Worth reading.

 

My Jewish family fled fascist Europe in 1939. Here are 10 lessons on authoritarianism from a Jew who learned from history and family's past.

The Era of Stupid

Reflected in this:

Republican Congressional Candidate Says 'Holocaust Never Happened 

Art Jones, who hopes to challenge Democrat Dan Lipinski in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District, neither denies nor repudiates his past affiliation with the neo-Nazi Party.

Do you think that maybe Art Jones actually passing his high school history class might have helped?

To and fro

Registration of Guns and Licensing of Gun Owners from the Alien Perspective

Two interesting posts from Juan Cole: Israeli Ads against Marriage with American Jews are Part of a Population War   and Theocratic Dominance of the New Egypt may be Exaggerated

We've used PayPal with great success... because we are customers.  Apparently those who sell things often have a different experience.  The evils of PayPal.  Numbers of PayPal higher-ups.  Another person's experience and his Reddit post.  An anti-PayPal site.

Paul Krugman's take on the GOP's field of candidates:  Send in the Clueless.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).
And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.
So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless.

For women cartoonists.. if any...  (I talked about this way back in 2007.)

One more thing in the Affordable Care Act that helps.

Sometimes graffiti tells the truth...

May this strike fear into the Bush administration

War crimes are always prosecutable.

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old former Nazi camp guard, is due to stand trial on Monday on charges of helping to force 27,900 Jews into gas chambers in 1943.

If you watch Jon Stewart on the Daily Show

Thank him and his team for interviewing Baltzer and Barghouti:

This past Wednesday, The Daily Show aired an interview with Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American peace activist and author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories, and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a leading figure in the Palestinian democratic and nonviolent movement for peace.

They are getting a lot of hate mail over this.

Only known video of Anne Frank

From this site.

Human suffering is the same the world over

In a small anonymous home in the West Bank, a Palestinian academic has set up a project which is almost unheard of in the Occupied Territories.

Hassan Musa is the curator of a museum exhibition dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust in Europe.

The cracked white walls of this makeshift museum in the village of Ni'lin are covered from floor to ceiling with images of people forced out of their homes, tortured, imprisoned, starved and murdered.

In addition to the pictures depicting the Nazi brutality against Jews in Europe, there are also images of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the violence in Palestine since.

On one wall, there is a picture of a scared Jewish boy holding up his hands as Nazi soldiers look on; the caption reads: "Make your final account with Hitler and the Nazi Germans, not with the Palestinians."

On an adjacent wall there are photos of dead children, demolished homes and women screaming during the Israeli war on Gaza in January.

Musa, who is also a member of Ni'lin's Popular Committee Against the Wall, says pictures of the atrocities committed against both peoples were strategically placed side-by-side to not only reflect the suffering of both and help Israelis and Palestinians better understand each other, but also to demonstrate how victims of one conflict can become the harbinger of another.

"The Palestinians have no connection to the Holocaust in Europe, but unfortunately we are paying the price of a misdeed we did not commit," he said.

No 70 virgins?

70 RAISINS?

There seems to be a discrepancy in the history and translation of the Koran:

Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

Why would the Nazis care? I think they were doing all sorts of work setting up for their 1000 year Reich and were into all sorts of research. (Hard work creating your own reality, you know.) Why would they keep a variant of the Koran yet suppress it?:

Why were the Nazis so eager to suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the answer lies in their alliance with Islamist leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and also sought leverage against the British in the Middle East.

What will happen now?

When the Atlantic Monthly story on Koranic criticism appeared nine years ago, author Toby Lester expected early results from the Yemeni finds.

Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely - a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this.

In 2005, Puin published a collection of articles under the title, Die dunklen Anfange. Neue Forschungen zur Entstehung und fruhen Geschichte des Islam ("The dark beginnings: new research on the origin and early history of Islam," Hans Schiller Verlag, 2005). This drew on the work of the pseudonymous German philologist "Christoph Luxenburg", who sought to prove that incomprehensible passages in the Koran were written in Syriac-Aramaic rather than Arabic. Luxenburg's thesis became notorious for explaining that the "virgins" provided to Islamic jihadis in paradise were only raisins. The Koran, according to the research of Puin and his associates, copied a great deal of extant Christian material.

[snip]

The Islamic world is forced to adopt an openly irrational stance, employing its power to intimidate scholars and frustrate the search for truth. It is impossible for Muslims to propose a dialogue with Western religions, as 38 Islamic scholars did in an October 13 letter to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders, and rule the subject of text criticism out of the discussion.

[snip]

Throughout the Internet, Islamist sites denounce the work of a handful of marginalized scholars as evidence of a plot by Christian missionaries to sabotage Islam. What the Muslim world cannot conceal is its vulnerability and fear in the face of Koranic criticism. In the great battle for converts through the Global South, this may turn out to be a paralyzing disadvantage.

Sounds vaguely like some of our own homegrown fundamentalists who become rabid and froth at the mouth when challenged on biblical translation....

We need this really big arena where all religious literalists can gather clutching their own specific translation of their holy book. Then they can attack each other with their gospels and hymnals. Last one standing wins....

Update: Suggested in comments by DistributorCap: