The two sides of the Holocaust

Should David Irving Be Allowed a Forum?

Controversy has erupted over C-Span’s plan to broadcast a speech by a Holocaust denier to “balance” broadcast of remarks by a Holocaust scholar.

“Balance” is a cherished concept for journalists, but sometimes it can run amok. Consider the textbook, The Reporter and the News, a 1935 volume that was then used to train American journalists. The book offers a startling example of a news story that needs to be “balanced,” that demands that “both sides in a controversial matter be given a chance to have their position stated.”

“A case in point,” the textbook solemnly declares, is “the Jewish persecution by the German Nazi Government.” It involves a struggle “between rival groups, each of which is strong in its own right, and each of which is anxious to get as much propaganda across to newspaper readers as is possible.” In other words, every claim by the “strong” German Jews had to be balanced with an equal response from the Nazi regime. [].

Lest journalists smugly assume we’ve gotten past such insidious examples of the need for “balance,” C-Span reminds us we haven’t. The cable network, which broadcasts Congress in session and other public affairs programming, planned to show a March 16 speech by Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt discussing her experiences as the defendant in a libel suit brought by Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving sued Lipstadt for statements she wrote about him in an earlier book. A British court dismissed Irving’s suit against Lipstadt in 2000, concluding that he deliberately misrepresented historical evidence.

Still, C-Span decided that it couldn’t show Lipstadt’s speech without balancing it with Irving’s position. As a C-Span spokeswoman told the New York Times, the network decided to tape an Irving lecture in order to cover “the plaintiff’s side of the trial.” When Lipstadt learned that C-Span planned to include Irving’s talk, she refused to allow the network to tape her speech. At first, C-Span said it would show Irving’s lecture anyway, but is now debating what to do.

The episode suggests that some journalists continue to lack both an understanding of the Holocaust and of the proper use of balance.

Read the whole thing.

Terrorists R Us

True religion, dark destroyed

Doesn't this sound scary? Especially if you look at the price.

a Fashion Statement of a Different Kind

Handbags do nothing for me

Handbags are cute, but I consider them furniture, not clothing. Does anyone look better with a nifty handbag? Does it complement your hairstyle? Bring out the blueness of your eyes? It's usually under the table or left on the bed in the spare bedroom. Now shoes! I definitely get shoes. And jewelry--I totally am all right with that.

Anyway, renting out handbags is a novel form of enterpreneurship. Good luck to her, them, or it.

Ashcroft is gone, but the legend lives on

Conservator comments:

THE "HYSTERICAL" LEGEND LIVES ON! Andrea Mercado of the Library Techtonics blog writes regarding the Bush administration and librarianship [emphasis mine]:

The bottom line is that I see an administration who has delivered a mixed message on librarianship, from calling librarians "hysterical" to creating funding to help the profession grow, and I would be more satisfied if their message was more consistent, and less geared towards its own political benefit.

Okay, now hold the phone! Has someone in the Bush administration called librarians "hysterical"?!

Of course, we have seen that the Bush administration has increased library funding, but calling librarians names? I have emailed Ms. Mercado to inquire about this, and will certainly post any details she is able to provide.

UPDATE: Andrea Mercado kindly sends a long, detailed explanation of her comment, explaining that she intended an "inference" by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. []

Interestingly, she refers to Ashcroft's use of the phrase "breathless reports and baseless hysteria" in his September 15, 2003 speech to the National Restaurant Association in Washington, D.C., rather than his reference to "charges of the hysterics" in a speech three days later in Memphis, Tennessee.

In fact, one searches either speech in vain for any occurance of the word "hysterical," in any context whatsoever. (We have seen one previous unsupported imputation of the word to Ashcroft himself.)

A final point is that John Ashcroft is not even a part of the (current, second) Bush administration, so that holding any comment of his—however unacceptable, however genuine—against the current administration seems most unfair.

Ashcroft is gone, and the victimized-librarian-American community misses him.

Travels with my box cutter

I traveled all the way to Italy and back with a box cutter in my purse.
I'm not proud of it. I just forgot it was there. Easy to do. I haven't really cleaned out my purse since the Reagan administration--no, make that the Nixon administration.

I have arthritis in my hands, so I carry a box cutter to open those little cellophane packets of crackers and breadsticks they give you in restaurants. Very handy. Somehow it got through the metal detector--both ways. Must be some really crappy form of metal. If I remember rightly, the thing cost a dollar at the hardware store.

It was finally discovered at the airport in San Suis Obispo, CA. It didn't set off the metal detector there--my keys did that. I wonder what kind of metal it is. Kryptonite?

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

My suggestion for a Starbucks coffee cup. By Edmund Burke

Why Be Jewish?

Miriam Gross has this to say:

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived.

My parents both came from secular, middle-class, professional German (and Russian) families and although ... they didn’t convert to Christianity, they were nevertheless assimilated members of German society. Indeed they believed that assimilation was the best answer to the Jewish ‘problem’. []

Despite these views my parents both emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s (they weren’t married at the time), very soon after the Nazis started introducing anti-Jewish legislation.[]
I was sent to an English boarding school where being Jewish was neither here nor there — it was never mentioned. []

Of course I was aware of the history of anti-Semitism, of Hitler and the Holocaust, but it seemed that these terrible things, however unforgettable, were over and done with. I learnt nothing about Judaism or about Jewish traditions and culture at school, any more than I did from my parents. I never once took part in a Jewish festival nor did I ever go into a synagogue.

So it is not surprising that, for most of my life, I have had almost no sense of Jewish identity. I feel much more English than Jewish. This must be true of hundreds of Jews with similar backgrounds.
However, just as my parents were forced by the Nazis to focus on their Jewishness, so the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world has made me much more conscious of being a Jew. Not that I have ever personally encountered anti-Semitism. But even in England ... there is more of it in the air; the anti-Semitism of the past, which I mistakenly thought had faded away, is coming back into the open.

So that I now sometimes find myself telling new acquaintances that I am Jewish for no other reason than to prevent the possibility of their letting drop some anti-Semitic remark. It would be less easy to do this when talking to Muslims who have been taught that Jews are devils....[]
In this new climate I feel more of a bond with other Jews than I ever have in the past — indeed it is a rather comforting fellow feeling, somewhat akin, perhaps, to belonging to a secret society. But no one would wish to acquire a sense of identity based on the negative fact of other people’s prejudices. It’s true that many Jews, perhaps most, have been shaped by traditional Jewish religion and culture, but it would be spurious for me to claim a part in experiences which I don’t share.



•

Coincidentally, I just returned from Purim services. Purim is a joyful holiday, when children dress up in costumes and people give little gifts of food, and also donate money to charity. It celebrates the triumph of Queen Esther and her cousin Mordechai over enemies who wanted to kill all the Jews. We used a little book full of Purim songs, pictures,and prayers. But in an afterword by Jacob Neusner, this sentence occurred:

Purim was invented to remind Jews that they always have enemies.

It is a shame that Miriam Gross knows nothing about the traditions and customs of Jews, if only to be able to reject them intelligently. There are some beautiful things in Judaism.

Sideways: the book

I haven't yet managed to see the movie, but I got the book at the library. What lame writing--scarcely a noun appears that is not shackled to an adjective, like a convict handcuffed to a policeman. An occasional verb is unaccompanied by the chaperone of an adverb, but not many. A sample:

Something caught his attention and he slowly lifted his head over the menu. ...a tall , strikingly beautiful woman with brunette

hair cascading over broad shoulders, in an eye-catching black cocktail dress...

A little more:

Their tiny tasting room was a ramshackleroadside barn, broken at both ends by enormous sliding doors....It was a refreshing change from the sterility of most tasting rooms, and an unpreprossessing rebuke to the tawdry excesses of Fess Parker's vulgar estate

....

And yet again:

"The sun poured bright parallelograms of mote-swirling light through the venetian blinds of my rundown, rent-controlled house in Santa Monica..."

The net effect is that of a wagon clumping along on four square wheels. I suspect that they turned the movie script into a book, which never works for me. The dialogue is okay, but you just know it needs actors to flesh it out.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the pretentious wine talk.

Back to the library. Thank God I didn't shell out for this!

Robert Frost on the Fragility of Early Spring

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her first leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In honor of our--delayed!--Spring and Poetry Month, which I thought was March...but their website says it's April.

All the better--we have more than another month to leaf through our poetry books and revisit poets, great and minor, who we enjoy.

Hatemonger's Quarterly plans big bash, calls for suggestions

The crack young staff seems to lack imagination when it comes to party-planning:

There’s just one hitch. The Official Events Planning Team of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly”—God bless it—isn’t exactly chock-a-block with precocious talent. In fact, its “Fog a Mirror” entrance exam hasn’t ensured that the team is made up of the best and brightest.

We mean, it’s not as bad as the CIA, but it certainly has its share of dim bulbs.

May we suggest a costume party? Everyone could come as somebody hatefulor just terminally annoying--Moqtada al-Sadr, Walter cronkite, etc. The list is endless.

Mick Jagger could come as himself. And bring the family, Mick.

Jeff Weiss may have been inspired by tribal leader

The Radio Equalizer suspects that the Nazi sympathizing teenager who went on a killing spree may have been inspired by a tribal leader:
z

A firestorm erupted across Canada in December 2002 when Dr. David Ahenakew told a reporter from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix in Saskatchewan that Hitler "fried six million Jews" to keep them from taking over Europe. “

"

That’'s why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they'’re doing. They'’re killing people in Arab countries,"” Ahenakew was quoted as saying.

Worst jobs--the historical approach

I have to admit they're worse than some of the jobs I've had.

Old headache for libraries; new headache for train stations

An old library problem resurfaces in train station.

airforce wife asks: Has the American Library Association Gone crazy?

The short answer: Yes.

Computers don't help kids learn

Computers are not an aid to children learning in school, but an impediment, according to a Royal Economic Society study, reported in the Telegraph, London;

The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.

[]

... the study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: "Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading."

Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University.

Their report also noted that being able to use a computer at work .. had no greater impact on employability or wage levels than being able to use a telephone or a pencil.

The researchers analysed the achievements and home backgrounds of 100,000 15-year-olds in 31 countries taking part in the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study in 2000 for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Pisa, to the British and many other governments' satisfaction, claimed that the more pupils used computers the better they did. It even suggested those with more than one computer at home were a year ahead of those who had none.

The study found this conclusion "highly misleading" because computer availability at home is linked to other family-background characteristics, in the same way computer availability at school is strongly linked to availability of other resources.

Once those influences were eliminated, the relationship between use of computers and performance in maths and literacy tests was reduced to zero, showing how "careless interpretations can lead to patently false conclusions"....

The more access pupils had to computers at home, the lower they scored in tests, partly because they diverted attention from homework....

Pupils tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching.

This seems to prove that throwing money at schools, the favored nostrum of the left, does not work. It has never worked, and never will.

The rights and wrongs of execution

Eugene Volokh approves the Iranian way of execution:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

And, yes, I know this aligns me in this instance with the Iranian government — but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in this instance the Iranians are quite correct.

UPDATE: I should mention that such a punishment would probably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. I'm not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it's cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.

[]
In any event, there's nothing unconstitutional about letting victims' relatives participate in the execution; it's only the use of cruel means that would require an amendment.

I know exactly how he feels. He's angry. So am I.
.
BUT: It is wrong to encourage people to enjoy cruelty. The Puritans banned bear-bating not for the sake of the bears but for the sake of the bear-baters. Cruelty degraded them. The enjoyment of torture is bad for a society. Another example: the behavior of guards in Nazi concentration camps. These guys might have been ordinary husbands, fathers, and churchgoers in other circumstances.

What happened to the cedars of Lebanon?

I always wondered if these ancient cedars were still there. Most were cut down:

As remote as they are, the cedars are not untouched by history. The grove we see today descends from an immense primeval forest of cedars and other trees such as cypress, pine and oak that once covered most of Mount Lebanon including part of its east facing slopes.
The Cedar is an historical entity mentioned often in the Bible and other ancient texts and it played an important part in the culture, trade and religious observances of the ancient Middle East. Serious exploitation of these forests began in the third millennium B.C., coastal towns such as Byblos.
Over the centuries, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians made expedition to Mount Lebanon for timber or extracted tributes of wood from the coastal cities of Canaan-Phoenicia. The Phoenicians themselves made use of the cedar, especially for their merchant fleets. Solomon requested large supplies of cedar wood, along with architects and builders from King Hiram of Tyre to build his temple. Nebuchadnezzar boasted on a cuneiform, inscription: "I brought for building, mighty cedars, which I cut down with my pure hands on Mount Lebanon". Prized for its fragrance and durability, the length of the great logs made cedar wood especially desirable. Cedar was important for shipbuilding and
was used for the roofs of the temples, to construct tombs and other major buildings.
The Egyptians used cedar resin for mummification, and pitch was extracted from these trees for waterproofing and caulking.
In the second century A.D., the Roman Emperor Hadrian attempted to protect the forest with boundary markers, most carved into living rock, others in the form of separate engraved stones. Today over 200 such markers have been recorded, allowing scholars to make an approximate reconstruction of the ancient forest boundaries. Two of these markers, carved in abbreviated Latin, can be seen at the American University of Beirut Museum. In the centuries after Hadrian, Lebanon's trees were used extensively as fuel, especially for lime burning kilns. In the Middle Ages mountain villagers cleared forests for farmland, using the wood for fuel and construction. The Ottomans in the 19th century destroyed much of the forest cover and during World War II British troops used the wood to build railroad between Tripoli and Haifa.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

An Englishman gives up eating

Simon Heffer is getting old:

As I reach my mid-forties I fear the time to give up eating is near, and I start to formulate a plan to retire from it in the not-too-distant future. I suspect it is only because my childhood was not blighted by twizzlers and nuggets that I have lasted this long. My retirement will be from recreational eating, and instead I shall stick to the necessary intake that makes for boring repasts but long life. This will also benefit those who dine with me, as none of them will die from passive eating. This may be a Sinatra-style retirement, with a long farewell tour and the odd comeback. However, it cannot happen until I have achieved my aim of eating in three three-star Michelin restaurants on the same day. My friend and fellow Spectator contributor Leo McKinstry has agreed to help me in this arduous project, which has the working title of ‘Two Fat Bastards’. Sadly, there are only three such eateries in England, and none of them does breakfast. So before we go to Bray for lunch and Gordon Ramsay for dinner, where do we get the bacon and eggs? Who serves the best breakfast in England?

I don't think he'll starve to death just yet.