Gone Conferencing

I want to apologize to the readers of this blog that there has been no substantive entry this week.  I have been away at an academic conference throughout the weekend and simply haven't had the time to write.

I will likely not blog again until the weekend of November 30-December 1.   So, in the meantime, please have the happiest of Thanksgivings ... and enjoy some tofurky for me!

Twinning Weekend is Upon Us Once Again

This week has been a tough week in many ways.  The death toll grows and grows in the Philippines from the type of natural disaster that is only going to become more common thanks to our reckless treatment of the environment.  The rollout of the health care law known alternatively as the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, or Obama’s Albatross is going so badly that even the President is counted among its critics.  And in the Holy Land, we are finally getting progress reports of Secretary Kerry’s efforts over the past few months to broker a peace treaty – and not surprisingly, those reports are every bit as dire as we would have feared.  Any way you slice it, picking up the newspaper these days doesn’t exactly bring in rays of sunshine.

But you’ll forgive me this morning if I sing a different, and indeed, happy tune.  Because we are now embarking on what is known by an increasing number of people as a “Weekend of Twinning.”  Thanks to a New York-based organization called the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding  (http://www.ffeu.org/ ), this is the sixth annual weekend where Jews and Muslims from congregations all over the world get together in an effort to better appreciate their profound similarities and lovingly embrace their differences.   My own organization, the Jewish-Islamic Dialogue Society of Washington (JIDS) (http://www.jids.org/new/) is about to celebrate its fourth annual Twinning Weekend event this Sunday at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, MD.  A few years ago, that mosque received notoriety because the Ft. Hood shooter had frequently prayed there.  Yet I know this mosque as an incredibly welcoming environment for Jews and other non-Muslims that is led by an imam who exudes holiness and who I am proud to call my friend.  In fact, you can even find a copy of my Moses the Heretic in its library.   Like the vast majority of American mosques, MCC is part of the solution, not part of the problem.

In the last five years, Twinning Weekend has become a bigger and bigger deal around the world.  I have read that there are now “twins” getting together on six different continents and that the number of twins has reached the 300 mark.  In my own hometown of Washington, D.C., interested parties can find twinning events at multiple locations this weekend.   Even my own home synagogue is getting together with a mosque and a church – thereby serving as a “triplet.”

If you don’t mind how divisive religion has become, or how chauvinistically and condescendingly religious people can behave, then feel free to ignore the interfaith movement and “stick to your own kind” whenever you set foot in a place of worship.  But if you would like to see religion become a source of social unity and heightened understanding among different cultures and creeds, then please join this movement … and no time is too soon.  Whether you are a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Secular Humanist, it’s time to reach out and embrace the Other.  In fact, the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding’s theme for this Twinning Weekend is “Standing up for the Other.”  If ever there were a cause for the whole world to embrace, this is it.

Cancerous Sub-cultures

“Hey Spiro, why don’t you come over to the [Delta Tau Delta] house on Saturday night.  We’re importing forty bush from Mills [College].”

It has been roughly 3 ½ decades since I heard that quotation, but I’ve never forgotten it.  I doubt I ever will.  It was in reference to the fraternity at Stanford known at the time as the “football frat,” though it was said by a resident of that house who was not on the football team.   He actually seemed to me to be  a pretty nice guy.   I suspect he wasn’t even a sexist, if by that term you mean someone who either looks down on or dislikes women.  He was simply speaking in the parlance of his subculture – for in certain fraternities at certain “elite schools,” when you bring in large numbers of women from lesser-known colleges, they are collectively known by words like “bush.”  All in fun, right?

A few years later, when I was attending Harvard Law School, I remember a group of guys getting together to form an organization known as the “Armadillo Club.”   The Club invited ladies from local women’s colleges to come and meet them – the thinking being that the women would hope that they could maybe snatch a Harvard Law Student, no pun intended, and persuade them to become their husband, whereas the men would take advantage of the opportunity and maybe “get lucky.”  While I never attended one of the Armadillo Club’s parties – just as I never joined a fraternity at Stanford -- my guess is that when the ladies walked into those affairs in droves, they were thought of as little more than potential sex objects.  All in fun, right?

It might be nice to get on one’s high horse and look down on such “animals” from above.  But the truth is that we all have an id, and some of us are just better able to sublimate it than others.  In my case, while I was never tempted to treat women the way they did at Delta Tau Delta or the Armadillo Club, I had no problem turning on a boxing match or a football game on TV and cheering on a devastating hit.  Clearly, there was something in my viscera that resonated with the violence I was watching, something that caused me to prefer those sports to more civilized alternatives, like golf, tennis or baseball. Taking extreme delight in watching a defensive end slam a quarterback to the ground isn’t exactly something that Mr. Spock would approve, but I know that emotion all too well.  I knew I had an issue when I felt that rush of pleasure in a situation where I didn’t even have a rooting interest in the game.  It is a purely animalistic feeling, but it is also an all-too-human feeling.  The last I checked, we are indeed very ape-like. 

I mention my own experience with the frat-boy subculture because that was what I was most reminded of when I first heard about the Jonathan Martin/Richie Incognito debacle a couple of weeks ago.  In case you aren’t familiar with the story, Martin and Incognito are two 300+ pound behemoths who, until very recently, started on the offensive line of the Miami Dolphins.  Incognito was presented in the media as the Cro-Magnon “bully,” whereas Martin was sometimes criticized as the “wuss” who couldn’t handle the bullying and ran to his parents … and his lawyer … for help.   I suppose that, like other scandals, we consumers of news are supposed to get on our high horse and look down on one or both of these men, and/or the “locker room culture” that spawned them.  But I was taking this scandal a bit more personally.   This time, part of me felt personally responsible for the scandal.

No, I haven’t engaged in the type of hazing that seemed to be at the root of this mess. But I am a loyal fan of the National Football League, and one might even say, I am a football addict who has stood by the league through thick and thin.  Until a few days ago, when I cancelled my subscription so as to avoid feeling any guiltier than I already felt, I had been paying hundreds of dollars a year to watch the “NFL Sunday Ticket,” a package that I’ve owned for 16 years.  I’ve also attended games and even a summer training camp, and have purchased several jerseys.  Ever since I was five years old, I’ve loved the sport and enjoyed watching it played at its highest level.  But after watching so many NFL players rush to the defense of the “bully” Incognito, I guess you can say I snapped.  I needed to do something to tell the league that I was sick of the culture of football, and that’s why I cancelled my subscription to the Sunday Ticket.  I had to at least make some kind of statement that enough is enough.

Do we really need locker room hazing – and I mean hazing of any kind, even the “harmless” variety where the rookies carry the veterans’ shoulder pads?   I think not.  We certainly don’t have that kind of junk in my law office.  It demeans people and there isn’t anything remotely funny about it. 

Nor is it funny when a veteran and team leader calls a relatively inexperienced player a “half n___er” and says that he is going to kill him and slap his mother.  And what truly isn’t funny is the number of players around the league who were quick to forgive that conduct and to condemn the recipient of that message because he didn’t keep his complaints “in house.”  When I watched these players interviewed, I realized that even though I too have an id, I couldn’t relate to their attitude.  Something is clearly profoundly wrong here, and it disgusted me to think that these problems might be swept under the rug.  

Of course, that is precisely what the NFL had been doing for years.  For this is the league that would tell players who had been pounded in the head to get back out on the playing field.  “He just had his bell rung,” was what the announcers would say.   And it was all in fun – until it was revealed that one former player after another after another … were coming down with serious brain injuries that either ended or at least ruined their lives.   What did the NFL know and when did it know it?  I couldn’t tell you, for the geniuses in the league office figured out a way to keep the problem “in house.”

What they couldn’t keep bottled up quite so easily was the evidence of all the players who had trouble walking without a limp because of all the abuse their bodies took, or the evidence of all the violent crimes that these players committed.   I had been hearing these stories for decades, but recently, the problems seem to be even harder to ignore.   In the words of a recent Thomas Boswell column in the Washington Post, “The NFL is now the league of murder charges against Aaron Hernandez – gang execution style.   The NFL is the league of murder, then suicide, with Jovan Belcher killing his girlfriend and then shooting himself in the head in a parking lot by his stadium as his coach and his general manager watched.   … The NFL is the league of chronic degenerative injuries and grotesquely crippled stars. …   The NFL is the league where famous teams and coaches … are fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for cheating, where a Super Bowl winning coach … is suspended for a year because his assistants offered cash bounties to injure opposing players (more if they are carried off the field).  It’s the league that suspends and fines [a player] for intentional hits to the head only to have him respond that he’ll just switch to ‘ending careers’ with hits to the knee. … The NFL is the league where star quarterbacks face sexual harassment or rape charges and a hero of the last Super Bowl has beaten a murder rap.”

I could go on for a while listing all of the things that shame football fanatics like me, and indeed, Boswell did just that.  But I think you get the point.  The Incognito/Martin mess was just another brick in the wall, as Pink Floyd might say.   It surely packed a stronger punch for me because Martin was a Stanford grad who came from a Harvard family, but I’d like to think that no matter where he attended school, I would have been sickened by the event … just as I have been sickened by so many other NFL stories that I have been reading about for years.  

When I called up Direct TV last week and told them that I had to suspend my subscription to the Sunday Ticket, I admitted that I loved football and could well resume my subscription next year but couldn’t in good conscience continue it for the present.  What I was thinking when I sent that message was that I couldn’t allow myself to watch grown men act with the stupidity of that kid who was psyched to see all those “bush” enter into his fraternity.  And yes, I see what is happening in the locker rooms of the NFL as part and parcel of the same attitude that I witnessed in college fraternities, and that is likely at the root of the dozens of thousands of sexual assaults in the military that purportedly go unpunished every year. 

We all have our ids.  But can’t we at least keep them to ourselves?  Do we have to reinforce each other’s animalistic sides, and then complain when one of our fellow animals doesn’t keep the problem “in house”?  

Some of the talking heads on TV like to differentiate between “harmless hazing” and conduct like Incognito’s that went “too far.”  But when it comes to demeaning other human beings – men or women, All-American football players or anonymous “bush” – what do you say we just put an end to it.  I mean all of it.  If that threatens to take away the locker room humor, I suggest that these football players might want to try making puns instead.  They are, after all, college boys, aren’t they?   Maybe it’s time that they put those “scholarships” to good use. 

The Party That Cried Wolf

When my daughters were very young, I taught them the story of the boy who cried wolf.  My point was simple: if you don’t have credibility with people, nobody will listen to you even when you truly have something to say.  I’m seeing that point play out on the national stage with the Obamacare debacle.

Do I personally have questions about how the Administration could be this clueless and ill-prepared with respect to the all-important website?  Sure I do.   Do I question why the President repeatedly would say “If you like your plan, you can keep it” if, in fact, that statement did not apply to millions of Americans?   Absolutely.   Both of these issues raise questions that I would like to see further probed.   But that’s just me.  My sense is that after nearly five years of efforts to rake President Obama over the coals for everything from the nationality of his father, to his so-called “Islamic” faith, to his allegedly following the teachings of Karl Marx, most people are sick and tired of scandals, accusations, probes, and the sense that the powers-that-be care less about the national welfare than about scoring petty political points.  

So now that prominent conservatives might actually see some real wolves on the horizon, nobody believes them.  And who is to blame for that, my Republican friends?

Perhaps I’m in the minority in this country.  I’m still bothered when the politicians in my party behave inappropriately, and I’m happy to see the issue further explored if I think the public deserves more information.  In other words, no matter whose conduct is at issue – whether Democrats or Republicans – I’m open to the possibility that the benefits from investigating the past may exceed the inevitable costs of dwelling on it.  For example, unlike many of my fellow Democrats, I wasn’t willing to brush under the rug the indiscretions of President Clinton, who I believe behaved recklessly (and not merely negligently), particularly given the way that he essentially assured us in 1992 that his personal indiscretions were a thing of the past.  Indeed, I’m frankly sick of the way Democratic pundits love to take any kind of misconduct perpetrated by a Democratic leader (call it X) and say, “Of course we don’t condone X” or “Admittedly, X is inexcusable,” and then immediately stop trying to explore why X happened and instead turn their attention to blaming the Republicans about something related to X.  Whenever they behave that way, I can see why Democrats have taken the donkey (or ass) as their symbol.

So, to the extent there are important lessons to be learned from the mishandling of either the Obamacare rollout or the way the law was sold to the public, let’s air them!   Media figures shouldn’t permit Democratic spin doctors to change the subject away from their own party’s conduct and toward the ol’ “vast, right wing conspiracy.”  Democrats claim that they are the moderates, and the GOP is under the control of the ideologues, so let’s demand that the Democrats practice what they preach.   I want to know why the signature program of this administration is getting off to such an incredibly bad start.  I don’t want to hear that “other programs have had kinks before” or other excuses.   I want to know how this one went down and why, because it does have something to teach us about the ability of the federal government to manage a vast national program in the 21^st century.  

But, I repeat, maybe I’m not in the majority in having these views.   If I weren’t such a public policy junkie who feels in my gut that the universe revolves around Washington, D.C., perhaps I’d be singing a different tune.   For example, I might be telling the Republicans/Tea Partiers that they have forfeited the right to criticize this Administration about anything ever again.   Birthergate.  Benghazi.  IRS.  NSA.  Shutting down the World War II Memorial.  Solyndra.  The list goes on.   On Fox News, they obsess about these “scandals.”  On MSNBC, they rip the Republicans for obsessing about them.  And pretty much, this is what passes for public discourse in contemporary America.

Can anyone blame the public for saying “Enough already!  Let’s focus on the future, and stop viewing the past with scandal-colored glasses”?

It’s unfortunate whenever a boy “cries wolf” and deprives himself of being taking seriously when he needs to be.  But it’s a truly scary thing when one of the two major political parties in the world’s most powerful country has stopped being taken seriously when it sends out alarm signals.  Like it or not, that’s where we stand.   And ironically, perhaps the biggest benefactor is President Obama himself.   No matter what he says or does wrong, the American public might be more willing to blame his critics than the President himself.    This could be just one more example of how, in the words of Bill Clinton (as reported in a new book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann), our President is “luckier than a dog with two dicks.”   

I agree with that assessment.  And I can also assure you that if the Republicans leadership were to see such a dog and take photographs of it, most people would swear they were photo-shopped.   

Talking Peace in the Dark

            If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  Sure.

            If the Palestinian and Jewish peace negotiators reach an agreement, and nobody cares to read it, does it make an impact?  Sure.   But I’m not sure the impact would be any more meaningful than the sound of that fallen tree.  

            Now don’t get me wrong; I support the ongoing peace talks.  I support any exercise to bring that conflict to an end, whether it takes place among heads of state, NGOs, or college students.   But let’s not kid ourselves – even on the off-chance that the two governments are ready for peace, I don’t think the two peoples themselves are ready.  I could see the rank and file taking a glance at a signed peace agreement, reading the particulars, and blowing it off with a shrug.   And that’s because, for the past several decades, there has been little trust between the two peoples, and the leaders of their civil societies have made no meaningful effort to bring about reconciliation.  As a result, even if the politicians can somehow miraculously get together on a document, they couldn’t sell it in Hebron or Haifa.  

            Why has there been so little progress in building trust and reconciliation?  I’ve discussed one of the problems in a previous blog post – every time the political types come to the negotiating table, they keep looking for the big, final-status agreement, rather than seeking the kind of incremental accomplishments that over time could produce a truly lasting peace.  Just imagine all the progress we could have made if every round of negotiations in the past few decades had produced at least one tangible, lasting result, rather than simply “ending in failure.”  Alas, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, time seems to be endless, but patience is ever fleeting. 

            Perhaps the more profound problem, however, is that each side has hunkered down behind a very dangerous narrative.  That narrative has, at its core, a rather absurd self-satisfaction.  Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have convinced themselves that they have done everything possible to work for peace and the problem lies entirely in the other camp.  For this sad state of affairs we can thank two powerful tropes – one for each of the combatants.

The Israeli trope is known as the “two state solution.”  With the exception of the fundamentalist fringe on the right and a small group of peaceniks on the left, it is almost universally supported among the Jewish communities in both Israel and America.  Indeed, I consider myself a great advocate of that idea.  So I should be happy that so many of my landsmen agree, right?  

Well … the problem is that, in the Jewish community, the term “two-state solution” has become more flexible than an Olympic gymnast.   Our hard-liners are fine with the Palestinians having their own state – but only if that state includes Jordan.  Oh sure, the hard liners are happy if it also includes the Gaza Strip and even parts of the West Bank.  But they don’t want it to eat up the big Jewish settlements in the West Bank and they certainly don’t want it to include parts of Jerusalem.  

To me, that position is antithetical to the notion of “two states for two peoples.”  I don’t care how many Palestinians currently live in Jordan; that is not the Palestinian state that we are obliged to allow.  Just as the Jews want to live in Israel, not Egypt, the Palestinian people want to live in Palestine – meaning that they want a state that is West of the Jordan River, not East.  When the state of Israel was created by the United Nations, it was never envisioned that the Palestinians would be denied a state within the pre-48 borders of historical Palestine.

Similarly, I don’t believe that Jews can legitimately claim to support two states as long as one of those states is a tiny, serpentine-shaped land mass that is reminiscent of North Carolina’s 12^th District or some other product of corrupt gerrymandering.  That’s an offer worthy of Marie Antoinette.    

If my fellow Jews don’t want to give up their huge West Bank settlements, they at least should have the class to admit what their position logically entails: that they oppose the two-state solution.   Once more Jews admit that fact, it will honestly constitute progress – for at least then the hard liners may stop being so complacent that theirs is the path to peace.  Clearly, it isn’t.

As for the Palestinians, their trope is known as “non-violent resistance.”   Armed with that governing principle, West Bank Palestinians have ironically come to be almost completely at peace with their own side’s conduct in this war – or at least with the conduct of the Palestinian Authority/PLO, which has clearly adopted that strategy.  According to the Palestinian narrative, non-violent resistance is the one perfectly moral response to the tyranny of the Israelis, and it ultimately will produce an outcome favorable to the Palestinians by peacefully revealing to the world that Zionism is an antiquated, apartheid and brutal ideology.  

            Believe me, I appreciate the strategy of non-violent resistance compared to the alternative of terrorism.  Any Jew in their right mind would see it as a major step in the right direction.  But the problem is that the centrality of this strategy is such that it is every bit as antithetical to peace as the idea of Jordan as the Palestinian state.  

            Folks, to reiterate what was said above, we need true reconciliation, not new and different strategies for “winning” the war.  We need both sides to appreciate the legitimacy of two viable states within the land known as pre-48 Palestine, one primarily for the Palestinians and the other primarily for the Jews.  The Palestinian obsession with “non-violent resistance” continues to reflect a narrative that the primary way of responding to the state of Israel is by resisting it.  And this in turn tends to reflect a general antipathy toward Zionism and the legitimacy of the Jews’ claim to their own Middle Eastern state.  

Stated differently, by comparing their own movement to that of Ghandi, the Palestinians are acting like the Jews have no greater right to their own state in the Holy Land than the English had to a state in the Indian Subcontinent.  Here’s the problem, folks: the Jews don’t have an island in the North Atlantic to which they can retreat.  Israel is their one and only state.  They’re not giving it up.  And if the Palestinians want a state of their own, they need to deal with that reality and not compare their plight to other victims of colonialism.

            So what can the Palestinians do?  How about take a different tack when Jews ask them to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.  Today, virtually all Palestinians will tell you that such recognition is “impossible.”  And yet the Palestinians nevertheless see themselves purely as the victims who are doing everything they can possibly do to make peace.  I’m not buying it.

            Then again, I’m hardly buying it when many Jews ask the Palestinians to give up much of the West Bank and become part of another sovereign nation that lies primarily across the Jordan River.   I cannot get over the chutzpah of taking such a hard line position, and then still claiming to support a “two state solution.”   Some peacemakers, huh?  

            And if all that isn’t bad enough, when the two sides come together and talk, they approach the proceedings like a home run derby – either they hit the ball out of the park and reach a final peace agreement, or they make an “out” and go back to square one.

            This is why, if you have kids who are about to enter college and you want them to pick a topic of study that will remain relevant for decades despite the ever-changing nature of contemporary society, you might suggest the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It’s one of the few constants in the universe these days.  It makes the Energizer Bunny look like a quitter by comparison.