Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009

Or Yom HaShoah. There's a different HRD in the US and another in Europe.

As a practicing Buddhist, the most natural response for me is to chant "Ji Jang Bosal" (a name which comes particularly from a Korean, Buddhist tradition, JJB is also known as Kṣitigarbha or by other names) a sort of prayer for the dead. But it's also awkward, because it's caught up in Buddhist rhetoric about reincarnation. JJB is a sort of saint figure, who guides the dead. By chanting we hope to offer teaching to the dead, so that they might have a more favorable rebirth. Obviously, it isn't the victims of genocide who most need teaching, but then there's also quite a loophole in Buddhism. If there's no self, then who is dead and who is reincarnated? For someone who's not Buddhist, that might not be a very interesting question. But it points to a complexity and nuance in the idea of reincarnation that's often unacknowledged.

Sometimes when someone dies, I chant "Kwan Seum Bosal," instead. If JJB is the patron saint of the dead, KSB is patron saint of compassion. I chant for survivors, for perpetrators, and for myself, but not for the victims. Today, however, JJB comes more naturally.

Someone I know passed away recently, so we did JJB chanting at practice last week. I explained to someone there for the first time the traditional teaching that you become JJB when you chant his name. Suddenly, I realize that to chant for a favorable rebirth isn't about some notion of karma located specifically with the deceased, a mistake that can too easily lead to blaming victims. It's about making the world a better place where their rebirth will be favorable. Chanting meditation brings this back to the Great Question: What am I?

It's funny because it's racist

Cause, you know, Jews are never Black. Or Athletic.

Maybe he's getting back at his Jewish ex. Or maybe there's just something he's missing - like the authority to talk about the Jewish experience.

Durban II

Today is Hitler's Birthday-- and the first day of Durban II.

We'll see at the end how the conference has gone, but early on, I'm heartened. Several nations have boycotted entirely. Not just Israel and the US, but Germany and Poland, as well. I've got mixed feelings on Italy being among the early refusers, as they've got some serious problems with anti-Roma racism that can't be ignored right now, but they were among the many.

And though many nations remained, it was great that they called out Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his shit. Also, via David, two very important nations, Jordan and maybe Morocco, were among the nations to leave during his speech. [In later reports, I haven't seen mention of these nations. Not sure what happened.]

If people and nations are unwilling to accept antisemitism, there might be a chance to keep it from spreading. Perhaps the antisemites of the world will be radicalized, but if enough nations are willing, we can deal with that.

Living in Israel helps Survivors cope

Holocaust survivors in Israel cope better with the traumatic effects of the genocide than those living in the U.S. and Australia, according to mega-analysis of prior studies performed by researchers from the University of Haifa.

The analysis, carried out at the university's Center for the Study of Child Development, encompasses results from dozens of research works on some 12,000 Holocaust survivors living in the three countries.

The research found that living in Israel played a role in moderating the long-term effects of the Holocaust on survivors.

This is apparently a huge meta-study. Generally such studies are conducted because numerous smaller studies were inconclusive, and the results should be understood in that vein. Individual variation might be so great that this sort of aggregate data isn't very informative in most contexts. You can't tell without being an expert. Yet this strikes me as probably meaningful.

Tragedies, even more personal or local tragedies without anything like the magnitude of the Holocaust, destroy so much. Things that are hard for a lot of us to recognize, like a basic sense of integrity, control over one's own life at the level of the body. It should be obvious that political empowerment of the sort Israel provides would be meaningful to survivors.

The full story is at Ha'aretz. It provides conjecture on why this finding might be. There's also a note that the constant state of war Israel has been in might be a reason Isreal isn't more obviously good for survivors.

the values of critical thinking beyond critical thinking

This post from Ta-Nehisi Coates is a couple weeks old, but I just re-read it. It's worth re-reading.

The other thing I learned in the conscious community was the value of critical thinking. The idea was that you live in a world where the Tuskegee experiments actually happened, where the FBI did plot to destroy the Panthers, where J. Edgar Hoover terrorized black leaders from Garvey to Huey Newton. In that vein, you should be skeptical of what you see and hear. This is the perspective Mos is coming from. (Note the Assata reference.) But here's the thing--if you really get that message, it ultimately leads you to be critical, not just of the larger white narrative, but of the narrative put forth by those around you.

So here's the deal--I was a history major at Howard University. I came to that school believing very much in an Afrocentric view of history. From that perspective, my first semester was just devastating. I had a professor, Dr. Linda Heywood, who specialized in taking on kids like me (the ones who believed ancient Egypt built fighter jets) and forcing us to face facts. She was, of course, a trained historian who was used to debating kids like me, and for every Chancellor Williams or Diop I whipped out, she had a David Brion Davis or a Eugene Genovese.

media biases

In the wake of a report of bias at the BBC, here's also an interesting report on bias in Swedish media.

If someone claims the US media as a whole is biased in favor of Israel -- honestly, I don't watch enough tv to know. The news I get online is different from how most people get their news. And the only news source I pay attention to in an unfiltered way is a public radio station. I tend to believe the US media is, on the whole, biased toward Israel, but that this is a simplification.

My concerns are more about why people think the media is biased. We know, for instance, that the biases of the reporters are not typically the same biases their editors have. Individuals have their individual biases. American reporters tend to share those biases common among Americans. But typically, in my experience, anti-Israel partisans portray it as a Jewish conspiracy. Strangely, all of those other biases disappear. What's frustrating about that is that we can't really talk about correcting the problem then. If the problem is identified as a group of people, the only solutions are either to cow those people into 'acceptable' views or to discriminate against those people in the field. And 'those people,' here, are Jews.

When it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are undoubtedly many, many biases. There's the bias where Western media tend to focus on the conflict disproportionately because they recognize the names of the cities, just to name one. Not all of these biases are necessarily bad until they are compounded with a failure to adhere to strict journalistic standards. I don't mind if reporters have an instinct to side with underdogs, but I mind if they don't do their job well.

In the case of the BBC, the situation is significant, even though it deals with a small number of instances that weren't up to the BBC's own standards, because it deals with Jeremy Bowen, the first Middle East Editor. However, in a way the Swedish case is more interesting. It doesn't deal with particular cases that clearly cross any lines, but with the whole of the coverage.

RPM’s low-key and logically stringent criticism focuses on three points. First of all, the papers (with the exception of DN) failed in providing any explanation for the Israeli attack — instead making it seem as if an irrational and brutal war machine unleashed its fury on innocent civilians. Secondly, RPM criticizes the way the papers treat the issue of war crimes. He points out that the only case of war crime that was beyond any doubt — and even confessed, proudly, by those who committed it — even before the start of the operation, was the continuous Hamas shelling of Israeli civilians in the south. However, nearly all discussions on war crimes in the press focused on Israeli actions. Thirdly, the greater narrative into which the reporting was placed, was over all the Palestinian narrative of a poor, downtrodden people, victim of an aggressive colonial power.

RPM is careful to point out that he doesn’t claim that the coverage in these four papers was erroneous. He doesn’t know. The point is, however, that neither did the people who decided to publish. Nonetheless, they followed a publishing pattern that lead them in a consistent anti-Israeli direction. Even though there are very few examples where individual articles step over the line of what can be described as honest reporting, RPM stresses that the over-all coverage creates a picture that’s highly problematic.

Maybe there are also pro-Israel biases in these papers as well. But that doesn't mean these biases don't matter.

One particularly awkward bias that I think dominates more than anything: space limitations that preclude context and the sort of serious analysis that can avoid bias. A five-hundred and fifty-nine word piece (the number is from this piece, at the top of the NYTimes online right now) will invariably simplify. In a sufficiently complicated situation, that simplification requires bias.

In an interesting remark, Mr. Helin defended why his paper – Aftonbladet – wrote so little about Hamas’ role in the escalation of the conflict. He said that it’s obvious that Hamas is a terror organization that commits war crimes. Therefore it doesn’t have to be reported (ca 21:30 into the broadcast).

Scroll down here (a wonderful resource, btw), and watch Guy Raz (7 Dec 2006). Preceding tales of editors cutting mentions of antisemitism, he tells the story of the BBC's reporting on Kristallnacht. It was all of 20 seconds long.

The problem with unconditional bans

I know these issues are a lot more sensitive in Germany than elsewhere, but this seems a bit off to me:

Mr Kramer launched his critique amid increasing sensitivity in Berlin over The Producers, the comic musical that portrays a singing, dancing Adolf Hitler. It is the first time that the show, which has been seen in London, New York, and Austria, has been staged in Germany. The controversial show is due to run for two months in a venue where Hitler once watched a Shakespeare play. It includes a troupe of storm troopers tap-dancing and Hitler singing: "Heil to me, I'm the Kraut who's out to change our history." Editorials carried in German national newspapers have questioned whether it is right to laugh at Hitler, while the advertising literature for The Producers has been forced to replace the swastika motif with a pretzel, to comply with German law.

I haven't seen the musical, but the original film was one of the greatest moments in anti-antisemitism.