Move to Rochester, I

This is the first in a series of blurbs about our move to Rochester. Well, the permanent move, in some sense, will be in July when my position at the University of Rochester officially begins. But the move has very much begun and we are now nicely situated in our new house at 145 Dunrovin Lane, Rochester, NY 14618. The boxes are still all over the place and are mostly unopened. We have some food, but many basic staples like olive oil and dish washing detergent are still missing. We are not planning to eat the dishwashing detergent, but you know what I mean!

The process of moving in was not adventure free. When we arrived on Wednesday (November 3)  morning, we discovered that the electricity has been cut-off and the house is freezing. After numerous phone calls to Rochester Gas and Electric we arranged for electricity to be turned on “sometime on Thursday” and no amount of pleasing and complaining could convince them that making this happen on Wednesday is essential. Diane, our real estate broker, put us up in a pet friendly La Quinta hotel nearby. We finished off the day with dinner at Delmanico’s Steak House, an excellent restaurant with wonderful steaks and beautiful Italian deserts. Several martinis also helped to deal with the wear and tear of a long but fulfilling day.

Lack of electricity and heat was not the extent of our problems. Somebody seems to have ripped out the mirror from the downstairs bathroom, turned the water off from a malfunctioning Japanese toilet in the master bathroom, did not have the furnace expected and a few more things along those lines. The real estate agent and the lawyer are dealing with it now. Moving into a new house is never easy, I suppose, but we are overall very pleased with the experience.

Steve, Shannon’s Dad, has been incredibly helpful. He showed how to use many things around the house, cleared the snow, started the wood burning stove and many other things. He will be back with Shannon’s Mom, Debbie, in a few weeks to have a good time, build a doggy door and other things of this type.

It is now late morning on Friday and we are about to go to run some errands and drop Steve off at the Buffalo airport. In the late afternoon, we drive to Albany with our dog Mason to pick up Joshua and Nathan.

Overall, life is wonderful!

Proportionality & Hypocrisy: NATO in Kosovo vs. IDF in Gaza, by Martin Sherman

“There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.”

-Jamie Shea, NATO Spokesman on BBC News, May 31, 1999

The international furor over the Goldstone Report and the ongoing censure of Israel over its conduct of “Operation Cast Lead” refuses to die down, even against the backdrop of the country’s remarkable humanitarian efforts in earthquake-stricken Haiti. It is this unending maelstrom of condemnation that imparts particular pertinence to the words with which the official NATO representative chose to respond to criticism regarding the numerous civilian casualties incurred by the alliance’s frequent air attacks during the war in Kosovo between March and June 1999.

Shea insisted NATO planes bombed only “legitimate designated military targets” and if civilians had died it was because NATO had been forced into military action. Adamant that “we try to do our utmost to ensure that if there are civilians around we do not attack,” he emphasized that “NATO does not target civilians…let’s be perfectly clear about that.”

Hundreds of civilians were killed by a NATO air campaign, however, code named “Operation Allied Force”-which hit residential neighborhoods, old-aged sanitariums, hospitals, open markets, columns of fleeing refugees, civilian buses and trains on bridges, and even a foreign embassy. (See Table for a summary of some of the undisputed major incidents.)

Exact figures are difficult to come by, but the undisputed minimum is almost 500 civilians deaths (with some estimates putting the toll as high as 1,500)–including women, children and the elderly, killed in about 90 documented attacks by an alliance that included the air forces of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Turkey, Spain, the UK, and the United States. Up to 150 civilians deaths were reportedly caused by the use of cluster bombs dropped on, or adjacent to, known civilian areas.

By contrast, the military losses inflicted by NATO on the Serbian forces during almost 80 days of aerial bombardment, unchallenged by any opposing air power, were remarkably low, with most estimates putting the figure at less than 170 killed.

NATO forces suffered… no combat fatalities! This was mainly due to the decision to conduct high altitude aerial attacks which greatly reduced the danger to NATO military personnel in the air, but dramatically increased it for the Serbian (and Kosovar) civilians on the ground. As opposed to realities which led to the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, moreover, the civilian populations of the countries participating in Operation Allied Force were never attacked or, even threatened in any way by Serbian forces.

The significance of all this for Israel, beset as it is by a tirade of criticism and censure regarding its military campaign in Gaza, should be starkly apparent. It raises three trenchant issues which it would fail to address to its great detriment:

The Irrelevance of Proportionality in Military Engagements

The Unlimited Hypocrisy of International Politics

The Disastrous Incompetence of Israeli Public Diplomacy

The issue of proportionality, or rather the alleged lack thereof, has been the basis the fierce condemnation of Israel’s conduct in its military operations in Gaza because the number of Palestinians casualties far outweighs that of Israeli ones. The conduct of military operations in Kosovo by many of Israel’s present detractors, however, shows that this was never a consideration or constraint to which they felt bound. Quite the contrary, the very modus operandi they adopted such as high altitude bombing, demonstrates that they deliberately aspired to disproportionality. As noted, this ensured an almost zero casualty rate among their own combatants but inevitably resulted in less accurate targeting of alleged military objectives on the ground, exposing a virtually defenseless civilian population to far greater danger and far higher casualties.

All of this serves to underscore vividly the crass hypocrisy of Israel’s critics. For their code of conduct hardly gives them the high moral ground with regard to their code of combat. Indeed, in stark contrast to NATO’s willful disregard for enemy civilians, the IDF has often placed Israeli soldiers in mortal peril to prevent Palestinian civilians from being harmed. Israel’s use of military might, furthermore, has invariably been in response a tangible threat, or actual assault, on its citizens. This, however, was not the case for military strikes carried out by NATO forces against the Serbs, who as mentioned previously, constituted no threat whatsoever to any civilian population outside the confines of the former Yugoslavia-certainly not to those in any of the countries participating in the alliance. Any claim that Serbian brutality justified NATO’s harsh actions can be swiftly countered by pointing to the cruel atrocities perpetrated against Serbs by Kosovars once Serbian forces had been neutralized by NATO. Indeed, the inter-ethnic civil war in the Balkans was encloaked in heavy moral ambiguity in which it was far easier to determine which party was “strong” and which “weak” rather than which was “good” and which “bad.” [1] Moreover, if brutality is a justification for the use of disproportionate force then surely there are few more deserving targets than the Islamist terror organizations such as Hamas, however regrettable the inevitable collateral damage might be.

The blatant disregard for any semblance of proportionality by democratic belligerents and the shameless hypocrisy of their self-righteous and misplaced criticism of Israel highlight a crucial deficiency-often diagnosed and equally often neglected-in the overall structure of its international strategy: the incompetence, indeed impotence, of Israeli diplomacy, particularly its Public Diplomacy.

For the documented data on the conduct of the war in Kosovo by the world’s leading democracies should provide ample material with which to resolutely rebuff much of the pompous tirade of condemnation being hurled at Israel today. Sadly, however, this has not happened and, although Israel’s media management during the Gaza operation showed a marked improvement relative to the appalling performance during the 2006 Lebanon War, it still appears to be trapped in mindset of unbecoming apologetics and mired in a misplaced timidity that undermine its credibility and persuasiveness.

For Israel to prevail in the crucial battle for public opinion it must go on the offensive. It must convey a confidence and a conviction in the fundamental moral validity of the nation’s actions. It must not shy away from resolutely repelling unjustified slander and from reprimanding malicious slanderers.

It should not shrink from convening all the NATO country ambassadors in a public forum, open to the international media, and sternly point out how unacceptable “stone throwing” is for residents of “glass houses”, how inadvisable it is for “pots” to accuse “kettles” of being black, and to firmly demand, in appropriately discreet diplomatic terms, that they “put a sock in it.”

It should not refrain from confronting unprincipled foreign correspondents who concoct malevolent fabrications against Israel and unambiguously convey to them that gross lack of professional integrity and balance will not be tolerated, that excessive abuse of journalistic privilege will result in its withdrawal. It should be made clear to those in the international media who reside in Israel but insist in portraying it in an unfair and unfounded light that they will have to cover events in the region while residing in some Arab country where they presumably will find society less objectionable and less defective.

It must emphasize that although it is true that criticism of Israeli policy is not necessarily anti-Semitism, the massive and enduring application of double standard toward the Jewish state regarding alleged human rights abuses while glossing over far more horrendous cases elsewhere, makes anti-Semitism a increasingly plausible explanation for such conduct. Indeed this is an explanation which can no longer be blithely dismissed and is one that needs to be convincingly refuted…or acknowledged and accepted

The Israeli government must not hold back the resources required to assertively-even coercively-replace political correctness with political truth in the international discourse on the Middle East in general and on the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular.[2] It must bring these truths to the attention of political opinion-makers and of politically aware publics across the globe-if need be by circumventing hostile and obstructive editorial bias by means of prominent, paid infomercials in major media channels.

Only measures such as these will allow Israel to gain the upper hand in the battle for public opinion, to prevent it being the victim of unjust, unjustified and unjustifiable double standards, and to ensure that military operations in Gaza and Kosovo are not judged by wildly disparate criteria.

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[1] “Moral ambiguity” should be distinguished from “moral relativism” where no party is deemed”good” or “bad”.

[2] Today, the budget for Public Diplomacy is ludicrously small. As MK Michael Eitan pointed out, it totals less than the advertising budgets that some Israeli food manufactures spend to promote their sales of snacks and fast foods. Ha’aretz, May 22, 2002.

The case against the Goldstone Report, by Alan Dershowitz

28/01/2010 08:00

Its writers applied totally different standards in evaluating intent.

The Goldstone Report is much more scurrilous than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. According to the report, Israel used the more than 8,000 rocket attacks on its civilians merely as a pretext, an excuse, a cover for the real purpose of Operation Cast Lead, which was to target innocent Palestinian civilians – children, women, the elderly – for death. This criminal objective was explicitly decided upon by the highest levels of the Israeli government and military and constitutes a deliberate and willful war crime. The report found these serious charges “to be firmly based in fact” and had “no doubt” of their truth.

In contrast, the Mission decided that Hamas was not guilty of deliberately and willfully using the civilian population as human shields. It found “no evidence” that Hamas fighters “engaged in combat in civilian dress,” “no evidence” that “Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack,” and no support for the claim that mosques were used to store weapons.

The report is demonstrably wrong about both of these critical conclusions. The hard evidence conclusively proves that the exact opposite is true, namely that: 1. Israel did not have a policy of targeting innocent civilians for death. Indeed the IDF went to unprecedented lengths to minimize civilian casualties; and 2. That Hamas did have a deliberate policy of having its combatants dress in civilian clothing, fire their rockets from densely populated areas, use civilians as human shields, and store weapons in mosques.

What is even more telling than its erroneous conclusions, however, is its deliberately skewed methodology, particularly the manner in which it used and evaluated similar evidence very differently, depending on whether it favored the Hamas or Israeli side.

I have written a detailed analysis of the Goldstone Methodology, which is now available online. (http://www.alandershowitz.com/goldstone.htm) It is being sent to the Secretary General of the United Nations for inclusion in critiques of the Goldstone Report received by the United Nations. This analysis documents the distortions, misuses of evidence and bias of the report and those who wrote it. It demonstrates that the evidence relied on by the report, as well as the publicly available evidence it deliberately chose to ignore, disproves its own conclusions.

THE CENTRAL issue that distinguishes the conclusions the Goldstone Report reached regarding Israel, on the one hand, and Hamas, on the other, is intentionality. The report finds that the most serious accusation against Israel, namely the killing of civilians, was intentional (and deliberately planned at the highest levels). The report also finds that the most serious accusations made against Hamas, namely that their combatants wore civilian clothing to shield themselves from attack, mingled among the civilian populations and used civilians as human shields, was unintentional. These issues are, of course, closely related.

If it were to turn out that there was no evidence that Hamas ever operated from civilians areas, and that the IDF knew this, then the allegation that the IDF, by firing into civilian areas, deliberately intended to kill Palestinian civilians, would be strengthened. But if it were to turn out that the IDF reasonably believed that Hamas fighters were deliberately using civilians as shields, then this fact would weaken the claim that the IDF had no military purpose in firing into civilian areas. Moreover, if Hamas did use human shields then the deaths of Palestinian civilians would be more justly attributable to Hamas then to Israel.

Since intentionality, or lack thereof, was so important to the report’s conclusions, it would seem essential that the report would apply the same evidentiary standards, rules and criteria in determining the intent of Israel and in determining the intent of Hamas.

Yet a careful review of the report makes it crystal clear that its writers applied totally different standards, rules and criteria in evaluating the intent of the parties to the conflict. The report resolved doubts against Israel in concluding that its leaders intended to kill civilians, while resolving doubts in favor of Hamas in concluding that it did not intend to use Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Moreover, when it had precisely the same sort of evidence in relation to both sides – for example, statements by leaders prior to the commencement of the operation – it attributed significant weight to the Israeli statements, while entirely discounting comparable Hamas statements. This sort of evidentiary bias, though subtle, permeates the entire report.

IN ADDITION to the statements of leaders, which are treated so differently, the report takes a completely different view regarding the inferring of intent from action. When it comes to Israel, the report repeatedly looks to results and infers from the results that they must have been intended. But when it comes to Hamas, it refuses to draw inferences regarding intent from results.

For example, it acknowledges that some combatants wore civilian clothes, and it offers no reasonable explanation for why this would be so other than to mingle indistinguishably from civilians. Yet it refuses to infer intent from these actions. Highly relevant to the report’s conclusion that militants did not intend for their actions to shield themselves from counterattack is that the Mission was “unable to make any determination on the general allegation that Palestinian armed groups used mosques for military purpose,” “did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used by the Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activities,” did not find evidence “that ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other military purposes,” and did not find “that Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat actives from United Nations facilities that were used as shelters during the military operations.”

There is, however, hard evidence that Hamas did operate in mosques and, at the very least, near hospitals. Circumstantial evidence (precise weaponry) was used to prove Israeli intent. Regarding Hamas, the circumstantial evidence even stronger in inferring intent. It is beyond obvious that militants do not fire rockets in the vicinity of mosques or hospitals because it is easier to launch rockets near community institutions. Rather, they do so only because of the special protections afforded to hospitals and religious centers in war.

The report – commissioned by an organization with a long history of anti-Israel bigotry, and written by biased “experts,” with limited experience and a pre-ordained result – is one-sided and wrong in its fundamental conclusions. This should not be surprising since conclusions can be no better than the methodology employed, and the methodology employed in this report is fundamentally flawed.

So now it is up to Richard Goldstone to explain the evidentiary bias that is so obviously reflected in the report, and that is documented in my lengthier analysis available online. The burden is on him to justify the very different methodologies used in the report to arrive at its conclusions regarding the intentions of Israel and the intentions of Hamas. Failure to assume that burden will constitute an implicit admission that the conclusions reached in the Goldstone Report are not worthy of consideration by people of good will.

Der Spiegel article on clash of cultures

What Muslims Hear at Friday Prayers

Is there really a clash of the cultures between Islam and the West? SPIEGEL documents Friday sermons from mosques around the world. As imams guide their congregations, they praise the delights of paradise, sow the seeds of doubt in government authority — and sometimes preach hatred.

Last Monday, the 12th of Rabi al-Awwal 1427, traffic stood still in most Islamic countries, government employees had the day off and children stayed home from school. On the 12th of Rabi, the world’s Muslims observe the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

Egyptians celebrate Maulid al-Nabi, as a sort of Islamic Christmas. In cities across the Nile delta, thousands take to the streets playing drums and trumpets. Little girls receive dolls and little boys are given horses made of sugar. It’s Egypt’s biggest religious festival.

In Pakistan, the faithful place a young boy, dressed as a Bedouin, on a horse and parade him through the streets, representing the return of the Prophet in the form of a child — apparently not a violation of the prohibition on displaying images of the Prophet the Muslim world often defended so vehemently. But this year the return of Muhammad ended in a blood bath, when a suicide bomber blew up himself and 57 others during prayers in the southern Pakistani city Karachi.

Islam has many faces, and on the Friday before the Prophet’s birthday, SPIEGEL correspondents visited mosques from Nigeria to Indonesia to listen to the sermons of the imams. They were there in part to look into a suspicion that has taken hold in the West, especially since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Have the mosques been transformed from a place of prayer into a hotbed of extremism and center of Islamist indoctrination? Is there truly a dangerous clash of cultures underway, as so many people in Europe and America fear?

Radical preachers have actively contributed to this impression. In a Berlin mosque, a television crew secretly recorded the sermon of a Turkish imam who described the Germans as godless and railed against their alleged stench. In London, hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri called upon the faithful to murder female tourists in his native Egypt, saying: “If a woman, even a Muslim woman, is naked and you have no way of covering her up, it is legitimate to kill her.”

Other agents of the Koran speak moderately when addressing Western audiences, but their words turn decidedly more radical when directed towards Muslims. In an interview with SPIEGEL, television imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, perhaps currently one of the most influential Islamic scholars around, magnanimously conceded that there is also room in heaven for devout Christians and Jews. But on his Arab-language website a short time later, he made it clear that he believes that Christians and Jews are ultimately nothing more than infidels.

Geopolitics and prayer

But surely such examples of narrow-mindedness can be found in any major religion or creed. Are these words of hatred and discrimination really representative of the thousands upon thousands of Friday prayers that millions of Muslims around the world attend each week? And what about those who occasionally oversleep and miss morning prayers or those whose lives do not revolve exclusively around their religion? The answers to these questions are highly varied, but generally speaking the more devout Muslims see themselves threatened by the secular West, the more zealous the region’s imams are in calling the faithful to fight in the name of Allah.

AL-AZHAR, CAIRO

The mosque and university was established more than a thousand years ago by Fatimide commander Gauhar al-Sikilli, and is considered the most important center of learning in Sunni Islam to this day. The Friday preacher, Dr. Id Abd al-Hamid Yussuf, 65, is completely against the use of Islam for political purposes.

The Prophet forgave those who committed injustices against him. He pardoned the murderer of his uncle, Hamsa. He forgave his people when they banished him from Mecca … Islam spread throughout the world through argument and conviction, but not through the sword, as the enemies of Islam have claimed. Islam only used the sword when it was attacked … The Prophet forbade extremism and fanaticism. He said: “I was sent to you out of the generosity of God. Night became day. Anyone who strays from this path will fall victim to ruin.” For some, religion is like a maze. Enter it with caution, because whoever approaches religion as an extremist will perish in his extremism.

Whereas imams in places like Istanbul and Jakarta tended to devote their sermons to theological exegesis, Friday prayers in Pakistan, Iran and the Gaza Strip were markedly more political. In these places, religious scholars whipped their listeners into a holy frenzy and drew a sharp line between the Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, and the Dar al-Harb, or House of War — the two spheres into which schools of Islamic legal thought have divided the world.

But at the same time, often in the same sermon, imams ask God for help in confronting everyday woes, issue moral appeals to their own political leaders and constantly return to the Islamic world’s greatest lament: a comparison between the gloomy present and the glorious past.

The news on the Friday before last contained all the key ingredients for a dramatic political sermon. The Israeli army had just launched an attack on two offices of the al-Aksa Brigades in the Gaza Strip, and both the United States and the European Union had announced their intention to halt financial aid to the Palestinians’ Hamas-led government. Ten people were killed that Thursday when a bomb went off in the Iraqi city of Najaf, and another 70 died in Baghdad while leaving the mosque after Friday prayers. Government officials in Washington also made it clear that they were opposed to interim Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s ambitions to stay in office.

The nuclear dispute between Iran and the West escalated further when Iranian religious leaders denounced as unacceptable United Nations’ demands that the country put an end to its uranium enrichment program. On that weekend, The New Yorker then revealed that the White House has developing plans for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promptly upped the ante by announcing that his mullah-led theocracy had successfully enriched uranium and now counts itself a member of the world’s nuclear club.

But Didin Hafiduddin, the imam at Istiqlal Mosque in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, made no mention of the precarious geopolitical situation in his sermon, given in one of the world’s largest houses of prayer. Titled “Professionalism and Honest Trusteeship,” it sounded more like a presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland than fiery religious rhetoric. Hafiduddin told the faithful in the most populous Islamic country about Joseph the Israelite, the man charged with running the Egyptian pharaoh’s economy. He drew parallels between the story — which is also mentioned in the bible — and modern-day Indonesia’s struggles with corruption.

“Place me in charge of the granaries of the land, and you will see that I am a clever custodian,” Joseph advises the pharaoh in the Koran sura that bears his name. No one has ever been a more efficient manager than Joseph, at least according to the imam from Jakarta. Today’s leaders ought to take a page from Joseph’s book, he said, adding that “corruption, laziness and fraud bring about destruction.” By contrast, said the Indonesian imam, God rewards professionalism and a “strict work ethic” with happiness and fulfillment.

Governments criticized

The moral appeal to one’s own political leadership is a leitmotif in the sermons of Muslim preachers — but also a natural response to strict autocratic conditions in many Islamic countries. It was almost an understatement when Sheikh Ibrahim Abu Bakr Ramadan, an imam in the Nigerian city of Kano, said that the “injustice emanating from our leadership is the worst part of our society,” in reference to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s efforts to amend the constitution so that he can be reelected when his current term expires in 2007.

In Peshawar, Pakistan, Maulana Khalil Ahmad compared the world’s monotheistic religions and — perhaps not surprisingly — praised Islam as being the most complete of them all: “Contradictions prevail, especially in Christianity and Judaism, as well as in Communism.” But that was mild compared with the sermon his fellow local imam Abd al-Akbar Chitrali gave in the same spot a week earlier, when he derided Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s claim to have given Pakistan true democracy. Musharraf, the imam complained, is trying to introduce the “Western secularism” of his idol, Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The founder of the modern Turkey, said Chitrali, was a man who “turned mosques into churches and had religious scholars murdered. Listen to me, Muslims! Kemal Atatürk is not our ideal. Musharraf is not just attempting to placate the West and the USA, but also to remain permanently in power.”

Many imams in Egypt and Turkey harbor similar reservations about their countries’ leaders, but little of that surfaced in their sermons. The security forces in both countries keep a close watch on mosques. In Egypt, the grand sheikh of al-Azhar University, traditionally the highest-ranking authority in Sunni religious teaching, is appointed directly by the president, essentially making him the administration’s mouthpiece.

This explains the tranquil nature of the sermon at al-Azhar University on the evening before the Prophet’s birthday. The speaker, Sheikh Id Abd al-Hamid Yusuf, praised Muhammad as the most complete of all prophets, saying: “We will never succeed in doing justice to his memory.”

To ensure that religious speech doesn’t suddenly turn into political invective, hundreds of police officers are stationed in the streets around the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo every Friday during prayers. The faithful have rarely staged demonstrations after prayers in recent years, and when they have, many of the “demonstrators” were undercover police officers. But such precautions are unnecessary on the Friday before the Prophet’s birthday. Indeed, Imam Yusuf warned his audience against the excesses of religious fervor, saying that “the extremist doesn’t plow the earth, nor does he allow any flowers to grow.”

BLUE MOSQUE, ISTANBUL

The house of worship, completed in 1616 under Sultan Ahmet I, is one of Istanbul’s major mosques intended to embody the faith and power of the Ottoman Empire. The mosque’s imam, Emrullah Hatipoglu, delivered the sermon.

There is no science without God. We see all the things that can happen in the schools when children do not learn in the name of God. When there are murders in the schools today, when an inhuman development becomes a threat, we must ask ourselves what led to this development. God says in the Koran: Murdering an innocent person is the same as murdering all of mankind … The Koran permeates our lives.

But there are problems with our attitudes to the Koran. We do not apply it everywhere. Let us assume that we are running a supermarket. Are we permitted to sell merchandise there that is prohibited in Islam, goods that are not legitimate? No? But many Muslims are doing just that. The goods must conform to the standards established in Turkey and the rules of consumer protection, but not those of the Koran. Is the sale of alcohol and pork allowed? What about the Koran? These, my fellow Muslims, are all sins.

Emrullah Hatipoglu, the imam of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, does his best to take advantage of the latitude he is given by the government’s Office for Religious Affairs. In his sermons, Hatipoglu argues against the view of the country’s secular elite that Islam is a backward-looking religion that is opposed to science. The Koran begins with the words “Read, in the name of your Lord, who has created,” and modern Islam, says Hatipoglu, should obey this exhortation to educate oneself. “Physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy … read that!” he says. But he also believes that the faithful should read the Koran with the same enthusiasm. “There is no excuse. No one can claim that he cannot read the Koran. Don’t you have computers and CDs?”

This is followed by a catechism that sounds like a campaign speech by current Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan during the 1990s, when he was still mayor of Istanbul and crusaded against the serving of alcohol, prostitution and Turkey’s inexorable Westernization. Today, with his sights set on EU membership, Erdogan has largely abandoned his Islamist rhetoric, but the conflict between government-controlled Islam and Turkey’s secular establishment, especially the military, continues to simmer.

NUR MOSQUE, GAZA STRIP

In this mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp with ties to the extremist Hamas movement, Friday prayers ended with an appeal to Palestinians to rise up against Israeli occupiers. The sermon was given by 38-year-old Imam Talal al-Majdalawi.

When the Jews withdrew from the Gaza Strip, we thought that we had gained all the freedom in the world. But then came the bombardment. This is a sign, you faithful, that your battle with the Jews is still a long way from coming to an end. It proves that the conflict is not taking place among us and between us, but with the infidel Jews. This is why you should say, whenever there is a rocket attack: God be praised, there is no God other than the one God, and He is our protector. We say to the Jews: “What you are doing to us today is written in the book of God.” There it is said: “Your will suffer fear and hunger.” But we too will sow fear and terror, as they have never seen before, in the hearts of those who bring us fear and hunger today. With the help of God, we should be afraid of nothing. We must not be afraid whenever a bullet strikes its target or whenever we are threatened … This does not frighten us. This should make us strong in our fight against the Jews.

The fronts are much more clear-cut in Palestine, even more so than in Iran. In the Gaza Strip, Imam Talal al-Majdalawi spends 25 minutes talking about the upcoming Prophet’s birthday and the need to constantly reflect on God and the holy Koran. He saves the last five minutes of his sermon for his political message: “Two hundred bullets were fired at us yesterday,” says the imam. “What prevents us from thinking about God each time one of those bullets strikes its target?”

His logic is the sort that has long determined the discourse of radical Islamists: The harder the enemy strikes us, the more clearly tries to present us with his supposed superiority, the more united and determined to oppose him we shall become. Everything, including nightly bombardment by the Israeli air force, follows a great, divine wisdom. “Do not hate evil, because it could be God’s gift to you,” he says. Such is the Islamist answer to the question of theodicy. If God is omnipotent, why is there so much evil in the world?

Hojjatolislam Ahmed Khatami, speaking to thousands of Iranian Muslims in the courtyard of the University of Tehran, is dealing with a similar problem. He begins the political portion of his sermon with a mention of the devastating earthquake in Iran’s Lorestan province, praising the “diligent Islamic regime for overcoming these difficulties.” But the congregation also wants to hear something else. When Khatami took to the podium, the faithful chanted: “Death to America! Death to England and its treachery! Nuclear energy is our natural right!” And Khatami doesn’t disappoint them. He mentions the controversy over Danish cartoon’s of Muhammad and calls upon Sunnis and Shiites to unite in the face of “this insult to the Prophet.” Quoting the Koran, he defends the right of resistance. “Our resistance is what triggers respect for our 27-year-old revolution. They have prepared many crises for our great nation, but we have left them behind with our heads held high.” Then he turns his attention to Iran’s nuclear conflict with the West.

UNIVERSITY OF TEHRAN

The Friday sermon at the University of Tehran is held exclusively by high-ranking members of the country’s ruling Shiite clergy. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader, personally appoints the campus preachers, among whom Hojjatolislam Ahmed Khatami is a novice. He preached to thousands of the faithful.

The Shiite and Sunni brothers find themselves facing a common enemy, one whose goal is to attack Islam. This is not just about Shiites. Any insult to the Prophet is an insult to the entire religion. For this reason, the Shiites and the Sunnis must strive to achieve more cooperation and unity of the hearts in this respect. Shiites and Sunnis should live together like brothers …

Our enemies are using the fairy tale about nuclear energy to bring about a crisis. The Security Council of the United Nations has itself become a factor of uncertainty and injustice, instead a forum for the security of the world … According to international custom, it is our right to control the technology to obtain nuclear energy. The Security Council wants to prevent us from mastering this technology. There is a law of the jungle, and it says: The strong will prevail. But our nation has made it clear that we want our right. We will stand up for our right with our blood and until we breathe our last breath.

“They have given us one month to discontinue our research,” he says, referring to the UN Security Council. “One month or one year — you can give us as many ultimatums as you wish.” Iran insists on its right and that, says the imam, means “that we will stand up for our right with our blood and until we breathe our last breath.”

These words are reminiscent of Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s speeches. Khatami mentions Iran’s recent navy maneuvers “in the blue waters of the Persian Gulf,” and then issues this threat: “If you so much as dare to show even a sign of aggression against the Islamic regime, we will strike your mouth with our fists.” His sermon ends with an appeal to God to protect his beloved Iran, grant its worthy leader success and accept all Iranians as soldiers of the Wali-e-Asr — the twelfth, or hidden, imam. “Expedite his resurrection,” he beseeches the Almighty.

Throughout the world, Friday prayers are the high point of the week in the life of a devout Muslim. It was a Friday when Adam entered the Garden of Eden, and it was a Friday when he left it again. The faithful believe that Muhammad said that the day of resurrection would also be a Friday. Muhammad supposedly also said that “God commanded both the Jews and the Christians to celebrate Friday as a day of worship but they ignored His command.” Muslims see the Koran as God’s last and complete revelation, and every Friday sermon serves as a reminder of that belief.

Reported by Daniel Steinvorth and Bernhard Zand and translated from German by Christopher Sultan.

The West Is Choked by Fear, An Editorial by Henryk M. Broder

A Somalian man broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard on Friday armed with an ax and a knife. He is accused of the attempted murder of the Danish cartoonist.

The attack on illustrator Kurt Westergaard wasn’t the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Salman Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights.

In 1988, Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” was published in its English-language original edition. Its publication led the Iranian state and its revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a “fatwa” against Rushdie and offer a hefty bounty for his murder. This triggered several attacks on the novel’s translators and publishers, including the murder of Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi. Millions of Muslims around the world who had never read a single line of the book, and who had never even heard the name Salman Rushdie before, wanted to see the death sentence against the author carried out — and the sooner the better, so that the stained honor of the prophet could be washed clean again with Rushdie’s blood.

In that atmosphere, no German publisher had the courage to publish Rushdie’s book. This led a handful of famous German authors, led by Günter Grass, to take the initiative to ensure that Rushdie’s novel could appear in Germany by founding a publishing house exclusively for that purpose. It was called Artikel 19, named after the paragraph in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights that guarantees the freedom of opinion. Dozens of publishing houses, organizations, journalists, politicians and other prominent members of German society were involved in the joint venture, which was the broadest coalition that had ever been formed in postwar German history.

Sympathy for the Hurt Feelings of Muslims

Seventeen years later, after the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published a dozen Muhammad cartoons on a single page, there were similar reactions in the Islamic world to those that had followed the publication of “The Satanic Verses.” Millions of Muslims from London to Jakarta who had never seen the caricatures or even heard the name of the newspaper, took to the streets in protests against an insult to the prophet and demanded the appropriate punishment for the offenders: death. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden even went so far as to demand the cartoonists’ extradition so that they could be condemned by an Islamic court.

This time, however, in contrast to the Rushdie case, hardly anyone has showed any solidarity with the threatened Danish cartoonists — to the contrary. Grass, who had initiated the Artikel 19 campaign, expressed his understanding for the hurt feelings of the Muslims and the violent reactions that resulted. Grass described them as a “fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act,” in the process drawing a moral equivalence between the 12 cartoons and the death threats against the cartoonists. Grass also stated that: “We have lost the right to seek protection under the umbrella of freedom of expression.”

“I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong,” commented then-British Home Secretary Jack Straw, referring to the decision by several European media organizations to republish the caricatures. Meanwhile, Vorwärts, the party organ of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party — one of the country’s two largest political parties — defended freedom of expression in general, but gave the opinion that in this special case, the Danes had “abused” the freedom, “not in a legal sense, but in a political and moral one.” For Fritz Kuhn, the then-parliamentary floor leader for the Green Party, it was a déjà vu experience: “They (the caricatures), remind me of the anti-Jewish drawings from the Hitler era before 1939.” With his statement, Kuhn, who was born in 1955, demonstrated that either he had a sensational pre-natal memory or that he had never seen a single anti-Semitic caricature in the Nazi’s Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper.

Like Eunuchs Talking about Sex

It was like listening to the blind talk about art, the deaf about music or eunuchs discussing sex based on hearsay. Because with the exception of the left-wing Die Tageszeitung, the conservative Die Welt and the centrist Die Zeit, every German newspaper and magazine followed the advice of Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth, who said “de-escalation begins at home,” and erred on the side of caution by not republishing the cartoons. Prominent German psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter advised: “The West should refrain from any provocations that produce feelings of debasement or humiliation.” Of course, Richter left open the question of whether “the West” should also refrain from the wearing of mini skirts, eating pork and the legalization of same-sex partnerships in order to avoid causing any feelings of debasement and humiliation in the Islamic world.

Had the Muhammed cartoons been reprinted by the whole German press, then newspaper readers could have seen for themselves how excessively harmless the 12 cartoons were and how bizarre and pointless the whole debate had become. Instead, the assessment was left to “experts” who had in the past defended every criticism of the pope and the Church as well as every blasphemous piece of art in the name of freedom of opinion, but who, in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, suddenly held the view that one must take other people’s religious feelings into consideration.

But that argument was clearly just an excuse, a way of excusing the fact they had been silenced by fear. After all, a few things had happened in the time between the Rushdie affair and the caricatures debacle: 9/11, the London bombings, Madrid, Bali, Jakarta, Djerba — events which some commentators have also interpreted as a reaction by the Islamic world to its degradation and humiliation by the West. Against this threat, it seemed more reasonable and, above all, safer, to show respect to religious feelings rather than insist on the right to freedom of expression.

Right to Offend More Important than Protecting the Offended

Very few people showed a willingness to break ranks. Among them was comedian Rowan Atkinson (“Mr. Bean”), who in the context of a debate over British proposed incitement of religious hatred legislation, declared that “right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended.” And Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a secular Muslim woman then living in the Netherlands, responded with a manifesto that began with the words: “I am here to defend the right to offend.”

But she was one of the few exceptions. Even the then-French president, Jacques Chirac, temporarily forgot that he represented the country of Sartre, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, and decreed that “anything that could offend the faith of others, especially religious beliefs, must be avoided.”

Thus began the “de-escalation” that had been called for. The only problem is the other side isn’t thinking about de-escalation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is still in effect, and the attempt to murder Kurt Westergaard last week wasn’t the first attempt to carry out a death sentence for an instance in which no crime had been committed. Islam may be the “religion of peace” in theory, but it looks different in practice.

A German-Turkish lawyer who lives in central Berlin recently had to go into hiding because she became the recipient of death threats after publishing a book. The tome doesn’t include any caricatures of Muhammad. It’s just the title that serves as a provocation: ” Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution.”

Joshua and Nathan visit their cousins Leah and Aaron in Chicago, January 2010

The visit to Chicago was very beautiful. It was great to see Sam, Olga and the kids. Joshua and Nathan had a wonderful time.

Joshua and Nathan in Missouri in December-January 2009-2010 Part II

More beautiful pictures of the little honeys!

Joshua and Nathan in Missouri in December-January 2009-2010

We had a blast with the little honeys as always! Joshua and Nathan were energetic and amusing. The pictures tell the story better than I ever could. Take a look!

Joshua and Nathan on the way to Missouri

On December 23, Shannon and I picked up Joshua and Nathan in Westford, MA and drove them back to Missouri. On the way, we stopped at Rochester where Shannon and I showed the kids our house. The kids were particularly excited about their room! But they did insist that the room needs to be repainted as it is currently pink… We made another stop in Chicago and then drove to Mokane, Missouri to the Reed Farm!

Here are some pictures from the trip, the farm and other places!

Joshua and Nathan on the Farm in November!