Author: jameswagner

A reminder from some who were impacted the most by the neglect and malignancy of the late, unlamented Giuliani adminstration.
Shame on the Episcopalian hierarchy! Their generally tolerant and progressive members deserve much better, as does all of New York!

The Episcopal Diocese of New York honored former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani Monday, as a group of parishioners protested outside.
. . . .
“They’re honoring him now for what he did September 11,” said protestor Glenda White. “We want him to remember what we went through for seven years.”

. . . don’t have to be jewish to be gay; don’t have to be jewish to be Israeli.
Not everyone has a problem with co-existence in this city of both jews and palestinians. Sometimes it helps to be gay.

[Jerusalem] Mayor Ehud Ulmert recently expressed the need for a massive march in the center of the city to show its citizens and the world that life goes on, El-Ad [director of the gay community center] mentions. “It’s difficult for me to think of a more appropriate event than Gay Pride to celebrate life in Jerusalem and to do it in a way that is relevant and meaningful to the current situation.”

The Onion reports this week, in banner headline, “God Re-Floods Middle East.”

JERUSALEM—In what theological and meteorological authorities are calling “a wrathful display of Old Testament proportions,” the Lord Almighty re-flooded the Middle East Tuesday, making good on last week’s threat to wipe the region clean if there was not an immediate halt to the bloodshed between Arabs and Jews.

If I can be forgiven , just this once, a religious metaphor of the sort loved by all true americans, allow me to suggest that our appointed government is driving us all to hell in a handbasket.
Just think about what has happened to the planet in only the last year and a half, and, even more exciting, what mischief is planned for the future (all of this accompanied by skyrocketing approval ratings, or so we are told).
It’s all so exciting, it makes one pee in one’s pants.

Would the world, after the experience of the Holocaust, step in to stop a new wave of anti-semitism and persecution of the jews?
Any answer to the question should require an examination of how effective world opinion has been in a defense against the more than fifty (to be historical, maybe we should say one hundred) years of humiliation and persecution visited on another victimized people, the non-jewish palestinians.
This appalling and continuing world neglect would actually be the best argument for the continued need for a strong and independent jewish state, except that it hasn’t worked. Jews aren’t safe in Israel, certainly no safer than in 1948 or anytime after, and jews are now imperiled all over the world in a way not seen since 1945, largely because of a general tendency to confound the attitude of jews everywhere with the specific policies of the Israeli government, a confusion dangerously encouraged by so many jews themselves.
The strong jewish state is ironically a threat to itself and to jews everywhere.
What is to be done to help the jews and the palestinians in the Middle East? The people who seem not to be able to live with each other but not to be able to live apart from each other can realize what they want and need, if those wants and needs are separated from their respective fanaticisms, by constructing a single large, inclusive state which would comprise all of 1948 Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, or something close to all that, and call it Palestine, the Unholy Land, Abrahamland or whatever. It must however be a state where all residents enjoy full and equal freedoms and citizenship under a single, truly secular government, one which is recognized and jealously protected by its neighbors, and by the entire world, precisely for the safety of those neighbors and that world.
After the horrors of the most recent weeks, if not months, and those too easily imagined for the near and even distant future, this is certainly no more unrealistic or preposterous a proposal than any now being advanced.
It is a proposal which should be on the table now, and it surely will be there as all others are successivly rejected or, if effected, seen to be as calamitous as the jerry-rigged unstable status quo which repels us all now.

I am unable to say a thing. The report will have to speak for itself.