I've been laboring on the symbolism of the Jacob/Esau story that was given to me by my relative as it relates to Ferguson and the Black experience. I had a difficult time with it and I was not comfortable with my analysis. It bothered me. I think the meaning of the story is much easier to understand than I thought at first. I glossed over the Reform rabbi interpretation of Jacob/Esau which may be the most important and salient point.
I should have focused on the birthright itself. Why should Jacob be the only one to get the birthright? Esau says or cries to his father "But father isn't there enough room for more than one birthright?" That is the theme on which I should have concentrated. I should have illuminated the fact that we all are deserving of the birthright and that it is not reserved for just one. We are all the chosen ones. Does there have to be one group on top and one on the bottom for all time? As my relative says "Life is not or should not be a zero/sum game."
In John 14:2 even Jesus is said to have instructed "In my Father's house are many mansions."
I did, though, relate it to the inclusiveness and the promise of America but, as MLK said, the bad promissory note to the Black man was returned "marked insufficient funds." The Black man historically has always been the one left out of the American Dream.
My interpretation had more to do with the method of acquiring the promise rather than the promise of the birthright itself. Ferguson makes us refocus our efforts to be inclusive of everyone.
The moral of the Esau story, therefore, as the reform rabbis see it, is that the birthright should be for all people, for all time and not reserved for just one. I agree!
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Can a Costly Campaign to Eradicate Polio From Nigeria Possibly Succeed?
An unidentified health official administers a polio vaccine to a child in Kawo Kano, Nigeria. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
When Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889, the black canals and
soot-filled air made him wonder if he hadn’t wandered into hell on
earth. The crowded slums reminded him of Calcutta; the anarchists and
religious fanatics, mobsters and businessman, shouting and spitting
everywhere, struck him as so many savages.
A few years after Kipling made these scathing reflections, he
nevertheless exhorted Americans to assume “the white man’s burden” in a
famous poem of that name, and join the imperial mission to civilize the
non-Western world. It’s not known whether 28-year-old lawyer Paul Harris
was inspired by the poem, but shortly after it appeared, he set out to
civilize the people of Chicago.
Harris came from Vermont, where people helped each other out in a jam
and friendship and business went hand in hand. He desperately wanted to
introduce some small-town civility into the brutal world he encountered
in Chicago. So in 1902, Harris founded the first of what would become a
global network of Rotary clubs that have been providing fellowship and
respite from the harsher side of modern capitalism to millions of
business people and professionals ever since. They donated land for
community gardens, sent shoes to European refugees and operated a Fresh
Air camp for crippled children.
Then, in the 1980s, Rotary set out on its most ambitious
philanthropic mission of all: eradicating polio from the face of the
earth. During the 1960s and 1970s, the World Health Organization had led
a campaign that permanently stamped out smallpox. Like smallpox, polio
is preventable with a cheap vaccine, and the disease had been all but
unknown in rich countries since the 1960s. That it still crippled
thousands of children each year in the developing world seemed to
Rotarians a terrible injustice.
They started with a fundraiser that attracted cataracts of donations
from ordinary people; at its height, $1 million a day was pouring in
from raffles, wine-tastings, golf-tournaments, chicken-plucking contests
and other, mainly neighborly, activities. Most of the money went to the
WHO and UNICEF, which set out to immunize every child in every country
where the virus was still spreading. In India, where polio crippled or
killed thousands of people each year, two million volunteers, including
350,000 Rotarians, set up immunization booths in marketplaces and went
door to door in slums and villages, some accessible only by camel or
elephant. By 2002, the number of polio cases worldwide had fallen from
350,000 to less than a thousand, all confined to just seven countries.
Some 5 million people had been spared paralysis or death.
A thousand cases of any disease may not seem like a big problem, but
Rotary was aiming to eradicate polio; otherwise, the disease, which
spreads through contaminated food and water, could quickly bounce back.
But the last 1,000 cases of polio have turned out to be much more
stubborn than the hundreds of thousands that came before, and it’s
certainly costing more money to get rid of them. The polio eradication
campaign spent slightly more than $2 billion between 1988 and 2002; then
Microsoft billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates joined the fight, and
today, his foundation, along with the American and British governments
and other donors, are pouring roughly $1 billion a year into it.
The last cases are concentrated in countries like Afghanistan,
Nigeria and Pakistan, all beset with violent conflicts. Polio cases in
these countries have declined steeply as a result of the campaign and
program officials are cautiously optimistic that they’ll meet the goal
of global eradication by 2018. But even if they do, questions will
likely linger about the wisdom of their approach. As I was to discover
in Nigeria, the polio campaign has exacerbated political tensions,
endangered the lives of health workers and contributed to the perceived
neglect of other public health issues. There are signs that the Gates
Foundation and its allies appreciate these concerns, and are now working
to address other diseases such as malaria and measles. But in the
future, public health experts should reflect on whether fighting one
disease at a time is always a good idea. Diseases like polio are not
rogue criminals to be tracked down and killed at all costs; they are
rooted in the same injustices that cause conflict in the first place.
In Nigeria, the trouble started in 2003, in the ancient slave trading
city of Zaria. The polio vaccine used in the campaigns is a liquid
administered by mouth from pre-packaged plastic dropper vials. Shortly
after the United States invaded Afghanistan
and then Iraq, Nigeria’s Supreme Council of Sharia announced that
scientists at Zaria’s Ahmadu Bello University had tested the liquid and
found that it contained contraceptives; the polio campaign was part of a
secret plan to reduce Muslim populations so that the infidel West could
take over the world, they said, and ordered parents to refuse to allow
their children to be vaccinated.
The polio campaign was then uncontroversial in other Muslim countries
and so the World Health Organization called on the Arab League, the
Organization of Islamic Countries and the African Union to persuade the
Nigerian clerics that the vaccine was safe. The campaign resumed a year
later, but by then Nigerian polio strains had spread to twenty countries
around the world, as far away as Indonesia.
Today, the campaign is running, but it’s not for the fainthearted.
When I visited northern Nigeria earlier this year, polio vaccinators,
most of them women who visit hundreds of households each month, told me
they have been stoned, cursed, doused with hot oil and had guns pulled
on them. In some areas, they hide their UNICEF thermos bags under their
hijabs. In early 2013, assassins shot dead nine vaccinators in the city
of Kano. The western aid workers who manage the project from Atlanta,
Seattle and Abuja, the faraway Nigerian capital, dart into these areas
for a day or two at a time in bullet-proof vehicles driven by guards
armed with Uzis.
Everyone, from the campaign managers to the vaccinators, risks his or
her life daily, and their heroism is astonishing. I interviewed one
young man who had previously worked on polio eradication in Pakistan,
where dozens of polio workers have been killed by Taliban fighters
angered about drone strikes and the CIA’s use of a door-to-door
vaccinator to help track down Osama bin Laden. One morning, as he was
walking on the street in Karachi, a boy of about 12 approached him and
asked if he was American. “No,” said the polio worker, who asked that
his name not be printed. “I’m African,” and he pointed to his T-shirt,
which had a map of Africa on it. Later that day, gunmen on motorcycles
opened fire on his vehicle and a bullet flew through the side door and
lodged in his hip. After months of rehabilitation, he can walk again and
is now working to eradicate polio in Nigeria. “I am so committed to
polio eradication,” he told me when I asked him why he took such risks.
“I want to see the last case in the world. Nothing will stop me.”
Why are so many Nigerians hostile to the polio campaign? Just as in
Pakistan, the campaign in Nigeria has become a symbolic front in a
battle between the nation’s leaders, widely seen as corrupted by the
West and failing their own people, and the radical extremist reaction
against those leaders. Ordinary Nigerians told me that what angered them
most about the polio campaign was that the government wasn’t doing
anything else for them. Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa, and
yet its people are among the poorest in the world. Although roughly $52
billion from oil sales is earmarked annually for poverty reduction, more
than 70 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day.
Meanwhile, elite politically connected Nigerians rake in millions in a
parallel universe of shell companies, bribery, ghost pension schemes,
fake subsidies and other charades.
The poverty alleviation money is supposed to go to Nigeria’s state
governors and local government councilors, who are like mayors. They are
supposed to use it to run basic services such as schools and medical
clinics and maintain supplies of electricity and clean water. And yet
half of the children in Northern Nigeria are malnourished; fewer than 25
percent have received all their vaccinations for diseases such as
measles and tetanus; and fewer than 15 percent of adults in some states
can read. A health clinic I visited one day was doubling as a dress
shop. When I asked the nurses about various medicines, half were out of
stock, and the nurse in charge was on her way to a pharmacy because she
thought she had malaria.
Because of the intricate and dangerous nature of Nigerian corruption,
trying to find the missing money is a fool’s errand. In 2011, British
development officials reported that the majority of clinics in one state
kept no budgetary records at all, and most of those that did spent far
less than state officials claimed they were.
Meanwhile, polio has been getting all the attention. Ten times each
year, polio vaccinators visit millions of households in northern Nigeria
offering polio drops to everyone under 5 years of age. The cost of this
program, almost entirely paid for by Western donors like the World
Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the American and British
governments, is equivalent to roughly one-sixth of Nigeria’s entire
(official) health budget.
While trying to figure out why so many people are angry about the
polio campaign, I came across the writings of Murray Last, a brilliant
anthropologist who has been studying northern Nigeria for over fifty
years. He explains how the disproportionate emphasis on polio has fed
into suspicions about Western medicine traceable to precolonial times.
In the nineteenth century, northern Nigeria was under the control of a
small number of vast caliphates headed by powerful sultans. Life was
organized locally by the sultans’ emirs, who lived in big houses, had
elaborate spy networks and knew what everyone was doing. If there was a
dispute, the emir would arbitrate; if people were hungry, the emir would
put food out for them. There were no public entities in this feudal
world: no courts, no police, no hospitals, not even public water
fountains. After the British took over in 1903, they tried to set up
bureaucracies to carry out sanitary inspections, adjudicate disputes and
collect taxes, but these came to be seen, according to Last, as
“synonymous with extortion.”
Modern medicine was seen as part of this conspiracy to undermine the
caliphates. During sleeping sickness epidemics in the 1950s, health
inspectors rounded up people with swollen glands and took them away for
compulsory treatment. When beautiful girls were caught in the dragnet of
this highly coercive program, many locals saw it as a form of
kidnapping, and bribed the inspectors to go away.
The few hospitals were run by evangelical Christians. The colonial
administration, worried about antagonizing the emirs and imams, tried to
discourage them from building their hospitals in the heavily Muslim
north, but medical care was desperately needed and the evangelicals
defied the authorities and set up hospitals anyway. As expected, the
hospitals came to be seen locally as part of a wider conspiracy to
undermine the caliphates. Preachers read Bible verses to people waiting
to see the white doctors who were rumored to steal body parts for
witchcraft, cast spells with their X-rays and suck blood with
stethoscopes. Some people, Last says, suspected whites might not be
entirely human: they were always washing; the dye on their clothes
didn’t run; you never saw their feet, which were always hidden in shoes;
they didn’t like walking; they built big lakes and dams and sometimes
dove under the water. People whispered about what they were doing under
there. Perhaps they were some kind of fish.
It didn’t help that the British arrival in the early twentieth
century coincided with famine and epidemics of meningitis and Spanish
Flu. People believed whites were yet another scourge sent by Allah to
punish blacks for being insufficiently devout. As a result, Last writes,
there were a series of Muslim revivals around this time, as people
sought spiritual protection from the terrifying power of these besieging
outsiders.
Suspicion about what whites are up to remains prevalent, even now,
along with a craving for order through intensive religious purification.
Since the 1970s, and especially since the end of military rule in 1999,
numerous charismatic Islamist movements have emerged to try to cleanse
Nigeria of what many northerners see as the corrupt, unruly ways of the
more Westernized tribes of the south, who now dominate the nation’s
politics. Some of these movements have called for Sharia law; others
want Nigeria to become an Islamic state like Saudi Arabia; and others,
like Boko Haram, seek to revive the ancient caliphates that colonialism
broke apart and replaced with what they see as a corrupt system overseen
by Western-backed figureheads. What all these groups share is a
yearning for bygone order and a suspicion of Wwestern-style modernity.
Over the years, one group or another has declared that not only polio
vaccines but also watches, radios, books other than the Koran, cars and
even dried bouillon cubes are haram—forbidden.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and megaphilanthropist, waded into
this maelstrom in 2009. By then, he’d already spent $657 million on
polio eradication, but he’d never visited the operation in Nigeria
before. According to a 2013 Rolling Stone article by journalist
Jeff Goodell, Gates cares more about polio eradication than anything
else because it provides a crucial test of his philosophy of
philanthropy as problem solving. For Gates, writes Goodell, “The world
is a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged”; he thinks
there’s an app for everything, from ending global poverty, to improving
education, to fighting disease and climate change. He has no patience with anyone who says any problem is too complicated.
Gates brought technical rigor to Rotary’s polio campaign, with new
vaccines, disease modeling programs, satellite maps and GPS tracking
methods to find unvaccinated children. But after the Nigerian clerics
revolted against the campaign in 2003, he came to understand that the
problems weren’t just technical; they were also political. So, in 2009,
he visited Nigeria and met with Predident Yar’Adua and the governors of
all of Nigeria’s thirty-six states. Eventually, they unveiled a new plan
to encourage clerics and other celebrities to say positive things about
polio vaccination in their sermons and on the radio and to sponsor
public events to promote polio. Some were paid to do
this. In 2011, Gates launched a competition: state governors who best
performed a set of promotional polio campaign activities would be
awarded $500,000, which they could use to support other healthcare
projects.
But the program was no match for Nigeria’s legendary corruption. When
I was there, I heard a new story every day: shortly before I arrived,
some of the vaccinators were caught throwing out their vaccines, and
then reporting preposterously high success rates to their bosses; then
local government officials were caught reselling toys and biscuits
intended as gifts for vaccinated children; then I heard that officials
from one of the international agencies were going around with sacks of
cash, for who knows what purpose. Finally, just as I was leaving, a
group of young men took over a clinic where polio vaccines were being
stored and refused to release them. They said they were angry that a
local politician who promised electricity for their neighborhood still
hadn’t delivered three years later. When the police turned up, hundreds
of women and children formed a barricade, chanting, “If you want the
vaccine, you’ll have to kill us first!”
To date no one has been able to identify who killed the nine polio
workers in Kano in 2013. Boko Haram, which usually celebrates its
atrocities, didn’t lay claim to this one. The shootings occurred at two
separate clinics, at around the same time. Security guards had been
hired to protect the vaccinators but, according to local sources, both
groups of guards left to get a drink at the same time, just before the
killers arrived. There are speculations that some people want to
sabotage the program so that the epidemic, and the millions of dollars
it brings in, will continue.
That might sound far-fetched, but rumors of sabotage for financial or
political gain aren’t unheard of in Nigeria. This past summer, analysts
began asking why Boko Haram assailants so often turn up in Nigerian
military uniforms, carry weapons stolen from Nigerian military armories
and frequently attack military installations where the gates have been
mysteriously left open. It’s known that soldiers are furious about army
corruption and low pay, and some may be hoping that by making the north
of the country ungovernable, they can undermine the prospects of
President Goodluck Jonathan—a southerner—in the 2015 elections. It’s
conceivable that some may be thinking along similar lines about the
polio campaign.
Each four-day polio vaccination campaign begins with a “flag-off”
ceremony at which the governor or some other dignitary immunizes the
first child and gives her a toy. At a flag-off I attended, thousands of
people gathered in a giant field, and some even climbed trees to watch.
Then the governor and his entourage arrived. A group of musicians
launched into a song, the words of which, I was told were, “May the
governor rule for another year and another year and another year!”
Dancers dressed in costumes printed with pictures of the governor did
handsprings all around them, while party officials showered them with
Nigerian banknotes. Then an official promised that the ruling party
would bring roads and primary schools and water to the people, if
re-elected in 2015. A small group of protestors who managed to get near
the podium began shouting, “We’ll do better than them!” They were
quickly silenced by security men. There was almost no mention of polio
at all.
The highlight of my trip was going around with the “mop up” team when
local leaders and health officials demonstrate their commitment to
fighting polio by revisiting the houses of vaccine refusers. If parents
still refuse, their house is surrounded by dozens of crippled polio
survivors in bright yellow Rotary vests, who may remain there for hours,
until the parents give in. “Look what happened to us!” they say. “Do
you want this to happen to your children?”
Polio is a terrible disease, but the answer to this question isn’t
quite as simple as you’d think. I interviewed some of the polio victims
expecting sad tales of abandonment and discrimination. Instead, I found a
group of Nigerians with remarkable integrity, managerial competence and
a charismatic leader named Abdul whom they call their king. Abdul
contracted polio as a baby and walks on all fours with flip-flops on his
hands, but still manages to support three wives and seventeen children,
all of whom (except the toddlers) are enrolled in school, unlike most
of northern Nigeria’s children.
Islam doesn’t stigmatize disabled people or begging, which is how
many polio survivors earn their living. Abdul’s friend Hamid, also
severely crippled by polio as a baby, recently ran for mayor. He didn’t
win, but after the election, he led a demonstration of blind, crippled
and other “peculiar people”—as he calls them—against a corrupt local
official and got her fired.
Polio cases are falling steeply in Nigeria, though the disease’s
course is hard to predict. In 2010, the year after Gates’s first visit
to the country, polio cases fell by 95 percent, to twenty-one cases. But
they rose again in 2011 by nearly 200 percent, to sixty-two cases. This
year, there have been only six cases so far, although officials are
worried that the virus could bounce back in areas made all but
inaccessible to vaccinators by the Boko Haram insurgency. In May, the
World Health Organization declared polio a worldwide emergency because
the virus had spread from Nigeria to Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and
Somalia, and from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and Syria to Iraq. Case
numbers are still very low, but the news is worrying.
Some public health experts, including Donald Henderson who led the
World Health Organization’s successful smallpox campaign in the 1970s,
wonder whether it’s time for the polio campaign to switch course.
Perhaps Nigeria should fight polio the way most countries do: by
strengthening local health services so that all children receive not
only polio vaccines but also vaccines for measles and other diseases and
treatment when they become ill. One such program, known as the
PRRINN-MNCH (Partnership for Reviving Routine Immunization in Northern
Nigeria; Maternal Newborn and Child Health Initiative), was launched in
2006 with help from Columbia University scientists and achieved
considerable success in some northern states. But earlier this year the
British government redirected its grant to a less comprehensive program
more narrowly aimed at immunization.
Somehow, the Nigerians may have to figure things out on their own,
just as the people of Chicago were forced to do in the decades after
Kipling and Rotary founder Paul Harris witnessed anarchists and
religious zealots—the Boko Harams of the day—battling political
graft-masters on the streets of their city. If the west is to be
involved, we need to find a better way, because even if the polio
campaign succeeds, many serious problems—health-related and
otherwise—will remain. Nigeria is filled with savvy, honest and
hardworking people who understand the needs and concerns of their
communities, but the architects of the polio campaign—for all their
billions and technical know-how—seldom encounter them, because few are
in positions of power. A more promising approach would be to seek out
those people and listen to what they have to say.
The Wall of Justice
A friend challenged me to compare Biblical story of Jacob and Esau with the tragic violent events of Ferguson, MO.
I think what the Jacob/Esau story told us was that Esau compromised with Jacob and was satisfied with the remunerations Jacob gave him which allowed Jacob to keep his birthright when, in fact, the birthright was not rightfully Jacob's to keep. Esau compromised and settled for the things he received even though he was much aggrieved against.
Should the black man be considered as Esau, much aggrieved, angered at those who have perpetrated a great injustice toward his people? If they give him what he wants should he simply forgive them? The black man in this nation was promised many things but the white man did not deliver on them. What does one do when one party is still stealing from you? Does one simply sit back and accept one's plight?
The emergence of the KKK, White Citizen’s Councils and other racist groups institutionalized racism through vicious Jim Crow laws mandating segregation, instituting poll taxes, and literacy tests to permanently cement the second class status of the black man into the southern landscape. It not only took root then but continues nationwide to this day.
The black man has been kidnapped, beaten, lynched, had property confiscated and innocents killed by white vigilantes and white police. The electorate does not think about that nor the de jure suppression of the black vote, the black man's only recourse for justice. Instead districts are gerrymandered in favor of whites and they get difficult and costly-to-obtain voter ID requirements. The excuse white institutionalized power gives is the protection of the vote when blacks and other progressives know it is protection AGAINST the black vote since there is little voter fraud and the white reason for the ID law is a sham. When one is poor it is not so easy to have the mobility to adhere to the "law" to obtain an ID nor afford the cost of one.
Jim Crow has reared its ugly head yet again and the black man is angry -- no furious. I cannot blame him for that. Prejudice of white against black in this nation runs deep and its amelioration slow. The Grand Jury of Ferguson comes back freeing the white aggressive police officer shooting an unarmed man as did the jury come back to free George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvone Martin and the truly innocent man selling cigarettes outside a store was choked to death by the police for a ridiculously minor offense. Multiply those incidents a thousand times.
Yes, Michael Brown had flaws. Were they deserving of death? I believe Michael Brown did not need to die and that what happened to him happens over and over and over again across the nation so much so that it becomes part of the black man's DNA to fear. This must change.
There are things so consequential that one must say "no more" for those who have felt the jackboot of white tyranny on their neck. The black man hangs from the Poplar Tree again and again and again. When does it stop and is passive resistance effective? I do not know. Michael Brown is NOT Esau but is the representative of hundreds of years of cruelty and injustice against a people where the wall of justice said to have been under construction has, in truth, yet to be built.
Racism is the albatross around our nation’s neck; it is the conundrum of a nation that is supposed to stand for justice for all but in reality stands for justice for the few. Esau, I suspect, would not compromise with that!
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Malcolm X as it applies to the Ferguson violence
The
Ferguson violence brings to my mind the quote of another era from a
civil rights icon of the black community, Malcolm X. I loved what he
said on non violence the
most in the era in which he said it.
He gave a speech on non-violence and the struggles then of the African American community. He said blacks were non violent BUT they were NOT nonviolent with people who were violent to them. What he said carried the strength as only Malcolm could utter the words then. The Ferguson mainly white police should replay what he said on YouTube and think on it. I post what he said below.
I got it then and I get it now. Understood, that is the essence of the Ferguson violent protest issue and the essence of the black anger behind it!
The Democratic Party is the ONLY Party of diversity. We must use now what we have and next time REGISTER TO VOTE and then DO SO.
Here and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXo0lgcOHhg
He gave a speech on non-violence and the struggles then of the African American community. He said blacks were non violent BUT they were NOT nonviolent with people who were violent to them. What he said carried the strength as only Malcolm could utter the words then. The Ferguson mainly white police should replay what he said on YouTube and think on it. I post what he said below.
I got it then and I get it now. Understood, that is the essence of the Ferguson violent protest issue and the essence of the black anger behind it!
The Democratic Party is the ONLY Party of diversity. We must use now what we have and next time REGISTER TO VOTE and then DO SO.
Here and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXo0lgcOHhg
Friday, November 21, 2014
What Democrats need--Read and heed if you care about your country
I have written
HUNDREDS of posts before the election. I left no stone unturned and
even got a list of Hispanic organizations urging them -- NO pleading with
them and others -- to get out to gd vote. We will keep getting these RepubliCONS
until the cows come home. They have the money and control it all including the media. They have a lot of
the courts (not all) and they won't confirm any of the president's court
picks. 2014 is 2010 on steroids! Those RepubliCON beasts sue the president at every turn.
How can anyone live with themselves and try to take HEALTHCARE,
healthcare of all things away from those who cannot afford what those
swine have themselves I will never know?
There are no words that can convey the detest I have for the Republicrat Party and if I could waive a magic wand I would get Democrats and Independent leaning Democrats OUT TO VOTE...that's the secret. They must register to vote and do so. By 2016 when Obama is not running will they remember what he has done for them now? I don't know. They better. It is up to leadership and the grass roots to get out this Democratic vote. Until Citizen's United can be repealed I am not really sure if anything will work and for that we need a Democratic president to nominate for the high court and a Democratic Senate to confirm. I am staying away from listening to any Republicon so I mute all the Republcon accusations against the president they make and any news about the rancid lawsuits they file.
This immigration action he did BETTER work for 2016. With a Republican president, House and Senate then George Carlin's "American Dream" segment on YouTube will be absolutely true. I post it below. George Carlin called it and got it right! I post it again and yes, it has profanity because what Republicans are doing IS profane. You can take it because it tells the truth. Start now and sign up ALL Hispanics, persons of color, all minorities, women, the disabled, the elderly etc. to vote. The Democratic tent is big and there should be NO reason to cede our nation to racists, wingnut extremists and their madness. The Republicon Party is now comfortably home for neo Nazis and Eugenics (white supremacists), Birchers and Ku Klux Klaners.
If you want a country that stands for something humane listen to George Carlin and KNOW he was right and then start now and DO something to make sure Republicons are crushed in 2016! Forward this to anyone you choose.
Here or below
http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/georgecarlin/youtube/carlin-american.htm
There are no words that can convey the detest I have for the Republicrat Party and if I could waive a magic wand I would get Democrats and Independent leaning Democrats OUT TO VOTE...that's the secret. They must register to vote and do so. By 2016 when Obama is not running will they remember what he has done for them now? I don't know. They better. It is up to leadership and the grass roots to get out this Democratic vote. Until Citizen's United can be repealed I am not really sure if anything will work and for that we need a Democratic president to nominate for the high court and a Democratic Senate to confirm. I am staying away from listening to any Republicon so I mute all the Republcon accusations against the president they make and any news about the rancid lawsuits they file.
This immigration action he did BETTER work for 2016. With a Republican president, House and Senate then George Carlin's "American Dream" segment on YouTube will be absolutely true. I post it below. George Carlin called it and got it right! I post it again and yes, it has profanity because what Republicans are doing IS profane. You can take it because it tells the truth. Start now and sign up ALL Hispanics, persons of color, all minorities, women, the disabled, the elderly etc. to vote. The Democratic tent is big and there should be NO reason to cede our nation to racists, wingnut extremists and their madness. The Republicon Party is now comfortably home for neo Nazis and Eugenics (white supremacists), Birchers and Ku Klux Klaners.
If you want a country that stands for something humane listen to George Carlin and KNOW he was right and then start now and DO something to make sure Republicons are crushed in 2016! Forward this to anyone you choose.
Here or below
http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/georgecarlin/youtube/carlin-american.htm
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Major Networks Not Airing Obama's Immigration Speech--Damnable!
It
is UTTERLY unacceptable, disrespectful and sickening that the major
networks are not covering the president's important speech on
immigration tonight.
I propose ALL those rotten channels (CBS, NBC, ABC) that do not cover the president I would like to start a boycott of them. Not only boycott those that insult our president kicking dirt in his face we need to boycott those sponsors that keep them in business. It is after all a business decision I presume. God forbid Americans KNOW anything important their government does instead of watching football. SHAME ON ALL OF THEM. Their programming STINKS anyway so its not hard at all for me to boycott them and their phony corporatist sponsors with them.
One wonders, too, if their decision carries some racism to boot. So get all your Hispanic, African American, and any other persons of color and whites who support a just cause you know to join the boycott. AND MOST ESPECIALLY GET REGISTERED AND VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!!! This white woman wants to give these major networks the gd BOOT. SHAME on all of them that refuse to carry this important speech of our president and we in turn will NOT tune them in!
Send this to anyone you choose.
I propose ALL those rotten channels (CBS, NBC, ABC) that do not cover the president I would like to start a boycott of them. Not only boycott those that insult our president kicking dirt in his face we need to boycott those sponsors that keep them in business. It is after all a business decision I presume. God forbid Americans KNOW anything important their government does instead of watching football. SHAME ON ALL OF THEM. Their programming STINKS anyway so its not hard at all for me to boycott them and their phony corporatist sponsors with them.
One wonders, too, if their decision carries some racism to boot. So get all your Hispanic, African American, and any other persons of color and whites who support a just cause you know to join the boycott. AND MOST ESPECIALLY GET REGISTERED AND VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!!! This white woman wants to give these major networks the gd BOOT. SHAME on all of them that refuse to carry this important speech of our president and we in turn will NOT tune them in!
Send this to anyone you choose.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
LOVE--Crossing the Divide
In view of the horrific world events I want to convey
my thoughts about a relationship that transcended the discord. It crossed the artificial divide we all too often
construct to keep human beings from sharing that part of our nature which
seems unique to us. It allows us to connect
to other living things on this planet and gives us the ability to love. We do not know for sure that we are the only
animal who loves but at least, on the surface, we seem to be the sole
evolutionary inheritor of the ability for higher thought and the attachments of love that it can bring.
When violent world events, especially those that centrifugally
revolve around religious belief and cultural differences, I think on a
relationship I knew between a Pakistani man, his family and an elderly Christian
woman who lived the love of her very strong Christian faith. She and I had ad infinitum discussions about faith as she tried, without much
success, to persuade me that this life is more than just our birth, all that
transpires in between and, finally, death.
She said, because she possessed such a strong faith instead of fearing
death, which was in sight for her as she approached 90 years of age, she
welcomed it because she knew her God would be there to welcome her into a place
of eternal peace. I envied her pacific
place.
This wonderful woman died yesterday and so I wanted to
write a tribute to her amazing life. She
was, in the purest sense, simply a good, kind and wonderful woman who never
married nor had children. She worried
about the loneliness of old age so she made her church and the love it preached
the center of her life. We would go on
walks at Christmas time when she shared with me the gift of her faith and the
love it encompassed and hoped I would see it too. Still, though, I remained steadfast in my agnosticism
and, in truth, I remain a skeptic who must wade through the travails of life
with no surety of anything more powerful beyond it.
There are times, though, I do think something more
powerful than we sends answers that are seemingly miraculous. I do not know this as truth but my friend's
circumstances gave me pause for thought.
She was forced to move in her 80’s to a less expensive section of town
where she found, as was her habit, someone, a young Pakistani Islamic man owner
of a convenience store nearby with whom she could exchange ideas especially
ones about the faiths they both possessed. They became close friends as each day she went
there for coffee and to talk. They
became so close she eventually bought a house with him. He moved his family to the US and she legally
adopted him. In the end he and his
family, too, were there for her helping her as a son would help his aging mother. She shared in the Middle Eastern food he
cooked and the holidays he kept. His
children thought of her as their grandmother, his wife as her mother-in-law and
they weep now for her loss.
He was a Pakistani Muslim man who prayed the required
five times a day. She shared in that
life as he shared in hers. It was the
most beautiful relationship and a love that, indeed, crossed the artificial
divide we create keeping those with whom we should have more in common to unite
us than we have differences that divide, keep us apart and kill. It does not
have to be this way and our friend proved that to me.
And so I say, rest in peace our beautiful friend and
if there is a God and a paradise, you are surely in His and its sacred
arms.
Monday, November 17, 2014
A Good Explanation--Over There
This opinion by editorialist Alex Kingsbury "Why the 2007 surge in Iraq Actually Failed" linked here and below in the Globe explains in detail why the original "surge" in Iraq failed and why it is doomed to failure now under this president.
It is an excellent editorial and presents me with details I would and could not have otherwise known. How can we the majority understand what really happened if the "news" does not relay it to us or if we get the truth only if we happen to fall upon a text or an article which does explain it. Few do go looking for it when the many need to. Only those who experienced it and who are not shackled by the fear of speaking about it can really tell us what happened.
This article presents more than most I have read why we should not re-enter the Iraq quagmire and why a re-immersion into the quicksand that is Iraq fighting ISIS probably will not work either. Every bestial action by ISIS provokes our population to acquiesce to more war and feeds into the ISIS desire to have us do that in perpetuity to waste our blood, resources and energy to continue a futile effort.
It is an excellent editorial and presents me with details I would and could not have otherwise known. How can we the majority understand what really happened if the "news" does not relay it to us or if we get the truth only if we happen to fall upon a text or an article which does explain it. Few do go looking for it when the many need to. Only those who experienced it and who are not shackled by the fear of speaking about it can really tell us what happened.
This article presents more than most I have read why we should not re-enter the Iraq quagmire and why a re-immersion into the quicksand that is Iraq fighting ISIS probably will not work either. Every bestial action by ISIS provokes our population to acquiesce to more war and feeds into the ISIS desire to have us do that in perpetuity to waste our blood, resources and energy to continue a futile effort.
What a simply horrendous condition in which Bush, et al placed us. With American memory short and its attention to the details of the few who fight this battle, the majority will go along with anything because it is not most of our necks on the line. Now every commander in chief will follow the yellow brick road the same as the president before him/her did. We will expend even more resources, blood of our soldiers and raid on our treasury so that the nation cannot spend for the necessary things we desperately need here because we have spent so much over there.
I simply do not know what the answer is now that we have broken all the china. We own it still but cannot fix it. I worry all is too late.
I simply do not know what the answer is now that we have broken all the china. We own it still but cannot fix it. I worry all is too late.
The
goalsof the Iraq surge were spelled out explicitly by the White House
in Jan. 2007: Stop the raging sectarian bloodletting and reconcile
Sunnis, Shiites, and...
bostonglobe.com
Saturday, November 15, 2014
The Great Divide
The link below is a wonderful interview by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now with whistle-blower Alayne Fleishman and the chronicler of the big bank frauds of the Great Recession, Matt Taibbi, who knows more
about the financial 2008 Great Recession debacle and crime emanating from it than anyone I have read.
Again, read it and weep better still get angry. KNOW those you elect ESPECIALLY Republicans but some Democrats too will NEVER EVER exact justice for YOU the taxpayer while the creators of the Great Recession CEO's of the big banks walk away with MILLIONS. It is an incredible interview!
Amy Goodman & Juan González interview Matt Taibbi and a bank Whistle blower on How JPMorgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy and Avoid Prosecution. See the interview here
Again, read it and weep better still get angry. KNOW those you elect ESPECIALLY Republicans but some Democrats too will NEVER EVER exact justice for YOU the taxpayer while the creators of the Great Recession CEO's of the big banks walk away with MILLIONS. It is an incredible interview!
Amy Goodman & Juan González interview Matt Taibbi and a bank Whistle blower on How JPMorgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy and Avoid Prosecution. See the interview here
"A year ago this month the U.S. Department of Justice announced
that the banking giant JPMorgan Chase would avoid criminal charges by
agreeing to pay $13 billion to settle claims that it had routinely
overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors. But how
did the bank avoid prosecution for committing fraud that helped cause
the 2008 financial crisis? Today we speak to JPMorgan Chase
whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann in her first televised interview
discussing how she witnessed "massive criminal securities fraud" in the
bank’s mortgage operations. She is profiled in Matt Taibbi’s new Rolling
Stone investigation, "The $9 Billion Witness: Meet the woman JPMorgan
Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from
talking."
Progressives
keep not voting like you did in 2014 and see how this nation saves its
1% richest and how the rest of us are relegated to hell.Friday, November 14, 2014
Richard Engel -- The War Against ISIS
I paste this incredible Richard Engel report below on the above referenced programming. The invasion of Iraq, historians will no doubt say, was the greatest blunder in US History. Go ahead, put another nationalist know nothing Republican, say a Jeb Bush, into office or put a whole Congress of Republican know nothings into high office and see what you get. You will get and probably now have eternal war; never ending, trillions of bucks war killing thousands more as far into the future as the eye can see capturing your children and even your children's children for a "mission UNACCOMPLISHED" Bush did not envision. As Engel says "No Iraq, No ISIS" it is as simple as that. He destabilized an entire region. The forces of slaughter that George W. Bush and his henchmen unleashed has engaged this nation in an eternal war we better win.
Richard Engel's reporting is UNBELIEVABLE about the war against ISIS which I have linked below. It is well worth your time not to stay ignorant of that which your country has done in your name. Weep, America, because you do not know enough to keep ignorant Cretans out of office. As Engel says "The US stayed in Iraq and it did no good; the US left Iraq and it did no good." Now as the president ups the forces again turning it into probably another ground war the US will be there in perpetuity way beyond Obama's term in office. The president really has no other choice.
If we stay out ISIS may surely establish their caliphate. They are strong and getting stronger drawing religious fanatical converts by the hundreds from even the west and making alliances with even Al Qaeda and other groups; establishing their own currency. It is truly amazing. Can they do it with the many disparate groups with whom they have often fought? Who knows? Do you want to risk turning the clock back to the 8th century to find out?
Watch this hour long program which I link here and below learn what your country has done to you!
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/richard-engel-special-isis-report-airs-friday-357802051985
Richard Engel's reporting is UNBELIEVABLE about the war against ISIS which I have linked below. It is well worth your time not to stay ignorant of that which your country has done in your name. Weep, America, because you do not know enough to keep ignorant Cretans out of office. As Engel says "The US stayed in Iraq and it did no good; the US left Iraq and it did no good." Now as the president ups the forces again turning it into probably another ground war the US will be there in perpetuity way beyond Obama's term in office. The president really has no other choice.
If we stay out ISIS may surely establish their caliphate. They are strong and getting stronger drawing religious fanatical converts by the hundreds from even the west and making alliances with even Al Qaeda and other groups; establishing their own currency. It is truly amazing. Can they do it with the many disparate groups with whom they have often fought? Who knows? Do you want to risk turning the clock back to the 8th century to find out?
Watch this hour long program which I link here and below learn what your country has done to you!
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/richard-engel-special-isis-report-airs-friday-357802051985
Matt Taibbi and Bank Whistleblower on How JPMorgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy, Avoid Prosecution
If
you want to know why it is important to get the gd vote out across the
nation. Scroll down. You get the government you deserve if you don't!
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/…/matt-taibbi-alayne-fleisch…
Matt Taibbi and Bank Whistleblower on How JPMorgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy, Avoid Prosecution
Topics
Guests
Alayne Fleischmann,
JPMorgan Chase whistleblower. She was a deal manager at the
bank, where she says she witnessed "massive criminal securities fraud"
in its mortgage operations during the period leading up to the financial
crisis.
Matt Taibbi,
award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. His latest article is headlined "The $9 Billion Witness." He is author of the book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
DONATE →
This is viewer supported news
A year ago this month the U.S. Department of Justice announced
that the banking giant JPMorgan Chase would avoid criminal charges by
agreeing to pay $13 billion to settle claims that it had routinely
overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors. But how
did the bank avoid prosecution for committing fraud that helped cause
the 2008 financial crisis? Today we speak to JPMorgan Chase
whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann in her first televised interview
discussing how she witnessed "massive criminal securities fraud" in the
bank’s mortgage operations. She is profiled in Matt Taibbi’s new Rolling
Stone investigation, "The $9 Billion Witness: Meet the woman JPMorgan
Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from
talking."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A
year ago this month, the Justice Department announced the banking giant
JPMorgan Chase would avoid criminal charges by agreeing to pay $13
billion to settle claims that it had routinely overstated the quality of
mortgages it was selling to investors. When the toxic mortgage
securities started turning bad, investors lost faith in the banking
system, and a housing crisis turned into the 2008 financial crisis that
led to millions of home foreclosures. New York Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman unveiled the settlement last November.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN: Not only will Chase have to pay the largest settlement ever levied against a financial institution, but it has admitted in our statement of facts that its own employees, employees of Bear Stearns and employees of Washington Mutual made material misrepresentations to the investing public about a large number of residential mortgage-backed securities that they issued prior to the crash in 2008. This settlement is a major victory in the fight to hold accountable those who were responsible for that crash.
AMY GOODMAN:
Soon after the JPMorgan Chase deal was reached, U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder discussed the bank’s misdeeds during an interview with NBC News’ Pete Williams.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: It packaged loans that it knew did not pass its own stated due diligence test. We have a whistleblower who indicated that she expressed concerns about what the strength of these mortgage-backed securities were, and they put them out there to the market and said that they were perfectly fine, when in fact they were not.
PETE WILLIAMS: So, to be clear, you’re saying that JPMorgan’s conduct here contributed to the housing collapse?
Show Full TranscriptATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: Not only the conduct of JPMorgan, it was the conduct of other banks doing similar kinds of things that led directly to the collapse of our economy in 2008 and in 2009.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/…/matt-taibbi-alayne-fleisch…
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
My Broken Heart
Republicons wining as much as they did in the 2014
midterms will make the president's life and those of us who support those
things for which the Democratic Party stands miserable. So what else is new? Republicons vow to block the president no
matter what he proposes. The epic
China/US treaty deal on climate change just forged by the president will be
blocked by these obstructionist mendacious nincompoops. Who could have
predicted that?
I feel now like I was hit by a truck. Ending the Obama presidency with a Congress worse
than any other obstructionist one since the Civil War is beyond my ability to comprehend
and therefore successfully write anything in exegesis of it. How does one explain the massive electoral
myocardial infarction that happened one week ago and make sense of it? How rational is it for a nation to usher into
office the same Party that obstructed the President at every turn insulting him, shut the
government down and refused to raise the debt ceiling? The refusal to raise the debt ceiling alone
would have sent this nation and the world into a gran mal economic seizure.
The difference between the 2008, 2012 elections when
the president was swept into office and the midterms of 2010 and 2014 when he was
not on the ballot is that persons of color including Hispanics and the
Democratic base sat the election out.
2/3rds who were registered to vote in 2014 did not do so. It was the lowest voter turnout in decades. Democrats win when voters vote. The majority of the electorate is on the side
of the 98% and not the side of the 1% millionaires and billionaires but if the
98% do not vote they are not counted.
Perhaps, they sat it out, too, because of unconstitutional
Republicon Jim Crow-like tricks requiring certain difficult-to-obtain and costly IDs needed
to vote or perhaps they sat it out because, clearly, we live in two different
Americas -- a racist half and the other half.
Moreover, Obama cannot be elected anymore. Or perhaps it was the fact that Democrats
like Alison Lundergan Grimes, who gave that chinless McConnell beast a bit of a
scare, thought it better to run away from the many successes of the president
and simply not answer the question posed to her: "Did you vote for
President Obama?" She SHOULD have
said a resounding YES and then screamed out the differences, the wide
differences, between a Democrat and a Republicon of this era. She should have stood tall and proud that she
is a Democrat instead of denying it and not answering the obvious.
After the president's rise to the presidency I thought
all that hard work, all the freedom rides, all the marches against segregation,
all the voter registration and Supreme Court decisions paid off and that all
the bombings of black churches, all the racist killings, all the segregation
and all of the strange fruit hanging from the Poplar Trees were made right. I thought the wrongs of a nation were addressed and in
the process made the arc of the universe, indeed, bend toward justice and not
away from it. I am not so sure anymore
that the arc of justice has not retreated and bent the other way. My heart is
broken and I weep. I hope someday in my
lifetime I will see a land that does not deliver "a bad check marked
insufficient funds" as MLK said it had.
Race has been the albatross around the necks of our national
historical experience from its beginning.
The president to me looks sad, he looks lonely and he waxes baffled by a
Republicon Party that should have been relegated to the ash bin of our history a
long time ago. But it has not been
relegated to the ash bin of our history.
In fact, the racist Republican Party of Harpies is stronger than at any
other post Civil War time in our history.
I used to love Malcolm X's response when he was asked
"Are you violent?" He said no,
he was not violent and that he was nonviolent BUT he was NOT nonviolent against people who were violent to him. I am not
advocating violence but I always could understand why Malcolm X said what he did.
US, China strike groundbreaking agreement
AP: Josh Leder-- A groundbreaking agreement struck by the United States and China is putting the world's two worst polluters on a faster track to curbing the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming. With the clock ticking on a worldwide climate treaty, the two countries are seeking to put their troubled history as environmental adversaries behind them in hopes that other nations will be spurred to take equally aggressive action.
The U.S., a chief proponent of the prospective treaty, is setting an
ambitious new goal to stop pumping as much carbon dioxide into the air.
China, whose appetite for cheap energy has grown along with its
burgeoning economy, agreed for the first time to a self-imposed deadline
for when its emissions will top out.
The dual announcements from President Barack Obama and Chinese
President Xi Jinping, unveiled Wednesday in Beijing, came as a shock to
environmentalists who had pined for such action but suspected China's
reluctance and Obama's weakened political standing might interfere. In
Washington, Republicans were equally taken aback, accusing Obama of
dumping an unrealistic obligation on the next president.
In fact, the deal had been hashed out behind the scenes for months. U.S. officials said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry floated the idea during a visit to China in February, and Obama followed up by writing Xi in the spring to suggest that the world's two largest economies join forces.
Obama pressed the issue again during a meeting with China's vice
premier on the sidelines of a U.N. climate summit in September, and the
two countries finally sealed the deal late Tuesday - just in time to
announce it in grand fashion at the Great Hall of the People as Obama's
trip to China was coning to an end.
"This is a major milestone in the U.S.-China relationship," Obama
said, with Xi at his side. "It shows what's possible when we work
together on an urgent global challenge."
Under the agreement, Obama set a goal to cut U.S. emissions between
26 and 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. Officials have
said the U.S. is already on track to meet Obama's earlier goal to lower
emissions 17 percent by 2020, and that the revised goal meant the U.S.
would be cutting pollution roughly twice as fast during a five-year
period starting in 2020.
China, whose emissions are growing as it builds new coal plants, set a
target for its emissions to peak by about 2030 - earlier if possible -
with the idea being that its emissions would then start falling.
Although that goal still allows China to keep pumping more carbon
dioxide for the next 16 years, it marked an unprecedented step for
Beijing, which has been reluctant to be boxed in on climate by the
global community.
"This is, in my view, the most important bilateral climate
announcement ever," said David Sandalow, a former top environmental
official at the White House and the Energy Department.
World leaders who have been pressing for a global climate treaty
heralded the deal, with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging all
other nations to follow Obama's and Xi's lead by announcing their own
emissions targets by early next year. Former Vice President Al Gore, a
prominent environmentalist, called the Chinese move "a signal of
groundbreaking progress from the world's largest polluter."
Scientists have pointed to the budding climate treaty, intended to be
finalized next year in Paris, as a final opportunity to get emissions
in check before the worst effects of climate change become unavoidable.
The goal is for each nation to pledge to cut emissions by a specific
amount, although negotiators are still haggling over whether those
contributions should be binding.
Developing nations like India and China have long balked at being on
the hook for climate change as much as wealthy nations like the U.S.
that have been polluting for much longer. But China analysts said
Beijing's willingness to cap its future emissions and to put Xi front
and center signaled a significant turnaround.
Yet it wasn't clear how either the U.S. or China would meet their
goals, nor whether China's growing emissions until 2030 would negate any
reductions in the U.S. And in Washington, Republicans were sure to
launch a renewed effort to block Obama's plans out of concern they could
overly burden U.S. businesses and taxpayers.
"This unrealistic plan that the president would dump on his successor
would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs," said Sen. Mitch
McConnell, R-Ky., who is set to become the majority leader early next
year.
For Obama, the fight against climate change has become a central
facet of the legacy he hopes to leave. Facing negligible prospects for
major legislative victories during his final two years, he has sought to
bypass Congress by using regulations on power plants and vehicles to
cut emissions, and his aides say his audacity on those fronts has
boosted his credibility on the issue when he meets with world leaders.
Monday, November 10, 2014
There is HOPE: "In Germany, a Jewish community now thrives" by Mike Ross
There is hope!
In Germany, a Jewish community now thrives
TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images
That, however, may be
changing. Seventy years after the Holocaust, as anti-Semitism churns
across Europe, the Jewish population on the continent is plummeting to
record lows. New strands of hatred foment seemingly justified by the
policies of Israel — a sovereign country thousands of miles away. And
yet Germany has suddenly reemerged as a home for Jews.
Ask Cilly Kugelmann, the vice director of the
Jewish Museum Berlin. Kugelmann is the daughter of two Polish Holocaust
survivors who, as it is said, “grew up sitting on packed suitcases.”
Today, she says she can’t think of anywhere else she’d rather live than
Germany. “Germany is one of the safest places for Jews worldwide,”
Kugelmann said.
In preparing to visit
Germany for the first time, nothing was further from my own beliefs. In
the place where my father’s family was slaughtered, I assumed that no
Jew would ever again see Germany as their home. How could they?
After
all, a walk down a narrow Berlin street takes one to where the city’s
Jewish population was routinely rounded up to be sent to concentration
camps — and to the windows of homes filled with complicit onlookers.
Nazis used the familiar settings of a Jewish school and community center
to lull their victims into a false sense of security, even though by
then, many knew they were being sent to their deaths. German residents
knew full well the fate of their Jewish neighbors — this street was
commonly referred to as “Todes Straße” or “Death Street.”
After the war, the once thriving Jewish
community of Berlin, which at its high point reached 180,000, was left
with only 7,000. In East Berlin — the section controlled by the former
Soviet Union — its population was down to several hundred and predicted
to reach zero in a matter of years.
In the
late 1960s my father returned to Germany to visit for the first time
since being liberated by American soldiers. Despite the celebrated
triumphs of Simon Wiesenthal the Nazi hunter, and the prosecutions that
were the result of the Nuremberg trials, he found his homeland awash in
Nazis, many of whom were back in positions of power in government. When
an attempt was made to finally prosecute high-ranking Nazis residing in
Germany, it failed miserably. Of 400 perpetrators who were prosecuted,
13 would be convicted, and only six would go to jail.
As the civil rights era drew to a close in the United States, a movement of German students, known as the 68ers, was just beginning. These young people demanded answers from their parents and grandparents.It took the next generation to demand change. As the civil rights era drew to a close in the United States, a movement of German students, known as the 68ers, was just beginning. These young people demanded answers from their parents and grandparents — generations who started two world wars and were responsible for humankind’s greatest atrocities.
Teaching a new generation: A mother walked her son at the Berlin train station memorial where Jews were sent to their death.
Gradually, Germany began to confront its
past. Public schools were required to teach about the Holocaust and
make mandated visits to former concentration camps. Reparation payments
were made to victims, and laws were enacted to make it a crime to deny
the Holocaust or to display Nazi symbols. Immigration laws were finally
liberalized to no longer require German blood as a precondition to
becoming a citizen.
The Germany of today
is a different place, particularly in Berlin, where 45,000 Jewish
residents now live. Waves of immigrants have arrived every decade since
the war ended. Most recently large numbers of young Israelis are moving
here, attracted by arts, culture, and a more reasonable cost of living.
Ironically they live quite peaceably in the same emerging neighborhoods
as young Muslim emigres. And for the first time since the war,
German-speaking rabbis are being trained in seminaries.
Two
years ago, one of those rabbis, Daniel Alter, was viciously attacked in
front of his 7-year-old daughter as he prepared for the Jewish High
Holy Days. I asked him if he believes that Jews will ever be home in
Germany. He answered by saying, “My suitcase is definitely unpacked, but
I know where it is.”
Today the gilded dome
of Berlin’s New Synagogue rises over the Spree River as a prominent
landmark announcing that a Jewish community thrives. And it does. For
now, it does.
Ugliness of anti-Semitism Marks Paris--the world's longest hatred!
The longest hatred never ends! The article below by Mike Ross sent a chill down my spine!
Ugliness of anti-Semitism marks Paris
AFP/Getty Images
Marine Le Pen, president of the French far-right party National
Front, poses beside a young girl dressed as Marianne, a personification
of the French Republic, in northern France on Sept. 14.
PARIS — Paris is justly lauded
as the most beautiful city in the world. Nowhere else is there a
greater collection of talent across the spectrum of architecture, art,
literature, food, and culture. But French society also has a nasty
underbelly – of growing ugliness – that should give pause to those who
live amid the sparkle of “The City of Light.”
That ugliness is an unprecedented rise in
anti-Semitism since the Holocaust. It comes in the form of increasing
violent attacks on Jewish people, the emerging popularity of a growing
right-wing political party, and a perfect storm of converging ideologies
that has distinguished France from its European counterparts.
Anti-Semitic
incidents in France are up stratospherically, according to information
provided by Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the director of the American Jewish
Committee in Paris. As recently as 1999 the number of recorded acts —
ranging from graffiti to targeted arson and homicide — against Jews
countrywide was, at just over 80, relatively small. Yet each of the last
15 years saw no fewer than 400 individual episodes. The methodology for
reporting such incidents has remained precisely the same — only the
volume of hatred has changed.
In just the first seven months of 2014, there
have already been some 600 anti-Semitic incidents. Rodan-Benzaquen
expects a total of about 1,500 by the end of the year. In fact, of all
the crimes classified by French authorities as racist against
minorities, Jewish victims represent 50 percent — even though Jews
account for less than 1 percent of the country’s population.
The seriousness of these attacks can’t be downplayed. People have lost their lives.
In
2006, 23-year-old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in
Paris. A similar incident followed two years later — both motivated by
anti-Semitism. In 2012, Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old French citizen
claiming ties to al Qaeda, killed four people — including three
children, ages 3, 6, and 8 — in an attack on a Jewish school in
Toulouse. And earlier this year, a young French jihadist murdered three
people in a Jewish museum in nearby Brussels.
All the more worrying is that, alongside this
increase in violence, France’s National Front — a nationalistic,
anti-immigration political party with a history of Jewish hatred — has
gained ground. The party is now led by Marine Le Pen, and while Le Pen
is far more politically savvy than her father, who founded and ran the
party as an avowed anti-Semite, her allegiances remain coy. She has
failed to distance herself from commentators like Alain Soral who loudly
castigate Jews, gays, and feminists as well as the “comedian”
Dieudonné, whose hate of Jews comes complete with a reverse Nazi salute
that he popularized called the “quenelle.”
Across
France, National Front’s popularity is at its peak. The party this year
received nearly 25 percent of the total vote in the election for
European Parliament — more than any other political party.
And then there are the jihadists. No
European country has had more recruits signing up with the Islamic
State terrorist group than France, today estimated to be around 1000. Once radicalized and trained, the danger that they pose upon their return to the country is very real.
All
of the threats, taken together, bring real fear to France’s Jewish
community, presently the largest in Europe. One example: Until recently,
it was commonplace for Jewish families to send their children to public
school. Today those same schools have few if any Jewish students.
Families are choosing Jewish and even Catholic schools instead.
Many
Jews are leaving France altogether. The number of emigres to Israel
alone so far has doubled in 2014 from last year to about 5,500.
Upon
my return to the melting pot that is the United States, I couldn’t help
but realize how lucky we all are. For all our problems — and there are
many — there is something that works here to connect our disparate
communities to a shared goal that seems absent in Europe. For all the
sparkle of Paris, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
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