quite frank, Sotomayor’s remarks about the wise and experienced Latina woman are very aligned with our long cultural heritage of romanticizing the underdog and believing that the underdog is somehow more virtuous. Heck, I would surely hope that someone who comes from poverty and a tough neighborhood plus several years of stellar legal experience would have greater insights than someone who has lived in total comfort. What’s so controversial about that? Notice that when the white guy, Alito, says the same thing it’s alright, but when the Hispanic woman does it is reverse racism.

Now I’d love to love Mr. Gregory; we went to college together. But he is so brain dead (or cynical) that in a later segment he discusses corporate discrimination against women with Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy. Of course, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to bring up discrimination on the bench a few minutes earlier when he was discussing how having two women and seven men on the Supreme Court would prejudice men.

Glen Greenwald once again saves the day by summing up just how bad the press has become:

I really don’t want to be Sotomayor’s unequivocal defender.  I continue to harbor some questions and reservations about how good of a choice Sotomayor is.  But none of those questions are being asked — at least not yet.  Instead, the discourse is, as usual, filled with totally fact-free and inflammatory claims which, if we had a minimally functioning media, would have been exposed as the obvious falsehoods they are from the start.

The silliest part of it, though, is that the Republicans probably won’t have another chance at such a moderate Obama nominee. Regardless of how we classify races and ethnic groups in America, Hispanic or Latino is not so easily definable. For example, Mexico and Puerto Rico share a language and religion but little more. They don’t live in the same parts of the country and they don’t necessary have the same political interests. So thinking that all Hispanics are going to be liberal on all issues at all times is naive.

Finally, I’d love to find a single one of these journalists who can actually explain and then cite examples of judicial activism as opposed to strict constructionism. If Supreme Court Justices simply interpreted the law in a vacuum, you could use computers to do their job. That’s not how American jurisprudence works. How stupid can a debate get? Please!

The world is full of unattractive people, so the only surprising thing about Ms. Boyle is the fact that the world was so surprised about her talent.

Just think about the entire history of pop and rock music with its overwhelming population of butt-ugly male musicians. Probably only a handful of them have even mediocre talent, yet they become sex symbols. And somehow, out of the blue, we are supposed to be so impressed with Ms. Boyle. Why? Because she is unattractive? Is her voice even that impressive? It’s good, but come one. The world is full of unattractive talented people, but for some reason the untalented beautiful women and the mediocre and ugly men are given the contracts.

What should truly surprise us is just how susceptible we are to television marketing campaigns and how little we value women or real talent for that matter.

The other day a friend of mine sent me this article denouncing the hypocrisy of the U.S. positions on North Korea, Iran and Israel. While it might sound like the mad rage of an anti-American foreign propagandist (a la Hugo Chavez), it is not. It is written by Paul Craig Roberts, an American economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. I am not necessarily buying into his arguments, but I do think it is worthwhile to at least take them into consideration. Continue reading →

One of the catch phrases of conservative Israeli politicians is that the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist. Netanyahu in his recent trip to Washington, DC to meet with President Obama was saying the same thing, while at the same time talking about the “Jewish State” (as opposed to a multi-cultural democratic state) and refusing to even address a possible two state solution. And as we all know, without a two state solution, Israel is left with the options of ethnic cleansing or apartheid.

So where is the Israeli government’s acknowledgment of the Palestinians’ right to exits? Just look at the basic statistics: In 1920 in the British Mandate over Palestine, the population of the area was 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish and 10% Christian. At the end of the Mandate in 1945 in Jerusalem, for example, land ownership was 84% Arab (Christian and Muslim) and 2% Jewish. Flash forward to 2006 and of Israel’s 7 million people, 77% were Jews, but only 18.5% were Arabs. I don’t think these numbers are perfect, but you get the picture.

Clearly, Netanyahu and the Israeli state as reflected in the numbers, like Hamas, does not respect the other side’s right to exist.