Switzerland and the Muslims

Last Sunday, in their referendum, the Swiss voted to ban the construction of minarets. They did not ban mosques or Muslims, just their minarets.

The United Nations called Switzerland's ban on new minarets "clearly discriminatory" and deeply divisive. The French Foreign Minister said, "It is an expression of intolerance and I detest intolerance. I hope the Swiss will reverse this decision quickly." The Vatican condemned and Amnesty International said the vote violated freedom of religion and would probably be overturned by the Swiss Supreme Court or the European Court of Human Rights.

And yet, is it not possible that the Muslims have only their brothers to blame for this vote?

Last year, Libya’s dictator, Gaddafi, effectively waged war against Switzerland. He announced a halt to all oil exports to Switzerland and a withdrawal of moneys out of Swiss banks. Libya suspended the issuing of visas for Swiss nationals and forced Libyan branches of Swiss companies to close. In August this year, Libya submitted a proposal for discussion by the General Assembly of the United Nations to abolish Switzerland and dismember it.

What caused Libya’s anger? The audacity of the Swiss police: Gaddafi’s son, a man with a track record of trouble in various other countries, including France, Italy and Denmark, was arrested in Geneva and held in custody for two days for maltreating his domestic staff. His sister, Aisha, vowed "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" and Switzerland immediately surrendered; they even sent their President to Libya to apologize.

Could Sunday’s referendum be the Swiss popular response? The campaign against the minarets will have exacerbated xenophobia and racial intolerance in Switzerland. That is unattractive. Is it also understandable?

The US Catholic Church blackmails Obama

Catholic Bishop Thomas J Tobin of Rhode Island has barred US Congressman Patrick J Kennedy from communion. Indeed, the Bishop went even further: he accused Kennedy of “false advertising” for describing himself as a Catholic. Tobin added, “If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things, you do certain things. …If you cannot do all that in conscience, then you should perhaps feel free to go somewhere else.” Is this Tobin’s private initiative or does he have the Pope’s approval to send people away from the Catholic Church?

I take it, that in Bishop Tobin’s book, his colleagues who have systematically lied, cheated and covered up sexual abuse by their priests are not false Catholics and do not have to go seek another Church.

Kennedy’s sin is his political stance against the legal prohibition of abortion. The issue has resurfaced in recent days, as the machinery of the US Catholic Church has lobbied with all its might to exclude abortion from the new health care bill. To that end, the Catholic Bishops were willing to let the very poor Americans, who do not have medical cover, continue to suffer.

Just in case you did not know on whose side the Catholic Church is.

American Justice Stinks

A Florida court has just awarded 300 million dollars to a 61-year-old woman who has been a smoker for many years and now suffers from severe emphysema. Philip Morris, the manufacturer of the cigarettes, has been instructed by the court to pay this woman 56 million dollars in damages and 244 million dollars in punitive damages.

This judgment raise moral as well as practical issues:

On the practical side, even if tobacco companies would be dissolved and all their assets used to pay out compensation to smokers – at this rate of awards, very few of the world’s smokers would get compensation. What is this? First in line takes all? Does not sound very fair to me. Secondly, I fail to understand how a Florida jury, consisting of people whose average annual income is most probably less than $50,000, reaches 56 million dollars in damages for a life of a 61-year-old damaged by emphysema.

On the moral side: the most obvious question is what about the woman’s own responsibility for her life. In the USA, cigarette packages included legal warnings about health damage since 1966! This woman continued to smoke to 1993!

What is even worse is the US notion of punitive damages. If society believes – as very often is the case – that a certain manufacturer ought to be punished for negligence or for criminal behaviour – why should the beneficiary of the penalty be an individual? Let the injured get damages awarded to take care of their injuries and let the state penalize those which the court decides to penalize.

Why is it that, especially in the USA, whenever something goes wrong: a) it is always someone else’s fault, and b) one is always prompted to make money by suing someone? Who are the only ones to really gain? The lawyers. American lawyers drive this system. They have a direct interest in the height of the damages as they get a high percentage of the damages awarded. And since the tobacco company will, in all likelihood, appeal, there is more work and more income for the lawyers. They have created a system that stinks.

A conversation in Germany, 2009.

In Munich, as I lay in a dentist’s chair for some emergency work to a broken tooth, a friendly Moroccan dental nurse in her early thirties asked me why it was that everybody spoke badly about the Jews.

It all started with small talk. She was curious about my good German, considering that I was a visitor from London. I explained that I am a Jew and that my grandparents had left Germany in 1933; that at the time my parents were still children but that German was the language spoken in our house in my childhood. Thus, German was a sort of mother tongue.

She wanted to know why they had left and I mentioned Hitler. ‘Ah’, she said, she did not really know much about him but did he push the Jews out? I did not want to get into this conversation and just said that it was rather more than pushing the Jews out of Germany. Yes, she knew that Hitler had been a really bad guy; perhaps to make me feel better, she added that Hitler was no longer around.

But why, she wanted to know, why do so many people speak badly about the Jews. Especially, she said ‘our people’, that is the Muslims, don’t like the Jews.

How should I have responded?

Her personal experience had been good. In her own version of ‘some of my best friends are Jews’, she told me of the generosity of Jewish acquaintances and repeated the question. She really wanted to understand why it was that so many people hated the Jews.

Anti-Semitism

This is a rough translation of a conversation I recently overheard in a German restaurant:

A: 65-ish year-old man, retired colonel (German army).

B: 30-ish year-old German

A: don’t talk to me about the holocaust. I’ve heard enough about it; especially with everything the Jews are doing to the Palestinians.

B: I don’t see the connection.

A: What don’t you see? Look at them. Look at Bubis. All his money. He owns the whole of Frankfurt. Where did he get the money?

B: Isn’t that somewhat superficial?

A: the fact is that Jews now own everything in Frankfurt.

More on boycott

I received quite a few emails commenting on my last blog, (Why do some Israelis call the world to boycott Israel?) Some of them questioned the efficacy of a boycott. The point I tried to raise was not the effectiveness and efficiency of boycotts. What I am interested in is:

1. Does Israel’s occupation of the West Bank justify a boycott and if so what kind of boycott.

2. Is it legitimate to do as Dr. Neve Gordon has done and “attack” one’s own country abroad?

Uri Avnery, the seasoned and well-respected Israeli left-wing politician and publicist, advocates not a general boycott on the State of Israel but rather a specific boycott on the product of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.

He writes: “Some 11 years ago, the Gush Shalom movement, in which I am active, called for a boycott of the product of the settlements. Its intention was to separate the settlers from the Israeli public, and to show that there are two kinds of Israelis. The boycott was designed to strengthen those Israelis who oppose the occupation, without becoming anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.” See LINK

This is also the thinking behind last week's decision by the Norwegian government to divest from an Israeli company (Elbit) because of their involvement with the “Separation Fence” that is being built on Palestinian land.

Why do some Israelis call the world to boycott Israel?

In an open letter published by the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Neve Gordon, a senior lecturer at the Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheba, called on the world to boycott Israel: “Putting massive international pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians – my two boys included – does not grow up in an apartheid regime.”

Anat Matar, a colleague at the Tel Aviv University, came out in his support: “…only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it.”

The general reaction in Israel, however, was uproar. Ben Gurion University’s President stated that Gordon’s remarks were “…an abuse [of] the freedom of speech prevailing in Israel and at the Ben Gurion University”. Moreover, they were “irresponsible and morally reprehensible”. She also suggested: “Academics who entertain such resentment toward their country are welcome to consider another professional and personal home.”

Not only right-wing Israelis are uncomfortable with calls such as Gordon’s or Matar’s. Gordon admits, “A global boycott can’t help but contain echoes of anti-Semitism. It also brings up questions of a double standard (why not boycott China for its egregious violations of human rights?)”

Jewish history is a long story of the successful Christian drive at marginalising Jews and Judaism. When that came to an end after the Holocaust, Arab countries started to systematically boycott Israel. For many years they successfully blackmailed their European and other trade partners into boycotting the newly founded Jewish State.

These were boycotts stemming from hatred of Jews and a wish to get rid of them and later from a concerted and clearly stated Arab wish to eliminate the Jewish State of Israel. This hope is still very much a fact of life.

However, when Gordon calls for external pressure he does so as an Israeli patriot and out of love of his country. Gordon, Matar and many other Israelis who pray and hope that the new US administration will force Israel to get out of the Occupied Territories do not hate Israel; they love their country and want it to thrive. They just hate the grossly immoral condition Israel has deteriorated into over the last forty years. To change that, they call for a boycott.

Gordon suggests pressure be placed in a “gradual sustainable manner that is sensitive to context and capacity” and talks of “sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner.”

Is that wrong?

David Grossman’s Until the End of the Land

David Grossman is my favourite Israeli writer and this very intensive and stirring novel, Until the End of the Land, which I am currently reading, is his best book to date. It has not yet been translated into English. A German translation, Eine Frau flieht vor einer Nachricht, is due out any day and can already be ordered at Amazon HERE

It is the story of a woman, two men and the woman’s two sons. The woman, whose one son is about to leave for a major military operation, cannot cope with waiting for possible bad news. She will not be at home and the bearers of bad news will not be able to deliver the message she dreads. She runs away. Wandering through the Galilee with one of the two men in her life, she hopes to protect her son by talking about him and about his life. No Short description can do this emotionally wrenching novel justice.

I am reading the book at a friend’s house in Germany. In the background, I can hear the chatting of the youngsters, young twenty-somethings, the kids of my hosts. I cannot avoid thinking how worlds-apart life in Israel is from that of these young Germans. Nobody is trying to kill them. Nobody is trying to destroy their country. Nobody has ever tried to annihilate their people.

Can others understand this at all?

Provincial Salzburg

Saturday was the opening night of the Salzburg Festival. They performed an opera I had never heard, not even heard of before – Handel’s Theodora. The rather repetitive music is quite beautiful and pacifying to listen to. But, the music often does not convey the drama of the opera’s storyline. It was beautifully performed with splendid soloists and a wonderful choir.

I am not a music critic and the reason I am posting this story is a Salzburg phenomenon that has always amused me. Whenever one goes to opening nights or premieres at the Salzburg Festival, the narrow road in front of the Festival hall is full of local onlookers who stand to await the so called VIPs and admire them. This time, the most important guest was the President of Portugal. His car, accordingly, was marked “VIP 1”. 

Most of the popular applause, however, is not directed at the foreign dignitary but at B list media celebrities. An aging German talk show host named Gottschalk traipses up and down together with his wife to the joy of dozens of press photographers and the street shouts in jubilation. Not seen last night was Bianca Jagger, the Salzburg regular, famed divorcee of the aging rock star Mick Jagger. The likes of her or of Gloria von Thurn and Taxis regularly bring out the Salzburg hordes. 

Tour de France

Steve, my personal trainer, told me that he would only read my blog if I would write about the Tour de France. As eager as I am to widen my readership - what can I say about the Tour de France?

I have now read up on it and have learned that the route is 3500 km. long, that some 200 cyclists participate and that millions (I cannot really believe that) line the route to watch the cyclists.

I also know that drugs and doping are rife and have always been used by participants.

I can understand the attraction of drugs but what I don't understand is the attraction of sitting on an uncomfortable saddle and cycling up and down French mountains. Why don’t they just do the drugs without the cycling?