Hate 101

The New York Daily News looks at anti-Semitism at Columbia, yesterday:

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are "warmongers" and "Gestapo apparatchiks."

The Jewish homeland is "nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States."

It's a capital of "thuggery" — a "ghastly state of racism and apartheid" — and it "must be dismantled."

A voice from America's crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university....

A familiar names crops up (quoted ellipsis in original):

.... Nicholas De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls him "the most hated professor in America."

At an anti-war teach-in last year, he said he wished for a "million Mogadishus," referring to the slaughter of U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993.

"U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy," he added.

De Genova has also said, "The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people.... Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust."

De Genova didn't return calls....

See also these.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 06:22:12 PM
Categorized as Educational.

Kennedy's Secret Corset

Interesting speculation at LAT today:

Two years ago, the historian Robert Dallek revealed new details about the extraordinary range of shots, stimulants and pills President Kennedy took to control his physical pain and present his youthful image to the world. Important and interesting as these details are, they should not distract us from the one medical remedy that probably killed the president: his corset.

Members of Kennedy's inner circle had often witnessed the painful ritual that Kennedy endured in his private quarters before he ventured in public, when his valet would literally winch a steel-rodded canvas back brace around the president's torso, pulling heavy straps and tightening the thongs loop by loop as if it was a bizarre scene out of "Gone With the Wind."

Once in it, the president was planted upright, trapped and almost bolted into a ramrod posture. Many would wonder how JFK could ever move in such a contraption. And yet move he did, and, besides his painkillers, his corset contributed to the youthful, high-shouldered military bearing that he presented glamorously to the world.

But this simple device imparted a fate almost Mephistophelean in its horror to the sequence of events in Dallas 41 years ago....

When Connally was hit, he pivoted in pain to his left, his lithe body in motion as it swiveled downward, ending up in the lap of his wife, Nellie.

But because of the corset, Kennedy's body did not act as a normal body would when the bullet passed through his throat. Held by his back brace, Kennedy remained upright, according to the Warren Commission, for five more seconds. This provided Oswald the opportunity to reload and shoot again at an almost stationary target.

The frames of the Zapruder film confirm this ramrod posture: Kennedy's head turns only slightly in those eternal seconds, and his upper body almost not at all, from frame 225 (when the first shot entered his neck) to the fatal frame of 313.

Without the corset, the force of the first bullet, traveling at a speed of 2,000 feet a second, would surely have driven the president's body forward, making him writhe in pain like Connally, and probably down in the seat of his limousine, beyond the view of Oswald's cross hairs for a second or third shot....

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, was assassinated 41 years ago today, Friday, November 22, 1963. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 05:49:56 PM
Categorized as Historical.

"In Light"

Gerald Bugge, a.k.a. Gerard Serafin was laid to rest today. Mark Shea blogs a poem by Pavel Chichikov.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 05:35:36 PM
Categorized as Religious.

Rightwingsparkle

Vide.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 08:05:38 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.

Open Letter to Europe

Thanks to Margaret for calling our attention to this article by Herbert Meyer at The American Thinker, Nov. 11:

Hi. Are you nuts?

Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I’m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain’s largest newspapers ran a headline asking “How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?”, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word – bizarre — to explain the election’s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that “Bush belongs at a war tribunal — not in the White House.” And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as “stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists.”

Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren’t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you’re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest.) But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso – and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world’s finest universities and five or six of the world’s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world’s most vibrant economy, are the world’s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars — may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?...

What worries me even more than all this is your willful blindness. You refuse to see that it is you, not we Americans, who have abandoned Western Civilization. It’s worrisome because, to tell you the truth, we need each other. Western Civilization today is under siege, from radical Islam on the outside and from our own selfish hedonism within. It’s going to take all of our effort, our talent, our creativity and, above all, our will to pull through. So take a good, hard look at yourselves and see what your own future will be if you don’t change course. And please, stop sneering at America long enough to understand it. After all, Western Civilization was your gift to us, and you ought to be proud of what we Americans have made of it.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 07:52:21 AM
Categorized as International & Social/Cultural.

Analysis and Interpretation of the Constitution

Annotations of cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Here.

(Thanks, Bill.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 07:25:28 AM
Categorized as Political.

The Darkness of the Year II

Yesterday began the longest two months of the year: the winter soltice is a month away, so this is the time of the shortest days and longest nights.

Congratulations, though, to any Faithful Reader of the southern hemisphere. :-)

Confer.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/22/04 07:13:15 AM
Categorized as Other.