How absurd. I am so sick of this nonsense.
18.01.2005
Some Israeli politicians are protesting a planned speech in parliament by German President Horst Köhler, arguing that the address, which Köhler will make in German, is an insult to Holocaust survivors.
"As long as there are still Holocaust survivors among us, the German language should not be spoken in parliament," Israel's Minister of Health Dani Naveh told the right-wing Israeli daily newspaper Maariv.
Naveh said he plans to boycott the speech, which Köhler will make toward the end of January, to mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany. His comment echoes the feelings of a number of members of the Israeli parliament or Knesset. Other Jewish public figures have spoken out in favor of Köhler using his native German.
The current dispute harkens back to 2000, when Germany's then-President Johannes Rau made the first address of a German president to the Knesset. His speech, also in German, caused a similar uproar.
Reminders of the Nazi era?
Responding to the current round of criticism, the acting president of the Knesset, Hemi Doron, said he would ask his superiors to cancel the event or to ask Köhler to hold his speech in English.
"My feet have never touched German soil, and I buy no German products," said Doron, whose grandfather was killed in the Holocaust. "I cannot allow that language to be spoken in the house of parliament of the Jewish people," he said.
Member of the Knesset (MK) Gila Finkelstein also said Köhler should speak in English, not German.
'Open wound'
"My whole body will tremor if I hear German in the Knesset," said Finkelstein, whose extended family was murdered in the Holocaust. "There is an open wound," she said, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post on Monday. Finkelstein called on Köhler to "act with sensitivity" and not speak German.
Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, who has rejected as the MKs' requests, was instrumental in the decision to allow Köhler to deliver his speech in German in the first place.
"It is clear that a visiting president speaks in his language," Rivlin told the Jerusalem Post. It would be "better not to extend an invitation than to demand that the guest speak in a different language," he argued.
At the same time, Rivlin said he understands MKs who argue that Israel cannot ignore what happened under the Nazis. But he also said the protest should not be directed toward one person or his spoken language, but a historic occurrence that "we must remember and not forget."
Insulting request?
Opposition leader Yosef Lapid -- himself a Holocaust survivor -- said the situation is different now than it was when Germany and Israel first resumed diplomatic relations. Forty years ago, Lapid would have have opposed a German address in the Knesset. Since then, Israel's relations with Germany have changed. Now, Lapid said, it would be insulting to prevent the German president from speaking in his own language.
In an interview in Germany's Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, one of the last survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and a prominent literary critic in Germany, criticized the discussion in Israel. Köhler should address the Knesset in German, he arged, calling the boycott threats "not only deplorable but shameful and, in the end, incomprehensible."
Associating the German language only with the Nazi regime and saying its use in the Knesset would defile Holocaust survivors is "pure nonsense," said Reich-Ranicki. It neglects, for instance, the fact that German-speaking Jews have played an enormous role in the development of modern thought, he told the paper.
German thinkers
"We can no longer imagine physics without Albert Einstein, psychology without Sigmund Freud, sociology without Karl Marx, literature without Franz Kafka, and modern music without Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg -- all German speaking Jews," Reich-Ranicki said.
He also noted that the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzle, published a decisive book on the creation of a Jewish state, Der Judenstaat in German in 1896, and that Herzl had long debated whether German should be that country's lingua franca.
It was only after the founding of the state of Israel that Hebrew became the official language because it was the common denominator among Jews of different nationalities.
Changing concerns
The German culture will soon cease to be a touchy topic in Israel, according to Reich-Ranicki. The current generation has too much else on its mind, said the man known in Germany as a "literature czar."
"In Israel, they won't discuss much longer whether Wagner should be played in concert halls or German should be spoken in parliament," he predicted. "The new generation of Israeli Jews isn't worried at all about such subjects. And that's a good thing."
Author DW staff (jen)
http://www.dw-world.de © Deutsche Welle
Liberal Christians
Friday, January 28, 2005
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
U.S. suffers its worst one-day losses of war as 6 other soldiers die in combat
The result of electing a man of marginal intelligence from a hick state such as Texas who believes that we came from a literal Adam and Eve, does not believe in evolution, believes that Jesus was literally born of a virgin and was physically resurrected and who also believes in a literal world wide flood, Noah and the ark. In short, the result of ignorant voters voting for one of their own, the worthless George W. Bush.
The International Herald Tribune
Copter crash kills 31 U.S. servicemen
By John F. Burns The New York Times
Thursday, January 27, 2005
U.S. suffers its worst one-day losses of war as 6 other soldiers die in combat
BAGHDAD The U.S. military on Wednesday suffered its gravest one-day losses of the Iraq war as 30 marines and one sailor died in the crash of a transport helicopter in the desert in western Iraq and six other troops died in combat.
The helicopter crash produced the largest loss of American lives in a single incident since the war started 22 months ago.
Militants waging a campaign to derail the national and provincial elections on Sunday carried out at least six car bombings and a flurry of other attacks on schools to be used as polling stations, political party offices and Kurdish sites, killing or wounding more than two dozen people, The Associated Press reported.
In Washington, President George W. Bush said that he had been informed of the helicopter crash but declined to give any details, saying that it was still being investigated. "Obviously, any time we lose lives it's a sad moment," he said.
Asked about polls that showed declining support among Americans for the war, he said, "The story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people."
"We value life," he said, "and we mourn when our soldiers lose their lives. But our longterm objective is to spread freedom."
General John Abizaid, the overall commander of American forces in the Middle East, said in Washington that the weather was bad at the time of the helicopter crash, and that there were no signs yet of hostile fire.
"It was not a special mission," he said. "It was a routine mission in support of the election."
Military officials in Iraq said the crash occurred over the town of Rutbah, a way station for American forces in Anbar Province, a third of the way between the Jordanian border and Ramadi, west of Baghdad in the so-called Black Desert.
Large troop movements have been stepped up as the elections approach.
A Pentagon official said the incident involved a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter transporting marines, The Associated Press reported, although there was no immediate word on how many people were aboard.
Since a spate of incidents in late 2003, military helicopters have followed revised flight procedures. They now routinely fly at low altitudes - they are often seen flying just above the reeds on the Tigris River - and maintain a zigzag flight pattern to avoid ground fire. Those procedures have sharply decreased the number of incidents.
A search and rescue team has reached the site of the crash, the military said in a statement, and an investigation is being conducted.
Before Wednesday, the most deadly helicopter crashes in Iraq occurred in November 2003. In one, a Chinook helicopter ferrying troops who were going on leave out of the country was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, leaving 16 soldiers dead.
In another, 18 soldiers died when two helicopters dodging insurgent fire from the ground collided over the northern city of Mosul.
A blast in a mess tent in Mosul late last year killed 22 people, including 18 Americans, 14 of them members of the military.
The crash on Wednesday came on another day of scattered violence in Iraq. Four marines were killed in combat against insurgents in Anbar Province, the military said, providing no further information.
A soldier with the 1st Infantry Division was killed and two were wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack by insurgents near the town of Dhuluiya, a statement from the military said.
In the Baghdad area a roadside bomb killed another soldier and wounded two others, the U.S. command said, according to The Associated Press.
The combined death toll from the helicopter crash and the fighting with insurgents - a total of 36 killed - surpasses the highest previous American death toll for one day. That came on March 23, 2003, when 29 American troops were killed during the early days of the invasion of Iraq.
Also on Wednesday, two car bomb attacks on American military convoys took place on the road leading to the Baghdad International Airport, a frequent target of rebel strikes. Four soldiers were wounded in the first attack, at about 10:25 a.m., the military said.
A second car bomb wounded three soldiers on the same road at about 2:35 p.m. and an armored Humvee was damaged, the military said.
Five people, including three policemen, were killed when three car bombs went off in Riyadh, north of Baghdad, news agencies reported.
In Sadr City, a heavily populated Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested 19 suspected insurgents in a raid Tuesday night, the military said. The area was the site of heavy clashes last year between American forces and Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric.
Terence Neilan of The New York Times contributed reporting from New York.
The International Herald Tribune
Copter crash kills 31 U.S. servicemen
By John F. Burns The New York Times
Thursday, January 27, 2005
U.S. suffers its worst one-day losses of war as 6 other soldiers die in combat
BAGHDAD The U.S. military on Wednesday suffered its gravest one-day losses of the Iraq war as 30 marines and one sailor died in the crash of a transport helicopter in the desert in western Iraq and six other troops died in combat.
The helicopter crash produced the largest loss of American lives in a single incident since the war started 22 months ago.
Militants waging a campaign to derail the national and provincial elections on Sunday carried out at least six car bombings and a flurry of other attacks on schools to be used as polling stations, political party offices and Kurdish sites, killing or wounding more than two dozen people, The Associated Press reported.
In Washington, President George W. Bush said that he had been informed of the helicopter crash but declined to give any details, saying that it was still being investigated. "Obviously, any time we lose lives it's a sad moment," he said.
Asked about polls that showed declining support among Americans for the war, he said, "The story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people."
"We value life," he said, "and we mourn when our soldiers lose their lives. But our longterm objective is to spread freedom."
General John Abizaid, the overall commander of American forces in the Middle East, said in Washington that the weather was bad at the time of the helicopter crash, and that there were no signs yet of hostile fire.
"It was not a special mission," he said. "It was a routine mission in support of the election."
Military officials in Iraq said the crash occurred over the town of Rutbah, a way station for American forces in Anbar Province, a third of the way between the Jordanian border and Ramadi, west of Baghdad in the so-called Black Desert.
Large troop movements have been stepped up as the elections approach.
A Pentagon official said the incident involved a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter transporting marines, The Associated Press reported, although there was no immediate word on how many people were aboard.
Since a spate of incidents in late 2003, military helicopters have followed revised flight procedures. They now routinely fly at low altitudes - they are often seen flying just above the reeds on the Tigris River - and maintain a zigzag flight pattern to avoid ground fire. Those procedures have sharply decreased the number of incidents.
A search and rescue team has reached the site of the crash, the military said in a statement, and an investigation is being conducted.
Before Wednesday, the most deadly helicopter crashes in Iraq occurred in November 2003. In one, a Chinook helicopter ferrying troops who were going on leave out of the country was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, leaving 16 soldiers dead.
In another, 18 soldiers died when two helicopters dodging insurgent fire from the ground collided over the northern city of Mosul.
A blast in a mess tent in Mosul late last year killed 22 people, including 18 Americans, 14 of them members of the military.
The crash on Wednesday came on another day of scattered violence in Iraq. Four marines were killed in combat against insurgents in Anbar Province, the military said, providing no further information.
A soldier with the 1st Infantry Division was killed and two were wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack by insurgents near the town of Dhuluiya, a statement from the military said.
In the Baghdad area a roadside bomb killed another soldier and wounded two others, the U.S. command said, according to The Associated Press.
The combined death toll from the helicopter crash and the fighting with insurgents - a total of 36 killed - surpasses the highest previous American death toll for one day. That came on March 23, 2003, when 29 American troops were killed during the early days of the invasion of Iraq.
Also on Wednesday, two car bomb attacks on American military convoys took place on the road leading to the Baghdad International Airport, a frequent target of rebel strikes. Four soldiers were wounded in the first attack, at about 10:25 a.m., the military said.
A second car bomb wounded three soldiers on the same road at about 2:35 p.m. and an armored Humvee was damaged, the military said.
Five people, including three policemen, were killed when three car bombs went off in Riyadh, north of Baghdad, news agencies reported.
In Sadr City, a heavily populated Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested 19 suspected insurgents in a raid Tuesday night, the military said. The area was the site of heavy clashes last year between American forces and Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric.
Terence Neilan of The New York Times contributed reporting from New York.
Monday, January 24, 2005
washingtonpost.com: Conservative Christians Protest Movie on Kinsey
I love it.
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 2004; Page A03
Conservative Christian groups across the country are protesting a film about the life of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, calling it a Hollywood whitewash of the man they hold largely responsible for the sexual revolution and a panoply of related ills, from high divorce rates to AIDS and child abuse.
Wary that too visible a controversy could help the film at the box office, most of the groups are not calling for a boycott or picketing outside theaters in Washington and a dozen other cities where "Kinsey," starring Liam Neeson in the title role, opened on Friday.
Instead, such groups as Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America are using more subtle, highbrow tactics against the third Hollywood release in a year that has instantly become a cultural dividing line, after Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."
"For those who think of people of faith as poor, uneducated and easy to command, I'm sure it would be amusing to see people praying outside of theaters," said Focus on the Family spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick. "But we want to have a serious intellectual conversation about who Kinsey was and what he did."
Robert Knight, director of the conservative Culture and Family Institute in Washington, said evangelical Christian and Roman Catholic groups also want to bring to bear the political clout they demonstrated in the presidential election.
"Just as Reagan was not content to contain communism but announced a rollback, pro-family organizations are not content to protest the latest outrage anymore, but will seek legislation and will punish sponsors of lewd entertainment," he said.
Knight acknowledged, however, that some opponents of the Kinsey film may be reluctant to try to punish its distributor, Fox Searchlight, owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
"Fox has a schizophrenic personality. Conservatives appreciate Fox news channel for bringing balance, but the Fox entertainment network, on the other hand, has clearly been the leader in driving TV into the sewer with its non-stop sexual emphasis," he said.
Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based broadcasting empire of psychologist James Dobson, has been working for nearly two years -- ever since it learned that director Bill Condon was planning to make the film -- to enlist scholars outside the evangelical Christian community to help "debunk" Kinsey's research, Hamrick said.
Prominent among them is Judith Reisman, author of the 1991 book "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud." Citing her work, Concerned Women for America, the nation's largest women's group, has encouraged its members to go to theaters and politely hand out leaflets that accuse Kinsey, who died in 1956, of committing child sexual abuse as well as scientific fraud.
Kinsey was a "massive criminal" who cooked his statistical data and based many of his purported findings on interviews with convicted sex offenders, Reisman said in an interview.
"He found pedophiles all over the country, sought them out and encouraged them to engage in sex with children and report on it to him," she said.
Reisman noted that she had seen only the first 15 minutes of the film because the producers cut off a private screening in Los Angeles as soon as they learned she was in the audience. But she said she closely followed the movie's filming and was certain it was "a coverup."
"The film effectively treats Kinsey as a tragic hero, a scientist -- a wacko scientist, perhaps, but a scientist. Kinsey was never a scientist," she said. "He was a change agent -- the most significant agent of change in American cultural life in the 20th century. The consequences of this sexual adventurism include AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, child sexual abuse, incest and pornography."
On the other side of the cultural barricades, the film's promoters have lined up an array of opposing experts. Jennifer Bass, a spokeswoman for the institute that Kinsey founded at Indiana University, said it is true that he interviewed prisoners and prostitutes.
But he and his collaborators "also spoke to women's garden clubs and parent-teacher organizations, church groups, nurses' groups, the Salvation Army staff and travelers on trains" -- about 18,000 subjects in all from 1938 to 1963, she said.
Biographer James H. Jones, whose "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, said that "in his eagerness to learn everything he could about human sexuality, Kinsey was a vacuum cleaner, and he had absolutely no standards about censorship or passing moral judgment."
There is no denying, he added, that Kinsey's samples were imperfect. But the Harvard-trained entomologist was "a rigorous scientist to his fingertips," and there is no evidence that he was a pedophile or that he knowingly cooked his books, Jones said.
"I do see him as a principal architect of the sexual revolution," Jones said. "But as a historian, I also know that it is silly to put all of this at his door. The times were changing, but Kinsey also helped to change the times."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 2004; Page A03
Conservative Christian groups across the country are protesting a film about the life of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, calling it a Hollywood whitewash of the man they hold largely responsible for the sexual revolution and a panoply of related ills, from high divorce rates to AIDS and child abuse.
Wary that too visible a controversy could help the film at the box office, most of the groups are not calling for a boycott or picketing outside theaters in Washington and a dozen other cities where "Kinsey," starring Liam Neeson in the title role, opened on Friday.
Instead, such groups as Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America are using more subtle, highbrow tactics against the third Hollywood release in a year that has instantly become a cultural dividing line, after Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."
"For those who think of people of faith as poor, uneducated and easy to command, I'm sure it would be amusing to see people praying outside of theaters," said Focus on the Family spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick. "But we want to have a serious intellectual conversation about who Kinsey was and what he did."
Robert Knight, director of the conservative Culture and Family Institute in Washington, said evangelical Christian and Roman Catholic groups also want to bring to bear the political clout they demonstrated in the presidential election.
"Just as Reagan was not content to contain communism but announced a rollback, pro-family organizations are not content to protest the latest outrage anymore, but will seek legislation and will punish sponsors of lewd entertainment," he said.
Knight acknowledged, however, that some opponents of the Kinsey film may be reluctant to try to punish its distributor, Fox Searchlight, owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
"Fox has a schizophrenic personality. Conservatives appreciate Fox news channel for bringing balance, but the Fox entertainment network, on the other hand, has clearly been the leader in driving TV into the sewer with its non-stop sexual emphasis," he said.
Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based broadcasting empire of psychologist James Dobson, has been working for nearly two years -- ever since it learned that director Bill Condon was planning to make the film -- to enlist scholars outside the evangelical Christian community to help "debunk" Kinsey's research, Hamrick said.
Prominent among them is Judith Reisman, author of the 1991 book "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud." Citing her work, Concerned Women for America, the nation's largest women's group, has encouraged its members to go to theaters and politely hand out leaflets that accuse Kinsey, who died in 1956, of committing child sexual abuse as well as scientific fraud.
Kinsey was a "massive criminal" who cooked his statistical data and based many of his purported findings on interviews with convicted sex offenders, Reisman said in an interview.
"He found pedophiles all over the country, sought them out and encouraged them to engage in sex with children and report on it to him," she said.
Reisman noted that she had seen only the first 15 minutes of the film because the producers cut off a private screening in Los Angeles as soon as they learned she was in the audience. But she said she closely followed the movie's filming and was certain it was "a coverup."
"The film effectively treats Kinsey as a tragic hero, a scientist -- a wacko scientist, perhaps, but a scientist. Kinsey was never a scientist," she said. "He was a change agent -- the most significant agent of change in American cultural life in the 20th century. The consequences of this sexual adventurism include AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, child sexual abuse, incest and pornography."
On the other side of the cultural barricades, the film's promoters have lined up an array of opposing experts. Jennifer Bass, a spokeswoman for the institute that Kinsey founded at Indiana University, said it is true that he interviewed prisoners and prostitutes.
But he and his collaborators "also spoke to women's garden clubs and parent-teacher organizations, church groups, nurses' groups, the Salvation Army staff and travelers on trains" -- about 18,000 subjects in all from 1938 to 1963, she said.
Biographer James H. Jones, whose "Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, said that "in his eagerness to learn everything he could about human sexuality, Kinsey was a vacuum cleaner, and he had absolutely no standards about censorship or passing moral judgment."
There is no denying, he added, that Kinsey's samples were imperfect. But the Harvard-trained entomologist was "a rigorous scientist to his fingertips," and there is no evidence that he was a pedophile or that he knowingly cooked his books, Jones said.
"I do see him as a principal architect of the sexual revolution," Jones said. "But as a historian, I also know that it is silly to put all of this at his door. The times were changing, but Kinsey also helped to change the times."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
