Neo-Nazi Gang Raises Questions About Jewish Nationalism.

It seems that Israel’s policy of granting citizenship to anyone who can prove Jewish ancestry sometimes backfires. The BBC recently reported the arrest of a gang of Israeli Neo-Nazis who—among other violent acts of hatred—attacked homosexuals, foreigners, and religious Jews. Many of the attacks were videotaped. The investigation started a year ago after ”a synagogue in Petah Tikva, a city east of Tel Aviv, was desecrated with graffiti of Nazi swastikas and the name of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.”

The gang members—whose ages ranged from 16 to 21—are all naturalized citizens who immigrated from the former Soviet Union and now live in Petah Tikva. Although Israel’s Law of Return gives anyone with one Jewish grandparent the right to Israeli citizenship and residency, authorities are claiming that the gang members are only distantly associated with Judaism.

This case proves the flaw inherent in creating a nationality based on religion and ethnicity. In the early days—before the twisted, genocidal fantasies of Europe’s anti-Semites became a reality—Zionism’s most vocal opponents were Jews in Western Europe who argued that they were French or German first. After the Holocaust, attitudes were understandably changed. For the most part, the European survivors of the Holocaust became unified through the collective experience—direct or proximate—of Nazi atrocities. But for many Jews in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, Jewishness is only a peripheral part of their overall identity. Thanks to the Red Army’s destruction of the German wehrmacht, Jews within the USSR were spared the most brutal and genocidal aspects of German occupation (not that Stalin didn’t do his part to make up for this, but that’s a blog posting for another day). After Soyuz fell apart, many Russians rediscovered their Jewish heritage and used it to get out of Russia; being Jewish enabled millions of Russians to immigrate to the United States and Israel. Not a moment too soon, either, as today’s Russia boasts some of the world’s most committed and aggressive racists and anti-Semites. The downside is that, thanks to Communism’s anti-religiousity, many Russian “Jews” grew up without a real Jewish experience and thus lack a strong sense of Jewish identity. Even worse, some, like the members of the Petah Tikva gang, actually feel animosity and antipathy towards their fellows who more strongly identify as Jewish. But because politics and ideology often trump morality, this possibility wasn’t daunting enough to Zionists like Ariel Sharon—who are always on the lookout for more Jews to populate the land and “help Israel in its conflict with Arabs”—to keep from trying to persuade Russian Jews to migrate to Israel.

After decades of subjugating the indigenous Palestinian population, it seems Israel may be facing a new threat, one of its own making. As an “external” threat, Palestinian violence has generally served to unify the Jewish nation and garner support for the Israeli state. However, the influx of immigrants from Russia and elsewhere in the former USSR—who often do not strongly identify as Jewish—may pose a far graver threat to Israeli society by challenging the very concept of a Jewish nation and undermining the Jewish nature of the state.

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Can You Spell “Uptight?”

Rotraut Susanne Berner—author of several children’s books that have sold well in both her native Germany and internationally—was thrilled to get a letter from a US publishing house expressing interest in translating and publishing her books in this country.

Then there was a minor glitch. First, the publisher asked that all smokers be excised from the drawings in Berner’s books. I guess we wouldn’t want our children to see images of adults smoking.

But there was another, larger issue. One scene in the book, set in an art gallery, depicts a nude painting with bare breasts. But that’s not all. There’s also a statue of an anatomically correct naked man atop a pedestal. Well, anatomically correct is a bit of an exaggeration. The cartoon statue stands about seven millimeters tall and you wouldn’t be able to see his bits even if you used the Hubbel Telescope.

But this was all too much for the publisher, Boyds Mills Press. They asked Ms. Berner to remove the offending painting and statue from the scene. She refused, offering a compromise instead: She agreed to have black censorship bars placed over the offensive cartoon breasts and the nude statue’s microscopic member. The author said that, while she would consider letting her drawings be censored, she believed her readers had a right to know that they were looking at censored drawings. The publishing house rejected the compromise.

So the author turned down their offer.

Good for her for not buying into the hyper-uptight, anti-sex, puritanical madness that is so much the vogue in the US today. In one of my first posts, I talked about how the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) routinely rates films with sexual content more severely (R and NC-17) than films with graphic violence. At the end of the day, the average American child will see millions of violent images over the course of their lives but our society will take care to protect them from images of nudity. And millions of American women who watch Desperate Housewives or read Cosmo will be exposed to artificial and unnatural standards of beauty that will undermine their self-esteem, distort their image of their own bodies, and lead to unhealthy eating and dieting habits and a host of other consequences of negative body image.

So why make such a big deal about cartoon nudes in a children’s book? Why is the American public so opposed to anything remotely deemed sexual (not that these cartoon nudes are particularly sexual). I’m sure part of the answer lies in Christianity’s anti-sex posture, which deems sinful and dirty anything having to do with “the flesh.” I personally think the whole discourse is idiotic. At the risk of exposing myself to accusations of insensitivity towards the visually impaired, I would like to ask, Who among us has never seen breasts? And, despite such medical advances as the Caesarian Section, I would venture to say that most of the human population still enters the world through a vagina. Why then treat the body as something dirty, an object of shame unfit for the eyes of children?

I don’t have children of my own but if I did, I’d rather they saw nude art than violence in movies or stick-thin women on TV and in magazines.

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Why does it cost so much to get an education in the U.S.?

Like my colleague whose op-ed was recently published in USAToday, I have student loan debts which, by the time I’m done paying them off, will total almost $40,000. Ouch! Like my colleague, I too received a letter from some student loan consolidation service urging me to act fast because Congress was about to enact some bill that would result in my student loan payments going up. My eyes glazed over as I automatically leaned over and dropped the letter into my recycling box.

I spent the next half-hour trying to shake off that feeling you get as you leave the auto mechanic’s after having had your car repaired. You know, that vague feeling of having been swindled?

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t care about getting a good rate on my student loan payments. What I hate is feeling like my postgraduate degree might not have been the wisest financial decision I’ve ever made. Why should I have to feel like a sucker just because I wanted to improve my life chances by advancing my education?

I also deeply resent the student loan industry for treating my education as just another commodity. I mean, it’s not like I just blew thousands of dollars on a new car or designer clothes, so why do I have to put up with these cheap sales tactics? “Act now to lock in all-time low rates!” “Student loan rates going up. Act now!”

But the problem does not lie solely with the student loan industry. We’re all guilty. As long as we insist on viewing higher education as a commodity, student–loan sharks will continue to treat me and other students as mere consumers, no different from homeowners, car owners, or Saturday shoppers.

So what does it mean that higher education is a commodity? Among other things, it means that costs will always be tied to “quality” so the better the school, the higher the tution. But does it have to be this way? When I was doing my Masters course—I went to the University of London because it was much cheaper than comparable U.S. schools—I met many European students who had studied at the region’s best schools without incurring tens of thousands of euros or pounds of debt.

Certainly, the U.S. is home to some of the best universities in the world but why do costs have to be as high as they are? Quality, right? Sure, but only partly. According to the University of Shanghai, which published the rankings of the world’s universities, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge are tied for first place. I’m not sure how these rankings were arrived at but I think we can all agree that Harvard and Cambridge are comparable universities in terms of reputation, academic rigor, and whatever other factors were taken into consideration.

But they are definitely not comparable when it comes to tutition costs. A year of tuition at Cambridge costs £3,070 ($6,143.79) while at Harvard, tuition runs at $31,456 (£15,712.23) annually, five times higher. Why does it cost more to study at some state universities in the U.S. than it does to study at the oldest university in the English-speaking world, which is also one of the best universities in the world?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that in the U.S., higher education—like health care—is treated as a commodity. In other words, people’s willingness to buy a higher education for themselves or their children determines the cost of tuition. As demand increases, so too will prices, in this case tuition costs. In France and Scotland, students protest against tuition increases. In the U.S., we just set up more education savings accounts or borrow more and more money for school.

Clearly, there is more than enough demand for a Harvard education but I’m sure most of it comes from those who are wealthy enough to afford it. The rest of us have to bury ourselves in mountains of student loan debt just so we too can hold advanced degrees.

I have to say, though, it sure beats the hell out of the alternatives available to really poor people.

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Gas guzzlers are only part of the problem.

Yesterday, I was stopped on the street by a Greenpeace canvaser who told me about her organization’s attempts to increase awareness of global climate change and get voters to put pressure on their congressional representatives to take the issue more seriously. But it’s going to be an uphill battle: The auto industry is already taking steps to pre-empt Congress. My biggest fear is not that automakers won’t make greener cars. Ultimately, I’m more worried that they won’t need to make greener cars because American consumers—once they are convinced that fuel efficiency will come at the expense of safety—will not want to buy them.

On the BBC World Service today, I heard an advertisement that is being run in the U.S. by big automakers who oppose higher fuel standards (I tried to find it online but couldn’t so I have to paraphrase). In the ad, a women is talking to her friend about the friend’s car. The friend answers something to the effect of, “I know it’s bigger than the average car but we just feel so much safer in it.” To which the first woman responds, “Well, you might want to hold on to it because this new law Congress is considering will mean Americans have to buy smaller and smaller cars.” Through these ads, automakers hope to convince  consumers that smaller cars might be more fuel efficient but they’re also less safe.

Obviously, automobile manufacturers are fighting against higher fuel efficiency requirements because it’ll mean higher car prices which will mean fewer cars sold. Since the auto manufacturers are not weaklings, they’re applying so much pressure that now Senators are openly discussing ”compromises” which might so water down the law that it’ll have no real effect on carbon dioxide emissions. But if consumers can be scared away from fuel efficient cars, automakers might be able to argue that there simply isn’t enough demand for green automobiles.

Now it’s an undeniable fact that carbon dioxide emissions are bad for our planet and everything that lives on it. Emissions have wrought havoc on our climate, leading to extremes of hot and cold all over the world (yes, I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I’m convinced!), and the melting of continental glaciers and polar icecaps. And there’s no doubt that increased carbon dioxide emissions are largely the result of human activity. Sure cow farts and other culprits are also blamed for global climate change but I’m going to include those under human activities (after all, who breeds and feeds cows). But, while we might not have the power to keep the Asians from cultivating rice in paddies or the Brazilians from burning down the Amazon (to grow soybeans and raise cattle for McDonalds, by the way!), we do have the power to pressure U.S. automakers to make greener cars that burn less fossil fuel (or no fossil fuel at all) and emit less (or no) carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, gas guzzlers are only the tip of  the proverbial iceberg, merely a symptom of a deeper disease. These mechanical behemoths are really a manifestation of our self-centered culture, what Michael Moore refers to in his new film Sicko as the “me culture.” In this “me culture,” the individual is king and the only issues of any importance are those that directly impact that individual. So automakers simply have to say, ”fuel-efficient cars will be BAD for YOU because they’ll be smaller and less safe” and Americans will continue to buy gas guzzlers.

Why?

Because our mentality is so warped, our sense of communitarianism so suppressed, that we cannot think beyond ourselves and our immediate family. In the event of an accident, the person driving the hummer might get off lightly but what about the people in the other car? This kind of thinking convinces me that progress on the environmental front will be tough. If people don’t care that their gas guzzler can wreak disproportionate damage on a smaller car and its occupants, how can they be expected to care about the effects of climate change on the other side of the planet?

The new ads appeal precisely to this kind of self-centered thinking. The auto industry no longer bothers to argue that global warming is a hippie, tree-hugger conspiracy or that cow farts contribute more to the greenhouse effect than cars. Instead, they’ve resorted to manipulating people’s fears. Automakers tell us that in order to make cars more fuel efficient, they’ll have to make them smaller. And smaller means less safe. Simple. And so, consumers’ fear of dying in a car accident helps automakers sell inefficient cars under the guise of safety, while the planet gets hotter and hotter.

But in one sense, the automakers are right about smaller being less safe. Advances in technology and transporation have already made our planet smaller. But climate change will also make the world increasingly unstable as more and more people are displaced by drought and famine and the first water wars predicted by the Pentagon start to erupt. Darfur is only a preview of what will happen when competition for basic resources becomes violent. Eventually, everyone—especially those of us fortunate enough to live in developed countries—will have to deal with the real consequences of climate change.

When that times comes, gas guzzlers will not keep us safe.

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What’s in a name?

There’s an Austrian village with a very interesting name, to English speakers at least. Tourists pose to have their photos taken next to the sign bearing the name of the village, and the authorities have to replace the sign several times a year because it gets stolen that often.

I wonder if “Washington” means something interesting in German.

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More Sierra Leonean shame. Well, not quite . . .

So . . . I just found out that Sierra Leone is a major conduit for drugs destined for Europe. Who’d have thought? Apparently, Venezuelan authorities seized 2.5 tons of cocaine as it was being loaded unto a private aircraft bound for Sierra Leone!!! Wow!!!

My initial impulse was to once again feel ashamed of my countrymen for letting Sierra Leone become a portal for drug smugglers. In addition to all the other bad stuff Sierra Leone has become known for, I thought, it’ll now be known as a smugglers’ paradise. But the more I thought about this, the less ashamed I felt.

You see, I’m curious about how the drugs were going to get from Sierra Leone to Europe. After all, when I was in Sierra Leone last September, I got the impression that it’s incredibly difficult for Sierra Leoneans to get visas to enter any European country. Hell, I live in the U.S. and I get a hard time from the European consulates every time I travel to Europe! When I was in Sierra Leone, I saw first hand how hard it is for Sierra Leonenas to travel abroad. On my recent trip, I noticed that the majority of people on the flight to Freetown were Sierra Leoneans going home for holidays, funerals, weddings, etc. However, on the flight back to London, the majority of passengers were White!

So my question is, who exactly was going to transport all that blow to Europe. If Sierra Leoneans can’t even get visas to leave their country, I seriously doubt they’re the ones who are bringing drugs into Europe. I mean, most Africans have a hard enough time smuggling themselves into Europe, let alone illicit drugs.

If you were going to enlist people to smuggle massive amounts of illicit drugs into Europe, you’d be stupid to ask Sierra Leoneans to do it. They’d never even get a visa. It would be a much better idea to have European “tourists” do it. After all, they have an easier time getting out of Sierra Leone than Sierra Leoneans themselves.

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