Month: November 2009

America’s Next Top Nazi

If this isn’t the craziest thing you read today, then you must be scrubbing graffiti off the walls of a padded cell:

While the sixth season of the fashion reality show “Project Runway” is fast-approaching its climax, it’s become a running joke in my house that the show’s host, German supermodel Heidi Klum, would have made a good Nazi.

…

It’s an unfair comparison, to be sure, but the choice of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed German as host of this particular show was, for my sensibilities, an unfortunate one. It might not be so bad if Klum didn’t deliver these life-changing decisions with so much glee. Granted, no Nazi ever kissed a Jew on both cheeks after sending him or her to certain death, but most of the time Klum administers those kisses with as much feeling as a robot, and enunciates the words “you’re out” in tones that could send a frisson down the spine of even the most detached observer.

Aryan supermodel Heidi Klum with her husband
Aryan supermodel Heidi Klum with her husband

That’s from the Forward, one of the less berserk purveyors of reliably pro-Israel commentary in America. The author, Rebecca Honig Friedman, concludes the piece with a dash of ha ha, this mannequin’s probably not going to commit genocide, but I was stunned to find such weird prejudice and paranoia in a relatively vanilla venue. If the Forward‘s contributors and readers are this terrified of the “entertainment” industry, then what are we to make of their views on Iran, the Palestinians, and – brace yourselves for the frisson – Mearsheimer and Walt?

Gays Don’t Have an Equal Right to Kill

My whole life it seems “gays in the military” has been an issue. Liberal democrats and gay activists have been arguing for years with right-wingers and the military establishment over the issues surrounding the right of homosexuals to fight in the armed forces — from troop morale to religious morality, everyone’s got a problem. Bill Clinton attempted to defuse the issue with his “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy neutering the military’s witch hunters and silencing would-be out-and-proud gay soldiers, but the next wave in this socially liberated age is to fight for gays to be allowed to openly, outwardly, “serve their country.” Not surprisingly, the military establishment objects.

My stance has always been one of ambivalence. Obviously I’m against the government discriminating against people for any reason, but I always thought the gay ban was great for those young people, gay or straight, who needed the out (hah) from a possible future draft. On the other hand, there is the admittedly shocking dismissal of many gay Arabic interpreters in a time when the military would admit to desperately needing their skillset. But now that the subject has been brought up again, I realize I finally have a solid viewpoint: I am completely against the ban being lifted.

Gay people do not have the equal right to join an organization, government-run or not, that seizes vast amounts of American wealth, weaponizes it, and then detonates it in foreign countries full of innocent people who have caused the United States no harm — and in the process destroying them and their wealth, turning their kinsmen against us in rage. There’s nothing progressive about claiming they do. I support the military’s ban on gays in the military, and I do not at all sympathize with those heartbroken homosexuals who have been ousted. Their pain is nothing compared to that wrought the world over by the organization they hope to join or re-up with.

On the issue of gay marriage, I don’t feel the same way — equal legal rights should be extended to all parties no matter what I think about the institution of marriage. But not so when it comes to literal life-and-death issues of war and occupation.

Want to serve your country? We’re in a recession — start a business, soldier.

Goldstone & Hassan

After the Goldstone Gaza war crimes report was released on September 15, Israel immediately asked for the U.S.’s help in “curbing the international fallout.”  Its message was don’t let a bad precedent be set, you want to be able to pursue “the war on terror” without having to worry about being hauled before the International Criminal Court, don’t you?  
 
Four days earlier, on September 11, Riaz Hassan had released the results of a suicide bomber study using the “most comprehensive compendium of such information in the world.”  The findings should be familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention, “It is politics more than religious fanaticism that has led terrorists to blow themselves up,” “People tend to have a strong aversion to what they perceive as injustice,” “Strategies for eliminating, or at least addressing, collective grievances in tangible and effective ways would have a significant and (in many cases) immediate impact on alleviating the conditions that nurture the subculture of suicide bombings.”   
 
Those we deem to be deadly terrorists we subject to summary execution via drone, but the victims of our deadly terrorism or war crimes don’t have the capability to pull of summary executions like we do and their path to international justice is curbed.  
 
For the Palestinians, in 2004 the International Court of Justice spoke with upmost clarity that Israel’s separation wall and settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal, but to no effect.   Now the Goldstone report is being thwarted, with Congress about to vote on a resolution so intellectually challenged that Goldstone has had to issue a point-by-point rebuttal. 
 
To oppose the congressional resolution and thereby the law of the jungle, go here or here.

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