In case anyone's wondering...

I'm still around and I've not yet completely abandoned this blog. I'll try to post something interesting soon.

Happy Hanukkah!

It Can't Happen Here

Found at the LewRockwell.com Blog.

Black Jena 6 Protesters Stage Mock Lynching of Child

News-Star article

Gramblinite article

Don't tase famous people, bro!

Suck it, Jesus.

"A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Can you believe this shit? Hell has frozen over. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now!" -- Kathy Griffin, accepting her Emmy

I've never really liked Kathy Griffin (I've heard that she's mean to co-workers), but I do applaud her outspoken atheism.

The censorship of her comment is, of course, ridiculous.

Israeli neo-Nazi ring busted

In a case that would seem unthinkable in the Jewish state, police said Sunday they have cracked a cell of young Israeli neo-Nazis accused in a string of attacks on foreign workers, religious Jews, drug addicts and gays.

[EDIT]

All the suspects are in their late teens or early 20s and have Israeli citizenship, [police spokesman Mickey] Rosenfeld said.

[EDIT]

Police computer experts have determined they maintained contacts with neo-Nazi groups abroad, and materials seized include a German-language video about neo-Nazis in the U.S.
The group planned its attacks, and its targets were foreign workers from Asia, drug addicts, homosexuals, punks and Jews who wore skullcaps. In one case they discussed planning a murder, Rosenfeld said, without providing details.

[EDIT]

Under Israeli law, a person can claim citizenship if a parent or grandparent has Jewish roots. Authorities say that formulation allowed many Soviets with questionable ties to Judaism to immigrate here after the Soviet Union disintegrated. About 1 million Soviets moved here in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Rosenfeld said all the suspects had "parents or grandparents who were Jewish in one way or another."

Full article

Holocaust Porn

It was one of Israel’s dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.

“I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women,” said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film “Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel” had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. “We were in elementary school,” he noted. “I remember how embarrassed we were.”

Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the “yellow aspects of nurturing the memory of the Holocaust.”

“Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?” she asked. “The answer is, we are.”

The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch,” was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.

Full article

Finkelstein, DePaul reach settlement

The long-running confrontation between embattled professor Norman Finkelstein and DePaul University ended today without the dramatics he had promised.

Instead, he read a statement announcing his resignation this morning on the university's main quadrangle before about 120 supporters announcing that he and DePaul had resolved the controversy. But the terms were kept confidential.

Finkelstein had vowed to present himself at his office door today and, if denied entrance, to perform an unspecified act of civil disobedience. He vowed to go on a hunger strike if he were jailed.

Finkelstein, a scholar praised and damned for his strong criticisms of Israel, was denied tenure in June. However, his classes remained in the university's course schedule until abruptly canceled a little more than a week before fall term classes began on the school's Lincoln Park campus.

At that point, Finkelstein also was notified that he had been put on administrative leave for the 2007-08 school year. By long-standing academic tradition, a professor denied tenure is entitled to one last year in the classroom of his home university.

Full article

I hope Prof. Finkelstein got a good settlement and I wish him well in the future, but I was looking forward to the promised dramatics.

Opus Prohibitorum

Here are the two censored Opus strips:






I don't even get where the offensive part is supposed to be.

Also, though I think everyone should just swim naked, I kind of like the burqini.

Finally, I realize that the title of this post should arguably be "Opera Prohibitorum" (since there are two strips), but I felt like that would be stretching the pun too far.

Free Speech/Blasphemy

In keeping with the spirit of Fröken Wikstrom's editorial on voluntary censorship and Herr Ströman's editorial on the right to ridicule a religion, I'm collecting a few examples of blasphemy that can be found on the internet.

I've decided to limit this post to works that satirize or otherwise ridicule the most holy of holies of each of the major Abrahamic religions. I'll try to offend more ecumenically in future posts.

Free (Your Own) Speech

The pitfalls of 'voluntary' censorship
By Cecilia Wikstrom

Friday, August 17, 2007
UPPSALA, Sweden

Just a few weeks ago, on the opening day of a summer art exhibition in rural Sweden, a collection of provocative pencil sketches of Muhammed were suddenly lifted off the walls. The gallery director said she feared for the security of Swedes abroad.

Such acts of "voluntary" censorship have become routine at cultural institutions in Europe. A Berlin opera house last year cancelled a Mozart premiere because of the fear that the stage show, which featured decapitations of religious figures, could provoke violence. Even more ominous, major Western providers of international Internet services routinely tailor their Web sites so that citizens living in totalitarian states are not exposed to "dangerous" ideas.

Pressure to draw a dark curtain over controversial cultural expressions is far from a new phenomenon in Europe. As an ordained priest, for example, I remember an outcry of righteous anger in Uppsala in Sweden in 1998. The town's cathedral, which is one of the oldest in Northern Europe, hosted an exhibition that depicted a gay, Aids-afflicted Jesus. There were bomb threats and Christians from all over Europe chastised the exhibition.

Censorship has a long and bloody history in Europe, but so does the defense of free speech.

Intellectuals and artists spearheaded the Enlightenment movement that demanded that all citizens be given the right to express themselves. I am proud to observe that Sweden became the first state to introduce laws that guaranteed freedom for the press in 1766, and several European states followed suit. The fundamental document for the French Revolution in 1789 stipulates: "The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely."

More than 200 years later, these rights are once again threatened. Meanwhile, European leaders are haggling over a new constitutional treaty covering issues ranging from environmental protection to tax polices. But that does not exclude the need to give a high-priority to key underlying values which are the foundation of democratic society, namely the universal right to free speech and expression. Therefore, the new EU treaty should include the appointment of a free speech commissioner, who reports directly to the President of the European Council.

The need for a commissioner to protect free speech grew evident during the Muhammad cartoon controversy in Denmark. The Danish government stood alone when it refused to apologize on behalf of the tabloid that published caricatures of Muhammad that caused a furor in Muslim states.

Commenting on Europe's unwillingness to help Denmark during the scandal, the Economist paraphrased Voltaire: "I disagree with what you say and even if you are threatened with death I will not defend very strongly your right to say it."

An EU commissioner would act to robustly defend the right to free expression in member states, as well as candidate states such as Turkey, where the right to free speech of the Kurdish minority has been under threat. An important task would be to publicize an annual assessment of the state of press and cultural freedom in all of the European Union. The free speech commissioner should also be a strong voice in public opinion and establish safe havens in Europe for persecuted writers and bloggers in other parts of the world.

At the same time, free speech can never be an unbridled right. Besides the obvious laws against slandering or inciting violence, the commissioner needs to be a voice for religious tolerance. The concept of religious tolerance should always go hand in hand with free speech. This was understood by Voltaire, who declared: "Toleration has never yet excited civil wars, whereas its opposite has filled the earth with slaughter and desolation."

Free speech is by no means a guarantee for a fair and just society. On the other hand, the failure to safeguard the rights of writers and artists has proven fateful in history. Heinrich Heine keenly observed the dangers of cultural censorship when he witnessed the Nazis' book pyres in 1933: "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

Original article

Though I strongly agree with the points made by Cecilia Wikstrom in the above editorial, I do want to correct one error she made. It is very unlikely that Heinrich Heine could have witnessed the Nazis' book pyres in 1933, since he died in 1856.

More Muhammed Cartoon Controversy in Scandinavia

Fears grew of a new confrontation over images deemed blasphemous by Muslims as Pakistan joined Iran in protest over a sketch by a Swedish artist portraying the prophet Mohammed as a dog.

[EDIT]

The publication, in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, came after several galleries had refused to display the drawings, apparently for fear of violent retaliation from offended Muslims.

Early last year, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the Muslim world after the publication in Denmark of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed which were also deemed blasphemous.

"Alongside the picture, we published a comment piece saying that it was serious that there is self-censorship among exhibition [galleries]," said the Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief, Ulf Johansson.

Full article

English translation of the Nerikes Allehanda editorial

Eli Valley's Foxman comic

One of the best sites I've ever seen...

Disinfotainment

Arson at the Crematorium

Israel's only commercial crematorium, viewed by Orthodox Jews as an abomination, was severely damaged in a suspicious fire Wednesday, just hours after its secret location was revealed in a religious newspaper.

Full article

Lowbrow

Earlier tonight on Ovation TV I watched The Lowdown on Lowbrow, a documentary about the lowbrow art movement, of which I am a great fan. La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Juxtapoz magazine, and Robert Williams were all featured prominently.

When I first moved to Hollywood, my apartment was on Lanewood Avenue, which is two blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. I walked past the nearby La Luz de Jesus many, many times, but I thought it was just a strange Mexican store-front church, so I never went inside. It was only after I had left California and started law school back in Louisiana that I began my subscription to Juxtapoz and discovered my mistake. Missing that opportunity to see such interesting artwork in my own old neighborhood is one of my three big regrets about my time in Los Angeles. (The others are never getting a hotdog at Pink's and never going to the Ackermansion.)

Local ADL Leader Fired Over His Refusal To Deny Armenian Genocide

The national Anti-Defamation League fired its New England regional director yesterday, one day after he broke ranks with national ADL leadership and said the human rights organization should acknowledge the Armenian genocide that began in 1915.

Full article


Joey Kurtzman of Jewcy has written a great criticism of Genocide-denier Abe Foxman and follow-up pieces about the Watertown debate and Andrew Tarsy's firing.

Government to pay $80K to pair arrested for anti-Bush T-shirts

The federal government has agreed to pay $80,000 to a Texas couple arrested and charged with trespassing in 2004 after they refused to cover up homemade T-shirts with anti-Bush slogans.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, announced the settlement yesterday.

The Ranks were handcuffed, removed from the July 4, 2004, presidential rally at the state Capitol and held in police custody for between one and two hours.

Full article

A Little Intifada Now and Then Is A Good Thing

I made the t-shirt design above and the one immediately below in protest of the forced resignation of Debbie Almontaser for actually discussing the meaning of the word "intifada" rather than just condemning the original INTIFADA NYC t-shirts. Click on either image to be brought to that design's store, where other shirt styles and more products are also available.


The a-Rab (which looks like it's going to be a very interesting website) has created its own t-shirt commentary on the controversy: