No word yet as to what lane he lived on.
All posts for the month September, 2013
The Muffin Man.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 25, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/the-muffin-man/
Israel mocks Iranian leader in undiplomatic Tweet.
I’m on record as thinking that the current Prime Minister of Israel tends to overstate his country’s case against Iran—that while official Israel’s long-standing concern regarding the possibility of Iran achieving nuclear capability is surely understandable (particularly considering the latter’s oft-stated hostility to the existence of a Jewish State), we mustn’t forget that Israel itself has nuclear weapons (yes, it does), that not everything’s another Holocaust, and that furthermore, if your government has spent more or less the last decade claiming with tones of urgency that we’ve only got six months, a year, two years in which to prevent calamity—your government might be overstating its case.
But you know what? Israel’s long-standing concern regarding the possibility of Iran achieving nuclear capability is surely understandable, particularly considering the latter’s oft-stated hostility to the existence of a Jewish State. If I were an Israeli official, I, too, would want to make sure that the U.S. government was not messing around and that whatever precautions being taken to protect my people were good and solid. That seems only reasonable, and certainly to be expected. Overstating a case doesn’t mean that the case doesn’t actually exist.
And yet.
And yet, there is asking the President of the United States to dot his I’s and cross his T’s; there’s making sure your concerns are heard; there’s even pressuring your allies and asking your friends to do the same because this is actually kind of a big deal and you’re truly alarmed.
And then there’s this nonsense.
Rather than treat the rolling tide of news regarding a possible thaw in relations between the U.S. and Iran as the serious matter that it is, rather than take into consideration all that’s at stake, rather than—oh, I don’t know—consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, if the Obama Administration manages to achieve an agreement with Iran, it might actually meet Israel’s security needs and improve the lives of everyone in the Jewish State—the Israeli Embassy in the U.S. decided to try its hand at biting social media wit, by way of fifth grade level sarcasm. Creating a false LinkedIn account for your country’s arch-nemesis carries about as much gravitas as does poking your friend at lunch and saying: “Hunh-hunh! Let’s give Hassan devil’s horns in the yearbook!”
And then Israel’s UN Mission re-tweeted it. Because why not.
Are these people professionals? Are they seriously concerned about Iran? Do they honestly believe that no one in the Islamic Republic can ever be safely trusted—or, alternatively, are they genuinely concerned that Iran’s leadership change its ways and be brought back into the community of nations? If the answer to any of those questions is “yes”—then what on earth were they thinking?
This kind of amateur hour performance is an embarrassment, pure and simple—and it does little but strengthen the impression shared by many across the globe (including many Jews both inside and out of Israel) that the fear-mongering has always been more about distracting the world from the occupation of Palestinian lands than it has been about Iran.
Else the Israeli government might be just a little more interested in seeing it resolved.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 24, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/israel-mocks-iranian-leader-in-undiplomatic-tweet/
Dear Israeli Right: This is what anti-Semitism means.
Language is a funny thing. On the one hand it’s malleable by nature, because human culture is endlessly malleable; on the other hand, at any given time, the words in whatever language you’re using have actual definitions. Take “anti-Semitism,” for instance.
“Anti-Semitism” has an actual, working definition—and here’s what that definition is:
Anti-Semitism, n. – hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.
I bring this up only because the Israeli right appears to be once again confusing anti-Semitism with “being opposed to things that the Israeli right want everyone to think are non-negotiable.”
Case in point: The sanctions that the European Union is poised to institute against West Bank settlements. The Israeli right feels pretty strongly that such sanctions will do damage to the settlement enterprise, and while we can’t really be sure of the outcome of a policy that hasn’t been implemented yet, I feel safe in saying that the Israeli right is, well, right—in fact, that’s the point of the sanctions: To damage the settlement enterprise. It’s a political action intended to produce political ends.
Representatives of the settlements, including Israel’s Ambassador to the E.U. and members of the Knesset, requested and were granted a special parliamentary session in Brussels earlier this week in which to present their opposition to the E.U.’s new policy—and here’s what MK Ayelet Shaked (of Nafatali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi party) had to say:
If Europe thinks Jews will return to the days where we were forced to mark our products—you can forget it. Delegitimization of parts of Israel by Europe is the new anti-Semitism. The old anti-Semitism led to the destruction of our people in gas chambers. We will not allow the new anti-Semitism to hurt us.
Now, we could start by noting that whatever you may think of the settlement enterprise, not even Israel thinks that the West Bank is “part of Israel.” Those lands haven’t been annexed, and indeed their future is (putatively, at least) under negotiation by the Israeli government even as we speak. We could start there.
But why start there when we have the specter of gas chambers before us?
This is not the first time that anti-settlement policies have been likened unto racism,anti-Semitism and/or the Holocaust (because, you know, taking the political position that the West Bank does not, in fact, belong to Israel is just like performing torture experiments on Jewish children, sexually enslaving Jewish women, and gunning down 34,000 men, women and children at Babi Yar. Not to mention gas chambers), and it probably won’t be the last.
Indeed, the right’s tendency to label everything vaguely unpleasant as anti-Semitism (and a new Holocaust to boot!) is so strong that Israel’s more non-hyperbolic citizens often mock and satirize it. Perhaps my favorite example of this is an old routine by iconic comedy troupe HaHamishia HaKamarite—you don’t even need a working knowledge of Hebrew to enjoy it.
The mockery comes because many, many Israelis (left, right, and ambidextrous) understand that there’s simply no intellectually honest way to shoe-horn a decision to suspend “grants, prizes, and financial instruments… to Israeli entities or to their activities in the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967” into the idea of hating on Jews because they’re Jews. Or into the idea of killing them. It’s ahistorical. It’s nonsensical. It suggests a lack of book learning. And it’s deeply, profoundly offensive.
When Shaked (or Dani Dayan, or Avigdor Lieberman, or Zeev Elkin) say these things, they’re using the screams of babies, numbers burned into flesh, and ashes that once rose into heaven to try to shame the world into accepting right-wing dogma as settled fact. It is, simply put, grotesque.
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with my work knows that I’m anti-settlement. I always have been. But I don’t think that you have to share my political inclinations in order to agree on this particular point.
Some things really are anti-Semitic—as the Jews of 21st century Hungary, baseball disgrace Ryan Braun, the good people of Virginia, and a young girl I know who was once told that “Hitler should have finished the job” can attest. We need to stand against that hate and that bigotry wherever we see it and educate aggressively so that it becomes a thing of the past.
But the European Union doesn’t oppose the West Bank settlements because the people living in them are Jews. The European Union opposes the West Bank settlements because the people living in them (and the government that sent them)are breaking international law:
In conformity with international law on the non-recognition by the EU of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967…the EU has made it clear that it will not recognize any changes to pre-1967 border, other than those agreed by the parties to the Middle East Peace Process.
But Israel’s right wing (and the Americans who support it) want the world to simply give up and give in, to adopt its ideological position and red-roofed West Bank homes as a fait accompli and play a supporting role in denying the Palestinian people their civil and human rights into perpetuity.
And they’re not above exploiting the deaths of six million people to do it.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 23, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/dear-israeli-right-this-is-what-anti-semitism-means/
For my birthday, would you be so kind….
September 21 is my birthday.
It is also the second anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia, and also day #921 in the Syrian civil war, which has forced about six and a half million people to run from their homes into an unknowable and deeply frightening future.
Every year on his birthday, actor Nathan Fillion (Buffy, Waitress, Castle, and most importantly: Firefly) asks people to give to his favorite water charity; it’s a lovely thing, and some years, I’ve even done as he asked. And so, inspired by Mr. Fillion, I’ve decided to do a similar thing, if on a much smaller scale (I mean – I know you love me as much as you love Nathan Fillion. There are just a few million fewer of you. Is all).
If you enjoy this blog, or my writing over at The Daily Beast, or the piece I just ran on xoJane (of which, by the way, there will be more in the future), or if you like my Tweets, or, heck, maybe you know me personally and maybe I make you laugh every now and then — and if you have a little spare dosh to pass around — please consider celebrating my birthday in one of the two following ways:
In Troy’s memory, please purchase I Am Troy Davis, published this week and written by my good friend Jen Marlowe and Troy’s sister, Martina Correia-Davis, who died of breast cancer soon after her brother was killed. It’s the story of Troy, his remarkable family, and the on-going struggle to end the death penalty. (And not for nothing, but Jen is a hell of a writer). Can’t say it better than Susan Sarandon: “I Am Troy Davis is a painful yet very important book” — unless it’s Maya Angelou: “Here is a shout for human rights and for the abolition of the death penalty. This book, I Am Troy Davis, should be read and cherished.” If you make your purchase through the non-profit publisher, Haymarket Books, it’ll cost you $18.- There are more than six million Syrians who have run from their homes in fear. About two million of them have crossed international borders; more than four million remain within their war-torn country, trying desperately to get by. There is so little that we can do to reach out and help the Syrian people — but we can reach out to support the folks working night and day to support them: Please donate to the UN Refugee effort. This is how I’ll be honoring my own birthday, and all who have raised and loved me so far.
Syrian refugees filling their buckets at Atmeh refugee camp, in the northern Syrian province of Idlib, Syria, Apr. 5, 2013 source
And hey, if you happen to be Nathan Fillion? Thanks for everything, man. And please celebrate my birthday with me.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 20, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/for-my-birthday-would-you-be-so-kind/
Signs of an Iranian-US thaw.
[Note: I actually posted the following a couple of hours before the interview in question aired. I’ve since done a little editing to make the time-frame a bit less confusing].
On Wednesday night, NBC aired an interview that Ann Curry recorded earlier in the day with newly-elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who won elections in June in a surprising landslide.
Remember back when I said that the situation in Syria is closely entangled with its relationship with Iran, and the American relationship with both?
Before that interview aired, I felt a need to list some of the various indicators that I’ve noticed since just before the August 21 Syrian chemical weapons attack that suggest that President Obama and President Rouhani are both intent on moving our countries away from endless enmity, and toward rapprochement, starting with:
Holy crap they *admitted* it?
RT @MillerMENA CIA admits it was behind 1953 Coup in #Iranhttp://t.co/6ttFgSt4LD
— Emily L. Hauser (@emilylhauser) August 19, 2013
In fact, I’m culling all of the following from a search I did within my Twitter account, but reading a long list of tweets tends to get wearisome, so I’m turning instead to that other fine tool of the modern age: The bullet point.
All of the following reads to me, in sum and in parts, like the careful public face of a lot of fierce whispering in back rooms and corridors and with the help of people like the Swiss, who have long served as Iran-US intermediaries.
- Within six days in late August, the CIA admitted its role in Iran’s 1953 coup (see above) and also in aiding Iraq in its use of chemical weapons against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s; the latter admission came a few days after Syria’s use of chemical weapons outside Damascus. These are both huge, huge scars on the collective Iranian psyche, and are frequently used as short-hand for why Iranians cannot trust the US. The minute I heard about the first admission, I thought “backchannel talks” — and when I heard the about the second, I nearly danced in my chair. For more on why the first is significant, here’s Robin Wright; for more the importance of the latter, click here.
- Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s new Foreign Minister, spent 30 years of his life in the US and helped negotiate the intelligence assistance Iran gave the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11 (yes, that really happened).
- Iran’s parliament fast-tracked a debate on suing the US over its role in the 1953 coup (which is to say: The acknowledgement was acknowledged, but no one’s ready to say it’s no big).
- State Department statement, August 28: “The United States respectfully asks the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to work cooperatively with us in our efforts to help US citizens Robert Levinson, Amir Hekmati, and Saeed Abedini to return to their families after lengthy detentions.” (Which is to say: “It’s not like we don’t have genuine diplomatic issues pending with you, too. We respectfully ask that you attend to them.”)
- Iran was intimately involved in the Russian-American negotiations surrounding Syria’s chemical arsenal.
- A western diplomat told the press that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be dialing back the pressure on Iran in upcoming talks regarding its nuclear program.
- “Rouhani seems to have chosen [the chemical weapons attack in] Syria as the first big internal debate of his new Administration.” – Time, September 9
- Iranian state-run Press TV interviews Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif; he says “Getting to yes is our motive for [nuclear] talks.”
- In an interview held before the Russian-American-Syrian deal was hammered out, Obama told ABC that he and Rouhani have exchanged letters, adding: “Negotiations with the Iranians is always difficult. I think this new president is not going to suddenly make it easy.” (Which is true, but also suggests that, just like Rouhani himself, Obama knows that even as he hints about a possible thaw in relations, neither he nor Rouhani will be served if he paints Iran’s President as a push-over).
- Reuters: “New Iranian atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi pledged greater cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog [the IAEA].”
- Der Speigel: Rouhani
saysheis reported to be willing to decommission Iran’s nuclear installation at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, if the West lifts sanctions. - Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who, according to the Iranian Constitution, is exactly what his title suggests; thus he holds ultimate authority in the country — told a meeting of the elite military force the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC): “I am not opposed to correct diplomacy. I believe in what was named many years ago as ‘heroic flexibility’.” He also told the Guards that they must not get involved with politics, which, given the fact that they are in fact deeply involved with the politics of Iran; helped unseat the last reformist President; and were instrumental in the violent suppression of the 2009 post-election protests — is saying something. Note also that the IRGC are the country’s single greatest economic powerhouse as well, including in such areas as civilian infrastructure and engineering, and thus they are not lightly messed with.
- Rouhani also told the IRGC that they shouldn’t be involved in politics, saying that this had also been the opinion of the republic’s founder, the Ayatollah Khomeini — and while you and I may have no fond memories of Kohmeini, he remains a powerful unifying figure for the Iranian people.
- On Wednesday Iran unexpectedly released eleven prominent political prisoners, including human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, on the eve of Rouhani’s visit to the US to attend the UN General Assembly. UPDATE: “In his annual message for Iranian New Year in 2011, President Obama specifically singled out Ms. Sotoudeh.“
- Also on Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney revealed more details of the President’s letter to Rouhani: “In his letter the president indicated that the US is ready to resolve the nuclear issue in a way that allows Iran to demonstrate that its nuclear program is for exclusively peaceful purposes.”
- In Curry’s preview of tonight’s interview with Rouhani, she reports that he told her: “From my point of view, the tone of [Obama’s] letter was positive and constructive” and that “he has full authority to make a deal with the West on the disputed atomic program” — which is code for “I have the Supreme Leader behind me.” Oh, and he also says that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons.
And hey, it’s not just me who believes there’s real momentum toward a major diplomatic shift! CIA veteran and Georgetown University professor Paul Pillar wrote today that
Since Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran, he and his appointees have piled up indication upon indication, in their words and their actions, that they strongly want a new and improved relationship with the West and that they will do what they can to bring one about by facilitating a mutually acceptable agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
Diplomacy is a messy, horribly frought business, and lord knows that the US and Iran have bungled many an effort to mend fences. Witness the fact that all that intel sharing in 2001 went absolutely nowhere — that indeed, within months, George W. Bush was referring to Iran as part of an “axis of evil.” Among other issues, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn’t appear particularly interested in any kind of thaw between Iran and the West, and as Pillar says, is providing copious rhetorical ammunition to any hardliners in the IRGC who would rather stay cozy with the Syrian regime and far away from the United States.
A lot could still go badly wrong, is what I’m saying.
But for the first time that I can ever remember, it feels like we have leaders on both sides who want it to go right.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 18, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/signs-of-an-iranian-us-thaw/
I hope someday to return to Love Your Orchid.
Hereunder you will find a map of Europe in which the names of the countries are translated back from Chinese, character-by-character — but bear in mind that the foreign-place-naming system in Chinese is phonetic, assigning characters the sound of which corresponds most closely with the countries’ actual names, having nothing to do with the meaning of the characters. So you know, the following is meaningless. And wildly inaccurate. And could get you fired. (No, not really. But the other two, totally).
*
All hail haonowshaokao, the source of this marvelous artifact (“West Classtooth” – heh!), whose original post + comments sections are the source of all I know about how foreign place-names are created in Chinese, and h/t Twister Sifter, which is a source of many fairly weird and wonderful things, including the 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World post wherein I found the above.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 18, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/i-hope-someday-to-return-to-love-your-orchid/
Our children, so fragile.
I wrote this essay for The Dallas Morning News a few years back, and first posted it here sometime later.
My recent post about little girls and body image brought it to mind, because it’s all the same question: How do we protect our children, when we can’t? How do we teach them to live with their own fragility (and teach ourselves to live with our own powerlessness)? So I thought I’d run it again. It’s all still true – and the kids just continue to grow and grow.
Our children, so fragile
EMILY L. HAUSER – Dallas Morning News
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The boy – my firstborn.
When pregnant with my first child, I had the opportunity to ask my graduate school adviser if we might discuss “my future.” With a glance at my belly, he looked me in the eye and said: “Thirty years of heartache.”
To which story my aunt later responded: “Only 30 years?”
If I’ve learned nothing else since the birth of that baby nearly eight years ago, it’s that your heart always aches. Happy or sad, there are many days when the heart feels it must surely implode from the weight of emotion, not least of course, the intense and impossible need to Keep the Babies Safe.
Right now my husband and I find our little family to be bathed in the glow of blessed days. The children – a beautiful boy and girl – are healthy, smart and funny, and in addition to delighting their parents daily, actually love and enjoy each other, too. We are the family Norman Rockwell was thinking of all those years.
It is impossible, though, not to think that this golden time will inevitably end. Human experience indicates that a day will dawn on which our idyll is at the very least tarnished. The fear, of course, is that it will be shattered.
Like everyone, I know my fair share of parents whose children have been visited by tragedy. I think of my friend whose baby died at birth and the one whose 10-year-old was shot in the head. I know a kind and patient man who lost his teenager down the hole to over-the-counter drug abuse and a warm and giving woman whose previously sunny son is now, at 22, in the grip of paralyzing depression. My grandmother buried my father when he was all of 35.
They are so fragile, these babies. So many things can go wrong, and at any moment.
Paradoxically, it is my rational self that blazes a trail for me down the road to fear. The cycle of life, human nature, acts of God – all act as constant reminders that nothing is forever, that everything, eventually, breaks, rots, dies. My children’s bones will one day lie in the earth, and there is no way for me to know that their end will not come far earlier than it should or that their days will not be filled with sorrow.
My absolute inability to keep them from harm takes my breath away. Limbs will break, hearts will break. Please God, not spirits. The maxim that joy is not complete without grief to shape it interests me not in the least – let their joy be shapeless, I think, but let it be joy.
And so it is tempting to see this time of blessing as a trick of the light, an ill-defined prelude to disaster. My siblings and I were struck by catastrophe before we could read or write, when cancer snatched our father from us as surely as it did from his mother; as I grew up, all happiness was, in fact, shaped by that grief. It is hard for me to stop.
But something about this boy and this girl who I hold so lightly, with so few tools or guards, has opened a place I couldn’t dream existed. Just as I have learned that the bittersweet ache never ends, so too have my children taught me that the heart can be quiet, and that the joy in a 3-year-old’s song and a 7-year-old’s hand is unending. That these things can never be lost, even if they are taken.
I curl around my daughter in her tiny bed and hold her warmth to my belly. I cover my son with the blanket he’s tossed aside, and watch his limbs stretch endlessly beneath it, an impossible length of boy. I pray that this time will never end. I pray for the strength to hold them when it does.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 17, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/our-children-so-fragile/
What space sounds like.
You heard me.
From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
*
Voyager.
captures.sounds.
of.interstellar.freaking.SPACE.
I mean. I just.
Did you hear me? You heard me! You heard SPACE!
And now, just for snicks, throw in the fact that Voyager has left the solar system. It’s gone. Se fue. And we have no idea whatsoever where it will end up and what it might find. I honest-to-goodness have chills just writing that.
It’s only a matter of time….
Posted by emilylhauser on September 17, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/what-space-sounds-like/
Oops: Bennett and I don’t agree. But migrants find justice in Israel’s courts.
Naftali Bennett
Alas, it was too good to last. As, perhaps, we could have predicted.
On Thursday, I wrote that I rather surprisingly found myself in agreement with Israel’s Minister of the Economy, Nafatali Bennett—a far-right politician with whom I am typically at ideological loggerheads on all matters political, cultural, and religious. Bennett had launched an investigation of businesses that employ migrant workers; he was reported to have said: “We are doing right by exploited workers [working] under substandard conditions.” I suggested that this was a good start to dealing with enormous labor problems that include not just migrant workers (legal or otherwise), but also Palestinian laborers (legal or otherwise), and Israeli citizens. I even quoted Yom Kippur-specific Scripture in which the prophet Isaiah calls on us to “untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free.”
Alas.
On Sunday, writer and filmmaker David Sheen reached out to me to suggest I watch a segment about Bennett’s initiative produced by Israeli Channel Two News, in which the minister explains his motivations to both ministry employees and Channel Two’s reporter—and (sadly if unsurprisingly) his motivations are in fact entirely in-line with the government’s ongoing efforts to demonize and dehumanize African migrants (many of whom are actually refugees) and free Israel of the inconvenience of dealing with them at all (in contravention of both international law and agreements to which Israel is a signatory).
In the voice-over just before we see Bennett himself, we learn that
At the Ministry of the Economy, they believe that if employing an infiltrator costs as much as employing an Israeli, the infiltrators won’t be able to find work, and will return to Africa. [Note that “infiltrator” is the government’s official term for African migrants and refugees in or on their way to Israel, a term which in Hebrew is historically rooted in the Israeli-Arab conflict and thus trades in an existential fear]
The report then cuts to footage of Bennett himself speaking with ministry employees who we’ve been watching going from business to business with clipboards and a translator. Bennett:
Whoever knows that if he comes here, he won’t find work, because it won’t be worth anyone’s while to hire him, they’ll stop coming—which has already started to happen—but those who are already here will gradually leave.
Reporter Gilad Shalmor notes that Bennett’s comments actually contradict police recommendations that the migrants be allowed to find work as a crime preventative, and poses the question: “What happens when [the migrant] doesn’t find work—he’ll be on the street and then what?” Bennett replies:
In the very short term, there might be a certain [problem] in that regard, but in the medium and long term, the entire phenomenon will decrease.
As Open Zion has repeatedly reported, these migrants have not randomly and lazily wandered across a border in search of an easy income: These are people who have crossed literal wilderness and often survived gangs of smugglers who rape and torture them in order to escape governments that have violently oppressed them in the past and frequently threaten them with death should they ever return. Some who have been forced to return anyway have literally jumped off trucks to their deathsrather than risk their chances back “home.” I’m not sure how powerful Naftali Bennett thinks he is, but the likelihood that he will be able to put a full stop that sort of desperation—or that, indeed, visiting 160 places of business in Tel Aviv will convince all of the nation’s employers (who are, it transpires, among the worst in the Western world with regard to minimum-wage violations even when the workers are fellow citizens) to stop exploiting such a vulnerable community—seems slight.
There is some good news out of Israel regarding the African migrants, however: On Monday, the High Court ruled unanimously to overturn the government’s recently crafted policy allowing authorities to arrest and detain migrants for up to three years without a trial. As the Jerusalem Post reports:
Justice Edna Arbel said Monday that detaining the African migrants rather than making a decision about whether they should be legally deported or granted asylum, “violated their fundamental constitutional rights to human dignity [that] is the basis for Israel’s values as a Jewish and democratic state.”
As a result and rather suddenly, the state may have to offer permanent residence to the migrants inside 90 days.
The ruling certainly doesn’t end the desperation, or provide work or food, or even do anything about Bennett’s own attitude (which, if history is a guide, will likely harden in response to the High Court).
But it provides a real measure of justice for those who have been illegally detained, and serves as a potent reminder that many in official Israel still recognize the Jewish State’s commitment to a foundational basis of “freedom, justice and peace… [and to be] faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Even if Minister Bennett himself has forgotten.
Posted by emilylhauser on September 16, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/oops-bennett-and-i-dont-agree-but-migrants-find-justice-in-israels-courts/
Programming note: Yom Kippur.
I’m about to disappear into my kitchen to finish making our pre-fast meal, and from there it’s nothing but prayers and services until later tomorrow evening. Functionally what that means in terms of this blog is that I will not be around, not even a little bit, even more than the usual Shabbat, because I’ll be completely gone from when I get up from this desk in 20 minutes until we get home from our break-fast meal tomorrow night.
If you fast: I hope it goes well, and that your time spent in prayer and reflection is good. If you don’t fast: Have a lovely Saturday! The weather in Chicago is looking delightful, and I hope it is by you, as well. : )
Here’s an English translation of some of what we’ll be reading in our services tomorrow – it’s the part that speaks to me the most:
They ask Me for the right way, they are eager for the nearness of God: “Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?” Because on your fast day you see to your business and oppress all your laborers! Because you fast in strife and contention, and you strike with a wicked fist! Your fasting today is not such as to make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Lord is favorable?
No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free. To let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin. Isaiah 58:2-7
גמר חתימה טובה
Posted by emilylhauser on September 13, 2013
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/programming-note-yom-kippur/
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 