Madame Potemkin has been experiencing the joys of kidney stones over the past several days, leading me to see the world through the prism of egestion; thus the title.
Anyhoo, there's been a fascinating, well, pishing match between uber-bloggers Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds of late, focusing, as I understand it, on the significance of allegations of military misbehaviour in Iraq, specifically the "Please Don't Squeeze the Koran" issue. Andrew is horrified, and Glenn is nonplussed.
My two cents (about two-and-a-half, Canadian) is scattered, as usual.
As I see it, the major threat to success in this venture is faint-heartedness on the part of the Western World. Some of this faint-heartedness appears to be fostered by the Cowboy-in-Chief's political opponents. There seems to be an inability on the part of many people to come to terms with the fact that someone whose policies they oppose may be doing a good thing. This inability is itself manifested in, among other things, an exaggeration of the significance of the inevitable errors in Bush's execution of the war.
To his credit, Andrew Sullivan was and is, an ardent supporter of Operation Iraqi There-Must-Be-WMD-In-There-Somewhere-Because-That's-All-This-Was-Ever-About, but he's a great example of how one's perspective on one issue (torture) can be skewed by opposition elsewhere (gay marriage). I think that this weakened support (of the military effort, not the president nor his party) is itself the primary threat to success. Some folks see it as Bush Lied!, some see it in Halliburton Lied! (Again!), and some see it in Abu Ghraib, but in all cases, it looks and sounds like a McLuhan-esque "If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it" limited perspective.
Besides, I don't know if Israeli flag burritos and menstrual blood facials are ineffective means of 'softening up' potential terrorists, but Andrew's assumption that they must be seems a little suspect. I'm also less concerned about whether these methods are incendiary or offensive than whether they contribute to the long-term project of developing the Muslim world's sensibilities so that they can co-exist with the rest of humanity. I don't know the answer to that, but the fact that it might offend people who are untroubled by babies being murdered in the streets of Tel Aviv does not in itself cause me to lose any sleep. I don't think that particular level of sensitivity has yet been earned.
- Moishe Potemkin
Last week, Cross-Currents featured a very distasteful posting by Toby Katz, supported by Yakov Menken, justifying the chareidi world's indifference to Yom Hashoa.
My own impression, based on my years in this world, is that DovBear's interpretation is correct, in that this indifference is only one example of a chareidi cultural phenomenon in which all ideas that originated by someone "outside of the camp" are derided, with backfilled halachic nyaah-nyaah-ing as appropriate. This is, as commentor Lumpy Rutherford states in a different context, an idea that resonates with me, but we're all different, and perhaps what I perceive as provincialist snobbery is, in fact, sincere.
Except the logic is so incoherent, it's difficult to make that assumption. Rabbi Menken, in a later comment, has the audacity to criticise a comment simply because it is offensive. This in the midst of a discussion explaining why the (ahem) Secular Zionists - hundreds of whom lost their lives developing a country where Jews could hopefully live in peace - are so impure that we must impute only the worst motives to all of their actions.
But be that as it may - Rabbi Menken, earlier in the discussion, claims that since Yom HaShoa also incorporates a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the date disgracefully insists that all of the other victims of the holocaust are being insulted. He later suggests that January 27th would be an appropriate date, although by his logic this date similarly derides those who either did not survive, or were imprisoned in camps other than Auschwitz.
Again, the entire discussion is distasteful, and I'm somewhat loathe to pick through the details. A better understanding of this topic requires a more detailed analysis of the charedi world's attitude towards the state of Israel. I close by quoting Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits' comments on the observed lack of any scintilla of religiosity among many of the early Zionist pioneers:
"To be blamed are those who sat back in their easy-chairs and wrote verbose protestations, instead of joining in the work and showing practically how Tora was to be realized while creating the new eretz yisrael. It will ever remain a stigma on a great part of Orthodox Jewry that they protested instead of encouraging, that they hampered instead of helping, that they stood behind instead of taking the lead, that they separated and did not join."
- Moishe Potemkin