Gershom Gorenberg – Page 34

More on CAMERA and Wikipedia

July 11, 2008May 4, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

Journalistic colleagues – in the Jewish and general American media – have emailed me to thank me for my recent column on CAMERA’s apparent efforts to slant Wikipedia articles. The notes came with comments like “batten down the hatches” or “hope they don’t throw eggs at your house.” I felt like the kid who took the dare to walk across the yard of the neighbor who keeps rottweilers, or who talked back to the teacher who still uses a paddle.

Knowing those colleagues, I don’t think any of them would pass up a story or a sentence just because CAMERA will attack them afterward. They are folks who have shown themselves to blessedly, professionally foolhardy. I can’t say I’m sure this is true of everyone in the business. This may please some donors to CAMERA, the attack-dog organization that claims to monitor the media for anti-Israel bias and that barks at any report it perceives as negative: See, those nasty media people have had the fear of God put in them.

Me, I’d think that if you cared about Israel, you really would want accurate info about what’s happening here, which means reports on what’s wrong as well as what’s right – as I’d think you’d prefer the doctors treating family members to be honest. You wouldn’t want the pediatrician to be afraid you’d start roaring at her if she said your kid showed definite signs of junk-food addiction and obesity.

Meanwhile, “dajudem,” a member of the CAMERA-organized group of stealth editors of Wikipedia has posted a fascinating comment on my Prospect column :

Cause of death: Globalization, weak dollar, human decency

July 11, 2008May 4, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

He was 48 years old, according to the brief items that appeared in the Hebrew press late last week (here , and here ). Yossi Danziger was the director-general of Polgat, a producer of wool fabric in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat. He died of a heart attack, shortly after the company did. He’d been trying to find alternative jobs for the 300 workers who lost their jobs when Polgat’s owner, the Bagir firm, decided to cut its losses and shut down the factory, apparently without great success .

Polgat, according to the news reports, couldn’t match the low production costs of Far Eastern competitors – especially when energy prices were soaring and the value of the dollar was shrinking daily. Most of the company’s export contracts were in dollars. Old-timers here recall a time when the dollar was considered a strong world currency and when using it for international contracts made sense.

As for labor costs, the news items did not detail how the Far Eastern competitors keep them down. We are supposed to accept the idea of garments and fabric and everything else being produced more cheaply in far away places where there are no safety protections for workers,

CAMERA: Committee for Agitprop in Middle Eastern Reporting

July 11, 2008May 1, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

CAMERA, which claims to monitor the accuracy of reporting on Israel in the American media, doesn’t feel obligated to be all that truthful itself, as I explain in my new column at the American Prospect. A CAMERA staffer organized activists to work as a group to edit Wikipedia articles on Israel – while hiding their intent and their connection to each other. Some would conceal their interest in Israel, get elected as impartial administrators, and then be able to decide disagreements between other volunteer editors.

Ineffectual as the CAMERA effort apparently was, there are several morals to the story. One is that despite the techno-idealism that Wikipedia can inspire, it’s best to approach the encyclopedia with an attitude of caveat lector, let the reader beware. The affair is also a reminder — not the first — that CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media.

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The Oud Plays for Peace

July 4, 2008May 1, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

It’s become dangerous to play the oud in Baghdad, the New York Times reports today. Religious extremists of all stripes apparently agree that secular music is unacceptable. No matter that the oud has been part of Islamic life for centuries. Fundamentalism (in all faiths) is a modern creation claiming to be old – a sort of Piltdown Man of the spirit.

One flaw in the article: Reading it, one could think that the oud is purely an Iraqi instrument, threatened by extinction – when in fact the voluptuous pear-shaped lute reigns from Morocco to Iran as the queen of music. The beauty of the oud may be the one thing that Greeks, Armenians and Turks agree on.

The article also cites a legend that the oud was invented by a descendant of Cain named Lamak. The basis of that legend is obviously the verse in Genesis 4, referring to Yuval, son of Lemekh, as the "father of all who hold the harp and pipe." One way to understand the story is that Yuval created a salve for the tear in the human soul that Cain left. I’m sure there’s a scholar out there willing to write a doctorate on whether the legend linking Lemekh to the oud is more Jewish or more Muslim,

The Roadblock to Damascus Lies on Pennsylvania Avenue

July 11, 2008May 1, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

Eyal Zisser, a top Israeli expert on Syria, says that Ehud Olmert and Bashar al-Assad appear serious about talking peace. The latest sign is Asad’s comment to the Qatari daily al-Watan Olmert has given him a commitment to return the entire Golan Heights.

In an analysis published through the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv U, Zisser describes that the most likely reason for Assad to reveal Olmert’s commitment, which was delivered via Turkey:

…the Syrians may have wanted to test Olmert’s seriousness, to check whether the message delivered to them was reliable, and whether Olmert would be capable of weathering the inevitable criticism from portions of the Israeli public. The fact that the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office declined to deny the news of the commitment has been understood as a tacit confirmation of its veracity.

The peacemaker here is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

Swimsuit extras: Pipes Dreams

September 8, 2008April 29, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

Reading your last post , Haim, I suspected that you’ve been hacking into my thoughts. Not about swimsuits per se , but about Daniel Pipes’s curious belief that swimming in mixed company is a democratic duty.

Strangely, I spent a day once with Pipes. A dovish friend of mine with an interest in the Middle East was then active in the Middle East Forum (MEF), Pipes’s organization. I’d recently published my book, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount , and my friend arranged for me to give two talks for the MEF – a lunch in New York, a dinner in Philadelphia. We took the train together between the two cities. Pipes was polite, energetic, intense. His eyes moved quickly when he talked. Did I say he was intense? He reminded me, strangely, of Bassam Jirrar, a Hamas-linked sheikh whom I’d interviewed for the book, and who’d been amazingly hospitable while explaining numerological hints in the Quran that Israel will be destroyed in 2022.

Sometime during the day, as I remember, Pipes gave me an article of his to read,

Disavow, Renounce, Didn’t Hear

July 14, 2008April 29, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Just in case I’m ever struck by the mad thought of running for political office in Israel, I’d like to set the record straight: I don’t agree with the prophet Isaiah’s political views. He doesn’t speak for me. No way.

It’s true that I’ve enjoyed some of his sermons, and I took some comfort from the spiritual stuff, like that vision of heaven, with the six-winged creatures praising God. But I attended to Isaiah strictly for the religion, not for the politics. I mean, I’m a patriotic Israeli (even if my lapel pin got lost in the wash, honestly).

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even there the day he said,

Ah, sinful nation!
People laden with iniquity!
Brood of evildoers!
Depraved children!
They have forsaken the Lord,
spurned the Holy One of Israel,
Turned their backs on Him!

but if I was there, I slept through the sermon. Otherwise, I would have told him that I might just run for office, and therefore I cannot tolerate him cursing my country.

Actually, now that I look for the first time at the transcripts (thank God there’s no YouTube clip) I can see it gets even worse.

Half-told stories: “Exodus,” the Armenians, and Holocaust Day

July 11, 2008April 27, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

In real life, Yossi Harel didn’t really look like Paul Newman. Harel was the commander of the “Exodus,” the illegal immigration ship that was stopped by the British in 1947 before it could bring 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine. In real life, the “Exodus” carried the survivors back to Germany. When Leon Uris fixed up the story for his potboiler, the boat got here. In the movie, Newman played Harel, renamed Ari Ben Canaan. OK, so Hollywood makes everything prettier and simpler and bigger. Nonetheless, Yossi Harel really was a hero, who also commanded three other illegal immigration ships.

Harel died last weekend, at age 90. The Hebrew obit in Ha’aretz quotes him describing what drove him. When he was 21, he said, he read Franz Werfel’s novel “40 Days of Musa Dagh,” about the Armenian genocide during World War I. “The book influenced my generation. I knew it by heart and my sense of mission grew sharper. I knew it was my job to save Jews.” Later, commanding the immigration ship Knesset Yisrael, he stood on the deck and looked north toward Turkey, and “the story of the Armenian people’s fight connected to my mission. To bring the survivors of the Holocaust, the refugees, to a safe shore, was the greatest thing I could imagine.”

For Harel, according to that testimony, there wasn’t a line between answering one genocide and another. He was helping Jews because fate had put him in a place where those were the people he could help.

Last week was the memorial day for the Armenians.

How the Bush Administration Pursues Peace

July 11, 2008April 24, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

Ha’aretz reports today on the latest leaks about the potential for Syrian-Israeli talks, and then hoses down the sparks of hopes with these paragraphs:

Following contacts between Israel and Syria, officials say significant U.S. involvement will probably be necessary for negotiations to move ahead, and that Syria is still demanding such involvement.

Both Israeli and foreign experts on Syria told Haaretz on Wednesday that a change in the American position was not on the horizon…

Southern Exposure: Telling Jerusalem Differently

July 11, 2008April 22, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

“Ancient Jerusalem Safari” said the sign on the side of the open-sided bus. It was parked this morning in the lot at the end of the promenade that stretches from UN Hill almost to Hebron Road. The promenade is an arc of stone walkways and stairs, of lawns and landscaping with a view northward of the Old City walls and the Dome of the Rock, which appear just close enough to be reachable, just far enough off to still be the double-page color illustration of the city at the end of the quest that I read about in a childhood book whose name I’ve forgotten but whose story I think I’ve remembered for a moment when I wake from a dream.

The promenade may be my favorite spot in South Jerusalem, partly because of the view and the quiet, partly because both Palestinians and Israelis spend time there. Riding my bike there on a weekday, I’ll pass Israeli joggers and women from Jebal Mukkaber in ankle-length dresses and sneakers out for their health walk. On one park bench I’ll see a young Orthodox couple, on another a young Palestinian couple – both having found a place public enough that it’s not immodest to be meeting there, private enough that they can really talk. In the morning, I usually pass several Jews praying by themselves, facing northward. In the afternoon, I’ll see a Muslim or three, kneeling toward the south. On Saturday afternoons, families from both sides of towns are picnicking and playing soccer. Whole congregations – especially ones that give women a role – come here to pray on the night of Tisha Be’av or at dawn on Shavuot instead of walking to the Western Wall, where the crowds of ultra-Orthodox brook no innovations in worship.

But on the middle days of Pesah and Sukkot, the promenade sprouts moveable police barriers and private security guards.

Marching up J Street, Passing Marty Peretz in a Shtreimel

July 11, 2008April 17, 2008 by Gershom Gorenberg

Much as I’ve come to disagree with Marty Peretz, I admit that I hesitate viscerally before criticizing him. Marty opened the pages of the New Republic to me in the 1990s. So attacking him feels like an act of ingratitude, if not a minor violation of oedipal inhibitions toward a one-time mentor. In his own blog, though, Marty appears to have thrown off all inhibitions. He’s turned obscene in print, figuratively and literally, as in his new screed against J Street. Even stranger, he’s exhibiting a definite ultra-Orthodox tendency in defense of his bellicose version of Zionism.