American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause

Posted on June 26, 2010 by abby

NY TIMES– One day nearly 20 years ago, Stephen Naman was preparing to help the rabbi of his Reform Jewish temple in South Carolina move the congregation into a new building. Mr. Naman had just one request: Could the rabbi stop placing the flag of Israel on the altar?

“We don’t go to synagogue to pray to a flag,” Mr. Naman, 63, recalled having said in a recent telephone interview.

That rabbi acceded to the request. So, after being transferred to North Carolina and joining a temple there six or seven years later, Mr. Naman asked its rabbi to remove the Israeli flag. This time, the reaction was more predictable.

“The rabbi said that would be terrible,” recounted Mr. Naman, a retired paper company executive who now lives outside Jacksonville, Fla., “and that he’d be embarrassed to be rabbi of such a congregation.” As shocking as Mr. Naman’s insistence on taking Israel out of Judaism may seem, it actually adheres to a consistent strain within Jewish debate. Whether one calls it anti-Zionism or non-Zionism — and all these terms are contested and loaded — the effort to separate the Jewish state from Jewish identity has centuries-old roots.

For the past 68 years, that stance has been the official platform of the group Mr. Naman serves as president of, the American Council for Judaism. And while the establishment of Israel and its centrality to American Jews consigned the council to irrelevancy for decades, the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made Mr. Naman’s group look significant, or even prophetic.

It is not that members are flocking to the council. The group’s mailing list is only in the low thousands, and its Web site received a modest 10,000 unique visitors in the last year. Its budget is a mere $55,000. As Mr. Naman acknowledges, the council’s history of opposition to Zionism renders it “radioactive” for even liberal American Jewish groups, like J Street and Peace Now.

Yet the arguments that the council has consistently levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence over the last decade, with the collapse of the Oslo peace process, Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and most recently the fatal attack on a flotilla seeking to breach the naval blockade of the Hamas regime. One need not agree with any of the council’s positions to admit that, for a certain faction of American Jews, they have come back into style.

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Photo by flickr user RonAlmog

South African Doctor Invents Female Condoms With ‘Teeth’ to Fight Rape

Posted on June 25, 2010 by abby

CNN– South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.

“She looked at me and said, ‘If only I had teeth down there,'” recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. “I promised her I’d do something to help people like her one day.”

Forty years later, Rape-aXe was born. Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said. Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it – a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.

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World’s Rich Got Richer Amid ’09 Recession

Posted on June 23, 2010 by abby

YAHOO NEWS– The rich grew richer last year, even as the world endured the worst recession in decades. A stock market rebound helped the world’s ranks of millionaires climb 17 percent to 10 million, while their collective wealth surged 19 percent to $39 trillion, nearly recouping losses from the financial crisis, according to the latest Merrill Lynch-Capgemini world wealth report.

Stock values rose by half, while hedge funds recovered most of their 2008 losses, in a year marked by government stimulus spending and central bank easing. “We are already seeing distinct signs of recovery and, in some areas, a complete return to 2007 levels of wealth and growth,” Bank of America Corp wealth management chief Sallie Krawcheck said.

The fastest growth in wealth took place in India, China and Brazil, some of the hardest hit markets in 2008. Wealth in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific soared to record highs. Asia’s millionaire ranks rose to 3 million, matching Europe for the first time, paced by a 4.5 percent economic expansion.

Asian millionaires’ combined wealth surged 31 percent to $9.7 trillion, surpassing Europe’s $9.5 trillion. In North America, the ranks of the rich rose 17 percent and their wealth grew 18 percent to $10.7 trillion. The United States was home to the most millionaires in 2009 — 2.87 million — followed by Japan with 1.65 million, Germany with 861,000, and China with 477,000. Switzerland had the highest concentration of millionaires: nearly 35 for every 1,000 adults.

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Photo by flickr user J_D_R

Young Man Beaten to Death in Eqypt for Using the Internet

Posted on June 18, 2010 by abby

HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST– Activists and supporters of Internet freedom in Egypt have described to Human Rights First different measures the Egyptian authorities take to control the activities of people accessing the Internet, but as of last week, it seems they have reached a whole new level. A young man was dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death after refusing to show his ID card to police.

Patrons of Internet cafés are often required to provide identification details before logging on, and then their searches and activities online can be monitored. Police officers carry out random raids on Internet cafés and gather identification information from those present, even though there is no justification in Egyptian law for this kind of demand.

On the evening of June 7, 2010 what appeared to be one of these random raids escalated into the horrific brutalization of a young man by two policemen. Reports now reveal that the man may have been targeted for exposing police corruption. He posted a video on the internet depicting officers sharing the profits of a drug bust.

One thing that distinguishes this incident from other incidents of government intimidation of bloggers and activists is that it was carried out in plain view, and other citizens were able to capture and transmit images of police brutality before they could be confiscated. As human rights defenders in Egypt have told us, the government’s usual approach is to brutalize activists/netizens after detaining them and to hold them in custody until the bruises have disappeared. Gamal Eid, lawyer and Executive Director for Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, has said that with respect to bloggers and Internet activists, the government will find reasons to “kidnap them, torture them, take their passport and send them to prison until the hurts on their body become normal so for us there is no evidence of what happened.”

Here are the facts of this tragic case: Khaled Mohamed Saeed, 28, was at an Internet café that he frequented in the Sidi Gaber district of Alexandria when two officers from the local police station entered the café and demanded to see everyone’s ID cards, claiming that they were authorized to do this under the Emergency Law, a law that has been condemned by international human rights organizations and Egyptian activists as allowing security forces to commit abuses with near impunity.

Khaled objected to what he saw as a violation of his rights. There are various reports of what happened next. One press report mentions that the police bound Khaled’s hands and started to beat him, others just describe the beating. Police officers knelt over him beating his head against the marble floor tiles of the café. Khaled was then dragged outside the Internet café, covered in blood, and the beating continued in full view of many witnesses, some of whom pleaded with police to stop. Two doctors even tried to help. Eyewitnesses said his head was banged against an iron door, steps and walls of an adjacent building. He was thrown into a police vehicle, and fifteen minutes later, his gruesomely disfigured dead body was deposited in the street.

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49% of US Voters Think Aid Flotilla is to Blame for Deaths at Sea

Posted on June 18, 2010 by abby

RASMUSSEN– Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters believe pro-Palestinian activists on the Gaza-bound aid ships raided by Israeli forces are to blame for the deaths that resulted in the high-profile incident.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 19% of voters think the Israelis are to blame. Thirty-two percent (32%) more are not sure.

But 51% say Israel should allow an international investigation of the incident. Twenty-five percent (25%) agree with the Israeli government and reject the idea of an international probe. Another 24% are undecided.

In the May 31 incident, nine people were killed when Israeli commandos raided an aid ship headed from Turkey to break the Israeli blockade imposed on the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

While a number of countries have called for an international investigation of the incident, the Israeli government is skeptical of such probes arguing that the participants are often biased against the Jewish state.

Nearly half (49%) of U.S. voters agree that, generally speaking, most countries are too critical of Israel. Twenty-one percent (21%) say those countries are not critical enough. Seventeen percent (17%) say neither.

The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on June 3-4, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

At the United Nations and in other international forums, the United States often finds itself as one of Israel’s few defenders, but just 24% say, generally speaking, America is too supportive of Israel. Thirty-three percent (33%) say the United States is not supportive enough, while 32% say neither is the case.

Israel is one of only five countries that most Americans are willing to defend militarily.

Republicans feel much more strongly than Democrats and voters not affiliated with either party that pro-Palestinian activists are to blame for the deadly outcome on the Gaza-bound aid ships.

While 65% of Democrats and 50% of unaffiliateds favor an international investigation, Republicans are evenly divided on the idea.

One possible explanation is that nearly two-thirds (65%) of GOP voters think most countries are too critical of Israel, a view shared by just 37% of Democrats and a plurality (46%) of unaffiliated voters.

Similarly, Republicans are more than twice as likely as Democrats to think the United States is not supportive enough of Israel. Unaffiliated voters are more narrowly divided.

Last year at this time, 35% criticized President Obama for not being supportive enough of Israel, while 48% said the president’s Middle East policy was about right.

Seventy percent (70%) of voters say they have been following recent news reports about the incident involving the ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip at least somewhat closely. Twenty-eight percent (28%) have not been following closely, if at all.

Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters think it is unlikely that lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians will be achieved in the next 10 years, consistent with findings going back several years. Fifty-eight percent (58%) view Israel as a U.S. ally and two percent (2%) as an enemy, with 32% saying the country is somewhere in between the two.

By comparison, just 30% see the United Nations, which has been pushing for an international probe of the ship incident, as an ally of the United States. Sixteen percent (16%) see the UN as America’s enemy, and 49% put it somewhere in between.

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