>Google blogger service all fouled up

>A technical note:  It’s come to my attention that Google Blogger has experienced a major disruption of its service over the past 48 hours.  At least 10 comments to my post on Ron Paul’s racist newsletters have been lost, as have a couple of other blog posts in their entirety.  I’m not certain if they will be restored.  The continuity of the comments string appears to be irreparable, but commenters are encouraged to resubmit their comments if they are currently missing.

Thanks.

>Dumb old party

>

from Half of Republicans polled still don’t believe Obama was born in USA | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times:

More than a week after the White House unearthed President Obama’s original, long-form, Hawaii birth certificate, only 48% of Republicans polled said they believe he was born in the United States.

In a poll conducted by Public Policy Polling from May 5-8 of 610 Americans who usually support Republicans in primaries, 34% said they did not believe Obama was born in the U.S. while 18% said they still aren’t sure.

>Gilad Atzmon Gaza fundraiser flops

>Only 35 people showed up tonight to hear Gilad Atzmon speak and play sax at a fundraiser for a group called  U.S. Boat to Gaza – West which is planning to participate in a prospective Gaza flotilla.  The sparsely attended event was held in the sanctuary of the Lake Merritt Methodist Church in Oakland, California, which has a capacity of 250.

I called the church earlier today to ask why they thought it appropriate to host someone with Atzmon’s extensive record of bigoted commentary.  I have not yet heard back from them.

>Amnesty International, MEMO and the Palestinian writer who calls Jews ‘kikes’

>Michael Weiss writes in the Telegraph that Amnesty International continues to show exceedingly poor judgment in building alliances with troubling “anti-Zionist” activists.

Two weeks ago, I pointed out how Amnesty International was due on 23 May to give over its Human Rights Action Centre in London to a discussion of Zionist control of the media co-hosted by Middle East Monitor Online (MEMO), a Hamas-friendly publisher of anti-Semites. I knew then that I’d draw a colourful response. I had no idea just how colourful.

In the course of making my case for MEMO’s lack of credibility, I cited one of its regular contributors, Khalid Amaryeh, who for good measure has got the front-pagestory in Monday’s edition on Israel’s “mendacious” prime minister. In the past, Amaryeh had written in MEMO that Israelis were “pathological liars from Eastern Europe”.

Amaryeh was quite upset at me for quoting his words back to him and denounced me as a “Zionist propagandist” and so on. Par for the course. But then he grew less pleasant and slightly more uncorked in the comment thread of a blog run by Richard Millett, who raised the same questions I did about Amnesty’s lapsed standards for invited guests.

I quote from one of Amaryeh’s contributions to the thread, for which he was good enough to use his full name. He’s referring to another contributor to the thread:

At least you don’t feel confident enought to admit your Jewishness.

Anyway, I don’t give a damn whether you are a kike or not.
well, you seem to lie as often as you breathe. Fow how could you enslave, torment, savage, persecue and deny millions of people freedom while you claim to love freedom? you are simply fornicating with language. If you were a woman, you probably would be a whore.

you are obviously a burden upon youself, your family, and upon the Jews.

>Haredim burn Israeli flags in Bnei Brak

>

Israel Independence Day observance in front of the Ponavez Yeshiva in the largely ultra-orthodox city of Bnei Brak:

More here and here.

>Gilad Atzmon promotes speech on Holocaust denial website

>

Gilad Atzmon is using a notorious Holocaust denial website to advertise a speech and performance he is giving tonight at a Methodist church in Oakland, CA. (Read here.) The website, which is maintained by Michael Santomauro, publishes articles propounding what Santomauro euphemistically refers to as “historical revisionism” concerning Naziism and the Holocaust, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist articles, and promotional material for books with the same themes. A notice on the website indicates that Atzmon himself sent the promotional notice to the Santomauro website for publication there.

Santomauro made a small fortune by creating a service which helps New York City apartment dwellers find roommates. His clients have reported that they were surprised to receive Holocaust denial propaganda emails after using his roommate service. (Read here.) Earlier this year, Santomauro got some local press by emailing Holocaust denial material to everyone on the mailing list associated with the Upper East Side public school attended by his 9-year-old son. (Read here.) That email promoted a book entitled Debating the Holocaust, which Santomauro published at his own expense and possibly authored under the pseudonym “Timothy Dalton, PhD”. (Read here.)

Santomauro has worked as an advance man for David Irving’s New York appearances, sometimes under the pseudonym “Michael Singer”, under which name he has booked venues for Irving to promote his books. (Read here.) Emails between Irving and Santomauro planning a speaking engagement were copied from Irving’s website by hackers and leaked to Wikileaks. (I wrote about that here. The hacked emails are online here. A prior post mentioning Santomauro’s link to Irving is available here.)

Santomauro is also reported to have run the Holocaust denial website VHO during the imprisonment of it’s founder Germar Rudolf for violation of Germany’s laws against promotion of racism. (Read here.)

In addition to the book written by him or “Dalton”, Santomauro currently promotes and sells a book called The Riddle of the Jew’s Success, which was written by the German anti-Semitic ideologue of the pre-Nazi and early Nazi era, Theodor Fritsch, author of The Anti-Semitic Chatechism. Santomauro advertises the book as follows:

An amazing book, originally written in 1927, revealing how the Jews and the Jewish culture, for many centuries, have used deception, treachery and immorality in business, trade and economic life to amass WEALTH – their ONLY “god” and to destroy the honest businesses of the non-Jews.

(That advertisement can also be found on a website called GoodNewsAboutGod.com.) Santomauro’s use of his Amazon store to sell this book led to his being banned from Amazon. Santomauro was later accused of issuing threats to and releasing private contact information for the person who brought the matter to Amazon’s attention. (Read here.) For a number of years, Santomauro published a long list of Holocaust denial books and papers which he sold or made available free online via another website, tadb.org. That website is no longer active. (Archived example here.)

Gilad Atzmon is using Santomauro’s website to advertise his appearance at a fundraiser for an organization promoting a prospective convoy of boats to Gaza. The fundraiser will take place at the Lake Merritt Methodist Church in Oakland, CA , and is associated with the organization US Boat to Gaza – West. (Read here.) In addition to the promotional material, Atzmon provided Santomauro with video of a recent anti-Israel panel which Atzmon held in London, which Atzmon calls with characteristic modesty “Must watch video: Gilad Atzmon in action…“

A commenter to a prior post on this blog concerning Atzmon’s appearance at Lake Merritt Methodist Church has indicated that a demonstration against anti-Semitism will be there to greet him. The demonstration is being scheduled to take place this afternoon, May 10, from 4:00-5:00PM at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave, Oakland, CA.

>Sexually provocative image of Hillary Clinton scrubbed from White House photo by Hasidish newspaper

>

Read the shocking details here: Hasidic Paper Removes Hillary Clinton From Osama Picture – FailedMessiah.com

>Jewish Foods To Bring Back

>The Forward website currently has an article listing 10 Jewish Foods To Bring Back. (My mother emailed a link to me in lieu of cooking.) As someone who no longer eats meat, but who enjoys remembering the offerings of my grandmothers’ kitchens, and the kitchens of various Jewish restaurants, this article really hit the spot. Humble yet luxurious, familiar yet exotic, some of these foods were artifacts of an earlier era even in my younger days.

P’tcha, a jellied calf’s foot dish that I would describe as garlic, cholesterol-laden jello with a hard boiled egg embedded within it, was weird in every way, and was lovable both for that strangeness and for its rich and assertive flavors. It was a favorite of my grandfather, a Litvak from Belarus. When he departed from this world, p’tcha departed from our table.

Similarly, eyerlach, which my Galitzianer grandmother referred to by some other name, seemed too weird to be real. Those were unhatched eggs which had been harvested from slaughtered hens. The shells were not yet hardened, and the chicks within them not yet fully formed. The Forward article describes them as a soup ingredient, although I remember them best sauteed in schmaltz with gribennes, seasoned with black pepper or paprika.

Others on the Forward top ten list, like belly lox, seemed to me to be a permanent fixture of Jewish American cuisine but have for some mysterious reason virtually vanished. When I tried to order it in Zabar’s about 10 years ago, the counter man/sturgeon surgeon tried to talk me out of ordering it. “It’s much too salty. Take the nova instead.” Dammit, I felt like saying, I like salty food. Why should I go for that bland, smoky stuff?

Similarly, tongue seemed like it would have legs. (Okay, that’s a weird sentence.) What I mean to say is that it seemed to me that it wasn’t an endangered species. (Also a strange sentence.) I used to love it in various forms, especially cooked in a sweet and sour sauce with raisins (my grandmothers made it that way — as did the Weequahic Diner in Newark), or steamed, thin cut and stacked high on yellow corn rye bread — the deli version. I can remember coming home from school and seeing the cow’s huge tongue sticking up from a cutting board on the kitchen counter. My mother was in the process of “peeling” it, a process I remember involving boiling water and a paring knife. No. That’s not why I stopped eating meat.

(I wonder if there’s a vegetarian version? Tofu tongue anyone? Now that I think of it, that might stop me eating tofu.)

Schav is the one vegetarian dish on the Forward’s endangered list/menu. That’s a sour-grass soup, as much Slavic as Jewish. A word to the wise, echoing the wisdom of the Forward: the stuff sold in supermarkets should be banned for human consumption. Make it at home, order it in a restaurant, or, please, come up with a palatable packaged version and sell me some. The real thing is so good.

Two questions for the Forward: 1) what about cholent and corn rye bread? and 2) when will you come out with the top ten lists of endangered Sephardi and Mizrahi foods? I’ve got some Sephardi background and that part of me gets hungry too.

P’tcha.  Looks good, but lose the lemon.

>Unanswered questions; Why Ron Paul’s racist newsletters still matter

>

I’ve just read an article that’s brought back into focus an issue that I’d put out of my mind since the last presidential campaign: Ron Paul’s troubling history of publishing racist columns. (Read here: Why Ron Paul’s Racist Newsletters Matter | News One) The article outlines the content of columns written and/or published by Ron Paul in newsletters called Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report, all of which listed Paul as editor and publisher. The columns in question are absolutely amazing: unashamedly racist, homophobic and paranoid. For your consideration, here are some excerpts from the writings of Dr. Ron Paul.

“Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressmen [sic]. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.”

(jpg of source document here)

That column went on to suggest, in response to a proposal that a city be named in King’s honor, that the city be called either “Welfaria”, “Zooville”, “Rapetown”, “Dirtburg”, or “Lazyopolis”.

In another shocking column entitled “Blast ‘Em?”, Dr. Paul warns in dire terms of the dangers of black on white crime. Dr. Paul suggests that white people arm themselves with illegal, unresgistered guns, and goes on to relay the advice of a police officer that, if a gun were to be used to shoot a “youth”, that the shooting be concealed and the weapon thrown away.

“(Carjacking) is the hip-hop thing to do among urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. The youth simply walk up to a car they like, pull a gun, tell the family to get out, steal their jewelry and wallets, and take the car to wreck. Such actions have ballooned in the recent months.

“In the old days, average people could avoid such youth by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob.

“What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).

“I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.”

(Jpg of source document here)

You may remember that Ron Paul also published columns that stated that

“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”

and

“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

and

“(W)e are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”

and

“We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”

Those statements were first revealed in a Houston Chronicle article published in May, 1996. (Read here.) According to the Chronicle, Paul’s congressional campaign responded to questions about these statements by saying that they were consistent with anti-crime statements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The Ron Paul campaign issued another statement, published in the Austin American-Statesman, that compared his newsletters to Tolstoy. (Read here.)

“Dr. Paul is being quoted out of context. It’s like picking up War and Peace and reading the fourth paragraph on Page 481 and thinking you can understand what’s going on.”

Paul’s defenses of these and many other outrageous columns have raised more questions than they have answered. His initial reaction to this issue, when it was raised by an adversary in the 1996 congressional election, was to admit to having written the columns and to defend their content as insignificant. As Matt Welch pointed out in a column for Reason (read here), statements made at that time by both Paul and his campaign staff accepted responsibility for publishing the columns and failed in any way to indicate that he hadn’t written them or even read them.  In fact, according to a contemporaneous report in the Dallas Morning News (emphasis added):

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation.

However, in 2008, Paul claimed that the columns, which he had said that he had written, which were written in the first person and which included references to his family life and other personal touches, had been ghost-written by someone of whose identity he was somehow uncertain. He claimed that it was completely plausible that he would allow people he did not know to author such columns for him, and that he would go on to publish them without prior review to his supporters in newsletters bearing his name in their titles. Such defenses by Dr. Paul insult those who legitimately want information about this troubling side of his record. Paul’s answers to these legitimate question do not treat with appropriate gravity a very serious matter. They are not only inconsistent, they are self-contradictory. They are not only implausible, they are impossible.

Why do these newletters continue to matter? In publishing these newsletters, and in his handling of the resulting controversy, Dr. Paul has shown himself to be either a racist, an amnesiac, a liar, or grossly irresponsible. None of those are attributes one should look for in a prospective president.

Ron Paul’s current candidacy for president once again raises the questions that he has failed to adequately address since they first came up in 1996. Who wrote the racist material that was published by him under his name in his newsletters? If the columns were ghosted, did he review them prior to publication? If not, why not? Why has he failed to take responsibility for and fully investigate the facts underlying this troubling publication of extreme racist propaganda into the political mainstream? If Ron Paul fails to answer these questions, fully investigate the matter and issue a complete and frank report of his findings, he will have failed to put the matter behind him. He can’t just say that it’s “old news” and leave it at that. That will only convince his true believers.

In conclusion, here’s video of Ron Paul on CNN in 2008, renouncing the contents of his newletters and claiming that he can’t possibly be racist because he “does not view people in collective groups”. He also argues falsely and in offensive terms which immediately belie this absurd defense that the issue of the newsletters was being raised for a particular political purpose concerning a collective group. (At 2:40 of the below-embedded video.)

“(It is) part knock down Ron Paul because he’s gaining grounds with the blacks. I’m getting more support right now, and more votes from the blacks because they understand what I’m talking about and they trust me.”

In spite of the fact that the issue had come up in 1996, and that his campaign had at time defended them, Paul states in this interview that, prior to 2008, he was unfamiliar with any of the racist material from his newsletter. As I stated above, his defenses have raised more questions than they’ve answered.

[The full contents of the Ron Paul newsletters was uncovered in 2008 by the very persistent and clever research of Jamie Kirchick, then of the New Republic. (His great article on this is available behind a paywall here.) Julian Sanchez and David Weigel wrote in Reason in 2008 that they were of the opinion that longtime Ron Paul chief advisor Lew Rockwell was likely the author and almost certainly the real editor of the offensive columns. (Read here.) A fairly comprehensive compendium of links to coverage of the newletters controversy is available here.]

>Gilad Atzmon to speak at Oakland Methodist church

>

Anti-Jewish activist Gilad Atzmon will be speaking in Oakland, CA on Tuesday evening on behalf of the organization US Boat to Gaza – West. (Read here.) The event will raise funds for American participants in a planned convoy of boats to Gaza. It will take place at the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, recent hosts of an ersatz seder with an anti-Israel theme. (Read here.) A leftist local paper with a reputation for disproportionate and biased coverage of Israel, the Berkeley Daily Planet, is promoting the event. (The paper essentially features local news and anti-Israel editorials.)  A front page notice in the paper describes Atzmon as “worldwide-renowned [sic] jazz saxophonist par excellence (who) holds a PhD in philosophy and is a prolific writer and speaker on Israel-Palestine”.

In 2009, the Bay Area Women in Black hosted a pro-ISM speech by Atzmon at the Fellowship of Universalist Unitarians in neighboring Berkeley, provoking demonstrations respectively opposing and supporting Atzmon.

Among his supporters was Stephen Pearcy, a local activist attorney with a penchant for controversy.  (He has repeatedly hung U.S. soldiers in effigy on the front of his house, and has demonstrated in front of the California state capitol with an image of the U.S. flag being flushed down a toilet.)  Pearcy is pictured below at the demonstration wearing a Nasrallah t-shirt and carrying a Hamas banner.