Heretics' almanac

Yom haZikaron

Every time I've visited Israel, I've been unsettled by the ubiquitous presence of young men and women carrying assault rifles, slung over their shoulders as they go about the regular business of taking a bus, hanging out at a cafe, etc. I don't like rifles, and it's hard to get past the feeling that something isn't quite right when there are so many guns, handled with such familiarity.

Today, Israel commemorates its war dead: the soldiers, police officers, bus drivers, and passers-by killed in the course of the last nearly 100 years since Jews became a noticeable factor in the area now known as Israel. This is a day of regret, not celebration. Another country - virtually every other country - would have erected an triumphal arch somewhere to justify the war dead; but not Israel. Today, names will be read, photographs shared; stories told, about individuals whose loss forms a nearly unbearable sacrifice for the Israelis.

Guns and Whores - on either side of the pond

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page says today that:

Reading a summary of European editorials yesterday, we couldn't help but wonder if they all got the same New York Times memo, so uniform was their cultural disdain and their demand for new gun restrictions.

To some extent, they're right - the Norwegian newspapers - and presumably public opinion - immediately took this incident as further proof that American values and gun laws leave too much to be desired. But they're not all wrong, either. One op-ed in the Roanoke Times, which must have been penned within minutes of the massacre, that:

Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.... That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.

At the same time, there is a raging debate in Norwegian politics about criminalizing prostitution. Here's how these issues intersect:

So today...

... at the last moment in their annual meeting, the Norwegian Socialist Left party got together on some business they could all agree about. Of course, it was on Israel:

• First of all, they reached a principled agreement that the Palestinians's righteous rage about their terrible plight by definition can not be interpreted as antisemitism, and that for two reasons: as an oppressed people engaged in a struggle for liberation, their cause is inherently righteous; and also because they as Semitic people can not be anti-themselves.
• Second, they agreed that Zionists have forever lost any moral standing to invoke the Holocaust or indeed any persecution of Jews through history. No matter how much Jews have been persecuted, there is simply no excuse for the racist, colonialist Zionist enterprise.

Apparently, it had been a tough meeting, and the delegates were glad that at least this dual resolution went through without much debate. They also agreed to exempt from the academic boycott of Israelis those Israeli academicians who advocated the boycott. "Nothing should prevent the free exchange of ideas among enlightened individuals," the resolution read. The famous radical professor Lirpa Loof was in attendance for this resolution, having been invited by the foreign affairs committee.

There was a bit more disagreement on resolutions regarding immigrants to Norway. A minority of the meeting held that immigrants who are considered unfamiliar with Norwegian society should enjoy a period of immunity from criminal prosecution for certain crimes; instead of punishment they should be referred to counseling by their own spiritual leaders.  The majority felt that cultural alienation rather should be a mitigating factor, especially if the accused came from a culture that was frequently maligned by Western cultural imperialists. There was an agreement that an ad hoc committee would look further into this issue.