The Muffti was intrigued by a question of TM’s the other day asking about whether or not we could prove or disprove God’s existence. While many (i.e. such luminaries as Kierkegaard and our own Laya) think it is an empty endeavour since faith is precisely that state where you believe without proof or evidence, others have been fairly convinced that irrationality is a fault not a virtue and have pursued proof either way. The Muffti thought there might be some interest in this so here are a few highlights from the last 2000 years of philosophical/theological thought on the matter. This will be a rather breezy guide, but much serious work has been done on all of these arguments.

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Don’t try this at home kids

The BBC reports:

A Sikh father hired a hitman to kill his own daughter claiming it would restore family honour because she had a Jewish boyfriend, a court heard.

Luckily a veritable bloodbath was averted because the man Kalwinder Dosanjh approached to do the job turned out to be an undercover police officer. Spared from death were not just Kalwinder’s daughter, but also the Jewish boyfriend as well as another man Kalwinder mistakenly assumed to be the Jewish boyfriend’s father. Why is it that every time you try to hire a hit man, he invariably turns out to be somehow connected to the police? Makes you kind of long for the days of reliable hit man services, like Murder Inc. where one could contract a killing with the assurance that the police would not be involved. Of course had Kalwinder contacted Murder Inc., he’d probably not be so successful given that most of the thugs employed there were Jewish (who wouldn’t kill on the sabbath btw). Go figure …

My parents were raised in Israel. They got married young and at an age when most of us are deciding what to do after graduating, they moved to Canada, little ck in tow. Amongst yordim, there’s a saying that implies that you have finally found what it is to be in the galut (the exile, outside of Israel) – the term in Hebrew is “Matsatem et America!” or “You have finally found America.”

When I read of this line of combo Christmas / Chanukah cards I thought to myself, “Ahhh! Matsatem et America!” It seems that American marketers, not content to completely eviscerate any religious meaning from Christmas, have now turned their attention to Jews and the growing segment of mixed Judeo/Christian families. This story is supposed to be one of those warm, fuzzy feel good things that pops up around this time of the year. It is supposed to be about how people deal with tolerance and mutual respect for others. To me however it is a pathetic piece of tripe that totally turns the story and the lessons of Chanukah upside down. But what the hey, us Jews may now feel free to celebrate Chanukah in a way that is completely divorced from the spiritual underpinnings of the holiday, just like our Christian neighbours! Merry Chrismukkah indeed, fellow Hellenists.

Mamash matzanu et America …

Or maybe it’s art?

You can listen to samples and I encourage you to do so…

Rabbi Yonah, the Rabbi of Long Beach Hillel, started off as a client but is now one of the few people I enjoy randomly chatting with. He’s cool and funny and all the stuff a good Rabbi should be. Recently I came across an article about a Jewish Buddhist in Forward that I thought was interesting and sent it off to Rabbi Yonah for his commentary. Here it is:

Recently the Forward published at article called “The Buddha From Brooklyn,” about Jeff Miller, AKA Surya Das. The article’s author wrote: “In a way, Surya Das’s Buddhist teaching is actually very Jewish.” And with that, I had to break my silence about Buddhism.

In discussions about the nature of Jewish life at the turn of this century, the Jubu phenomenon, deserves our attention. But don’t believe the hype, as it offers no solutions, only deeper problems.

Jews in large numbers have studied and adopted Buddhist practices. Some have become leading practitioners. In mainstream Jewish life, among Reform and Conservative congregations, one can hear references to Buddhism or Buddhists in sermons. Even my mother, from a traditional home, has offered to send me books that meld Jewish and Buddhist teachings, that tell Jews how many positive lessons Buddhism has for Jews to learn from.

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The spammers are linked to websites. Can’t we respond by asking those sites to stop the attack, or even by spamming their websites?

Here is the WHOIS info:

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Boys Gone Wild!

Well not exactly… 6 Israeli Naval Commandos on a field trip to mount Hermon posed naked in the snow as part of a unit tradition. The photograph was meant for internal use, however a nearby photographer for Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot also snapped a pic and the newspaper published it the next day. The elite soldiers had their faces blurred out and they posed modestly with their hands covering their uh… relevant bits. However, the unit commander was infuriated and suspended the soldiers from active duty pending review.

The reaction to the soldier’s suspension has been quite sympathetic. Said the father of one of the soldiers:

“I am shocked by the lack of proportions… We are talking about the best of the youth. They did not choose an easy or comfortable service. In the last few years they have buried a number of their friends.”

Lack of proportions? Not so shocking – their uh… proportions were covered up… Anyhow, when did the IDF get so prudish all of a sudden? I’d love to put up a pic for the sake of balance, but I can’t find one. Sorry ladies – word has it these boys are totally hot!

So just below you have the Juan Cole and MEMRI story. After MEMRI threatened Cole with a lawsuit, he cried foul, suggested that Academic Freedom was at stake, and blasted the ethernet with his blog and emails suggesting people should contact MEMRI and complain.

Now, Martin Kramer notes that two years ago, Cole was eager to sue him and Daniel Pipes for far less than Cole did to MEMRI.

By the way, Cole has just been elected as head of MESA (Middle Eastern Studies Association). This academic association, to which many active scholars studying and teaching modern Middle Eastern history, politics and society belong, seems to have taken a turn to the left in recent times. At least that’s what a couple of my sources, who were just at their annual meeting held in San Francisco, tell me. I guess Cole’s election cements that notion.

PS Check out MEMRI’s Reform section, it’s fascinating and clearly proves part of Cole’s claims to be false.

Tonight, a friend sent me a an email that had been floating around a local university campus. The email decried a potential lawsuit, threatened by MEMRI’s head, Yigal Carmon, against Juan Cole and potentially U of Michigan for publishing false information about MEMRI in an article. The email proceeded to urge all its readers to “preserve academic freedom” by writing a strong letter to MEMRI opposing any threats of a lawsuit against an academic and his institution.

This all began when MEMRI translated Osama Bin Laden’s last video. That’s the one that arrived at Al Jazeera, the station that loves broadcasting messages from terrorists and images of their atrocities (unless the images show cerrtain Muslims being so evil that they’d kill the head of a human rights organization who has been assisting their compatriots for 30 years), during the final days of the recent elections. Among other things, he says that Al Qaeda will attack states that support Bush.

MEMRI translated the word for states to mean, well, “states,” as in Texas, Oklahoma, etc. Cole felt that they were wrong and the word means states in the sense of sovereign countries. But Cole didn’t stop there. Cole proceeded to discuss MEMRI as if badmouthing them would buttress his point. For absolutely no reason, he accuses them of having $60 million in funding, cherry-picking articles to create an over-all negative and distorted impression of Arab media (he brings up the KKK as it relates, in his opinion, to certain Israelis), and of being a PR machine for the Likud. He also says a few other things that are quite offensive

In other words, “You guys are Israeli Right Wing shills with lots of Jewish/Israeli money behind you, some racist feelings toward Arabs, professionalism that sucks, the wrong kind of people leading you…and therefore can’t be trusted to translate the word ’states’ properly.”

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Oy.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking at Manhattan’s Congregation Shearith Israel, argued against the notion of a separation between Church and State.

“The founding fathers never used the phrase ’separation of church and state,’” he said, arguing that rigid separation of religion and state – as in Europe, for example – would be bad for America and bad for the Jews. “Do you think it’s going to make Jews safer? It didn’t prove that way in Europe,” he said. “You will not hear the word ‘God’ cross the lips of a French premier or an Italian head of state,” Scalia said. “But that has never been the American way.”

I don’t think I really need to launch into a whole spiel about why this is kind of scary. One of the things establishment Jewish groups have gotten right over the years is their staunch opposition to any attempted blurring of the lines between Church and State. The scariness comes in when one considers that Chief Justice Rehnquist is about ready to retire and President Bush will seek to nominate an Über Conservative to replace him. The only choices are Scalia who was appointed by Reagan in 1985, and Clarence Thomas appointed by Pops Bush. Thomas is a moron, a total judicial lightweight of nearly unprecedented proportions. That leaves Scalia.

Scalia failed to discuss how his advocacy for a more flexible approach towards religion in matters of state corresponds to his support of, uh, free love and stuff. At a recent speech he gave at Harvard University, the following was reported:

Challenged about his views on sexual morality, Justice Scalia surprised his audience at Harvard University, telling them: “I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.”

I must have missed that part of the bible.

Anyhow, Scalia received a standing ovation from the crowd at Shearith Israel, America’s oldest congregation, ironically founded by Sephardic Jews escaping the Inquisition in Brazil 350 years ago. What was that about the separation of Church and state again?

Behold my love, thine name is milingua.com

Sign up for their amazing and free Hebrew word a day. Even if you can’t string together complicated sentences, you might learn how to say “used books” b’ evrit, which to me is a little bit thrilling.

Channel your inner Charney

I came in today to find that we had been Gawkered. For those of you who do not know, Gawker is one of those unbearably cool blogs, wading hip deep in a delicious morass of pop culture, gossip and irony, while managing to both denigrate and celebrate the cult of celebrity. Not surprisingly, Gawker is very, very popular and today, Gawker saw fit to link to us. I posted a story in August about Dov Charney, President of American Apparel, the company that makes those unbearably cute crop top girlie-ts, etc. My post quoted from an article in Jane Magazine written by the witty and erudite Claudine Ko. This article went beyond the formulaic profile of a hipster business dude. Of course, Charney’s creative vision and innovative labour practices were amply discussed. But most everybody reading the article focused mostly on Charney’s thing for uh… masturbation – with staff, in front of Ko… This made for an unconventional but nonetheless interesting story.

Since then, we’ve been inundated with people googling for info about Dov. In fact that’s our number one source of search engine traffic. The Internet in general has been awash with message board discussions relating to Charney’s predilection for public pud pulling. Charney and American Apparel have gotten oodles of press of course, including today’s piece in the New York Times, which, as Gawker noted, made no mention of Charney’s onanistic endeavors. Perhaps the money people behind American Apparel wanted Charney to tone down the whole whacking off thing, fearful that it might detrimentally affect their bottom line.

However, it seems as if quite the opposite is true. Women, the bulk of American Apparel’s customer base, seem to love Charney. Despite everything we’ve been told about sensitivity and feelings and cuddling, bad boys are indeed BIG!

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Better smelling, smooth-skinned, Jewish men.

he scrubs his body with granular gel and massages his eyes with anti-wrinkle serum. And, of course, he nourishes his face with moisture.

It sounded like a title The Onion would publish, but it’s actually completely legit.

Yesterday marked the 58th annual Latke-Hammentaschen debate (58 years of this??) at U Chicago, where it has been held every Tuesday before Thanksgiving since 1946, and has since spawned other such debates nation wide.

Thankfully, after years of agonizing curiosity, long time mediator and Professor of Philosophy, Ted Cohen, broke down this year and admitted his preference “It is not my opinion. It is a fact: hamentashen are pretty good, but latkes are perfect. I teach philosophy; I used a metaphysical argument and mathematical logic to prove latkes were perfect.”

“The Latke-Hamentash symposia have become legendary for their lighthearted wit and the audacity of their participants’ tactics,” reports the University of Chicago News

Audience members are encouraged to support for their preferred foodstuffs by coming to the debate dressed in a latke-or-hamentash-related costume.

Hilarious as it all seems, I really don’t know what the argument is here really. It’s apples and oranges. On the one hand, you have crumbly, jelly filled unenlightened cookies, and on the other you have deep fried potato-y goodness. Why don’t they argue Latke’s vs. Sufganiot? which is the better oily Hanukkah treat? Now that’s a debate.

Today, Mr. Abbas, Abu Mazen, the likely successor to the dead fart, indicated that nothing has changed.

“We promise you [Arafat] that our heart will not rest until we achieve the right of return for our people and end the tragic refugee issue,” he said.

Let’s hope he was being clever with the use of language or we might as well just assume the war will continue without any resolution.

Close to 400,000 Internet surfers from Israel and around the world visited the Web site of Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, during the first 24 hours after the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ names went on air. See more.

Yad Vashem Database

That’s the message from the World Bank to Israel. Nigel Roberts, the Bank’s representative in the Territories has come out publicly with the assessment that Israel must allow Palestinian Gazans into Israel to work through 2008 at least, despite any disengagement pullout.

Not only that, said the dreamer, but Israel has to ease closures, increase Palestinian accessability into Israel, and watch as the world gives money to the Palestinians again even if $900 million disappeared last time.

When asked if the current war the Palestinians launched has something to do with their current plight, he indicated he had no desire to address the past, only look to the future.

When asked whether other Arab nations could provide jobs for the impoverished Gazans, he proved himself no less funny than Jerry Seinfeld:

He said it was illogical to expect Arab states to hire Palestinians in Israel’s stead, because Palestinian workers have been barred from the Gulf states ever since the Palestinians backed former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

I’m sure the Israeli Cabinet is having an emergency meeting right this minute in their haste to comply with his wishes.

As you may have picked up on, I have taken a little trip to North America. Zionist guilt be damned.

Even though I grew up in America, Western culture is tripping me out. I suppose I’m young enough that I have acclimated to Israel better than I realized, because all of a sudden this culture seems somewhat foreign to me as well.

One thing that us expatriates always mention upon returning to Israel is the supermarkets. They are so big, and calm, whereas shuk shopping is practically a competitive sport. Cashiers help you rather than finishing their cell phone call, and then bag your groceries for you. And you can get anything, anytime of year (what do you mean, i asked ck, like, you can get avocados in winter? and that doesn’t seem strange to you?)

Despite the calm of elevator music and wide aisles, there is a stress of choice unparalleled in Israel. I had forgotten how many foods and variations on a food are available. Jam, for instance. You have a dozen or more brands, each with different lines and different flavors. So I stand there intensely comparing cost, size and ingredients of all of them. This continues in the cereal aisle, and don’t even get me started about the fifty varieties of shampoo.

And that’s just the supermarket. Then there are the seemingly endless choices every other time I leave the house. By the end of the day, I’m exhausted from all the decision making.

How do we handle it?

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What a shocker. Not.

The word from returning delegates was that the Cleveland GA was pretty unimpressive. Most of the complaints centered around the remote location of the convention and the scarcity of food and coffee, a necessary lubricant for Jewish shmoozing, which is what the GA is really all about, no? Oh well. I’m glad we didn’t go.

A sudden unseasonable cold snap has pretty much finished off the plague of locusts that hit parts of Israel this past Friday. Eastern Australians, hit by a similar infestation, have taken to eating what a recently published recipe book calls “sky prawns.” Israelis could have resorted to eating the locusts as a way of battling the pesky critters that can consume their own weight in food on a daily basis, without the assistance of munchy inducing substances. However, there is a question regarding the kashrut of locusts. Halachah dictates that you can only eat locusts if you possess a continuous tradition of regarding them as kosher. It seems that this tradition only exists amongst North African Sephardic Jews – which I ought to have suspected having never seen a recipe for locust knishes.

If you can rely on such a tradition, you will find that not only are locusts healthy and rich in protein, but they are a tasty and multifaceted snack, capable of being fried, grilled, boiled and roasted. For those of you interested, I’ll throw in a few recipes and for the rest of you, I guess be thankful that Israel was spared a makat arbeh.

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Hollinger International Inc. today announced that it will sell The Jerusalem Post to a group made up of Israeli media company Mirkaei Tikshoret Group Ltd. and CanWest Global Communications Corp., the largest newspaper publisher in Canada. The sale price of $13.2 million is significantly less than the $21.5 million that Hollinger paid for the newspaper in 1990. This marks the second sale of an international newspaper by Hollinger as the company reduces its assets following the ouster of its former CEO Conrad Black.

The interesting thing about this story is that the Jerusalem Post sold for the price of a couple of really nice homes in Jerusalem. Only in Israel! Sheesh …

Nasser al-Kidwa, Yasser Arafat’s nephew, has his uncle’s medical records. He has yet to actually read the 558-page file but he has already determined that Israel is to blame for Arafat’s death.

He said he had no doubts that Arafat’s still undisclosed illness was “connected to the conditions that the late president was living and suffering from … This is a principal part of the issue…” Al-Kidwa said toxicology tests were conducted during Arafat’s two-week stay in France but “no poisons known to doctors were found”. He did not, however, categorically rule out poisoning – which again could fuel conspiracy theories in the Middle East that Arafat was murdered. “This possibility could not be excluded,” he said.

Now I don’t know Mr. al-Kidwa. I’ve never met the man nor do I even have a photo of him. But despite this I have already determined that he is a dipshit.

The Muffti is a man of much love, not hate, and thus regrets passing on the following story. The land of the free generated over 7,400 hate crimes last year, ranging from intimidation to arson to murder. Apparently this is only slightly up from the year before. Some notable facts:

Anyone with stats that would provide a comparison should post them in the comments.

Yup…

Nasser Al-Kidwa has been as clever at foiling Suha’s remuneration plans as he has been at screwing Israel at the U.N. Come to think of it, I guess both Suha and Israel were also screwed by Arafat. Well, maybe not Suha.

So…

In our last installment, Suha had grabbed the worm’s medical files and had her lawyer busy attempting to prevent the French medical facility from providing them to anybody else. She was already counting the huge shekels the PA was going to foist upon her manicured fingernails when she was completely outmaneuvered. What happened was that good old Nasser, who seems to be cut from the same cloth as his foul-breathed and very dead uncle, waltzed into France and without much ado, but lots of fanfare, got Abu Ammar’s records.

So then Nasser, who is not a doctor, had two hours to read the 540 page report (we’ll assume he speaks French), and has now ensured that within one year, everybody will be claiming Israel poisoned Arafat.

What did Nasser say?

He said that while no known poisons were the cause of death, poison as a cause of death couldn’t be ruled out.

Here is the Associated Press version of the story, by the way. Here is the Haaretz version. They’re a tad different.

Now, this guy is an important member of the Palestinian leadership and he can’t bring himself, or chooses not, to tell the truth in what is a very obvious and clear-cut situation. For god’s sake, just tell us what the old fart died of and let’s move on, why all the intrigues and obvious lies? I mean, I want to negotiate with these people for peace, but how are we supposed to trust them when even in a matter as simple as this, we can’t get the truth and they turn it around to blame Israel? What a snake.

Hey, did I mention that Suha hasn’t returned the PA’s plane yet? (CK, we need one of those rolling on the floor laughing icons).

So I am half Sephardic.

I am also half Ashkenaz. That half grew up with virtually no family because they were exterminated in the Holocaust. As a result, it’s not a part of my background with which I have ANY familiarity. However, before my grandfather, who did survive, died, I asked my father to get him to tell as much of his life story as possible, and to list as many names of relatives as he could.

Today, Yad Vashem opened their online searchable directory and I paid it a visit. Based upon a very sketchy piece of information, I was able to locate my (deceased) great grandmother (aleha hashalom) within moments. Although the bios give no personal info other than place of residence, birth, birthdate, name and maiden name, I now know more about my great grandmother (who was murdered in Auschwitz) than I knew a couple of hours ago.

It’s an incredible resource, this database. Best of all, it lists the name and relationship of the referrer of the person’s name. It turns out that it was her sister who submitted the name, and as recently as 1999. I am going to try to track down my great aunt and see whether there might be an entire branch of the family still around – I have always thought they were all dead, but from the listing I found, it appears that at least two people I didn’t know about survived the war.

(On that note, I should add that I am glad Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in DC exist, but I believe the Jewish community is wasting valuable resources by building and supporting numerous Holocaust museums and memorials around the world. That money could go to general Jewish education and programs for the new generation and could serve much better use because it would allow this generation to grow and have a connection to their Jewish heritage. Instead, we are focusing on a very particular (and, in historical terms, short-lived) part of our heritage, to the detriment of the living. I should add that one of the sadder things about Holocaust related institutions is that they tend to focus on the death and the last years of the murdered, and we rarely see a focus on their lives prior to the rise of the Nazis. I think focusing on how they lived before things became horrible is at least as important as after, if not more.)