I Beg to Disagree

The Laogai of China

2009-11-08T00:48:00.006-05:00

Chongqing (AsiaNews/CHRD)

New Yorkers who understand French can subscribe to the French TV network TV 5 Monde and often get information that American media ignore. So tonight we heard about the ongoing totalitarian repression in China, something that should not have surprised me, but it did, just because we do not hear much about it. It's not a secret, there is quite a bit of information on the internet, yet for all the American public knows, "Laogai" may as well be a secret. There are millions -- perhaps as many as seven million -- prisoners in forced labor camps all over China. The Chinese bureaucratic term Laogai, "reform through labor," has now entered European languages to mean what it in fact is: brutal political and cultural repression There is a Laogai Research Foundation, a Laogai Museum in Washington (whose founder was Harry Wu), and a small band of human rights activists who take an interest. The prisoners are persons suspected of political or cultural or religious incorrectness, or in some cases are people who have committed criminal acts.

Could we perhaps get Ms. Clinton to think about Laogai the next time she hobnobs with Chinese Communist diplomats ? Or perhaps Mr. Obama might keep it mind at some diplomatic cocktail party, while sipping a cocktail with the Chinese ambassador ? He should be warned that a Chinese Communist diplomat in Berlin became furious and abusive after the Bundestag voted to condemn Laogai a couple of years ago.

Moyers, Goldstone, and the Shackled Hands

2009-11-05T10:48:00.012-05:00

Some six weeks ago, on Wednesday, September 23, Bill Moyers interviewed Judge Richard Goldstone on the PBS "Journal." The judge had just released his Report in which he had accused Israel (and, much less urgently, Hamas) of "war crimes" in the conduct of the 2008-9 Gaza war.

(It should be noted parenthetically that Judge Goldstone has made numerous Recommendations to Israel for improving its behavior, his Report has nothing to recommend to Hamas, at least not to Hamas by name.)

As I listened to these two gentlemen in September, Moyers and Goldstone -- each more compassionate than the other, each more exuding compassion and good will than the other -- one accusation struck me as the most frightening of them all: it appears that Israel, in Goldstone's telling, had actually and deliberately shot prisoners to death whose hands were shackled behind them. The image stuck in my mind. No, I didn't believe that Jewish boys, even in the midst of war, would deliberately shoot captured and "shackled" men to death. And yet ... Jews, God knows, are no angels. Some are terribly cruel, not doubt. Could a terrible thing like this have happened ? I decided to look into the matter as much as I could. And I found out, as we shall see, that the best short answer to the question is that this alleged cruelty did not take place.

First of all, my memory played a trick on me. (I would suggest that others must have had the same experience.) I had remembered that, in the interview, Goldstone had actually used the words "shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them." It turns out that it wasn't Goldstone but Moyers who used the words, and that Goldstone -- shall I say merely ? -- that Goldstone assented to this telling of the story. Here (right below the video) is the relevant transcript:

BILL MOYERS: Your report, as you know, basically accuses Israel of waging war on the entire population of Gaza.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: That's correct.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, there are allegations in here, some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who'd been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it's a damning indictment of Israel's conduct in Gaza, right?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I've really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report.

Now, in his Report itself, the accusation by the Judge is very far from what it appears to be in this interview.

First of all, nowhere that I can see does the Report accuse Israeli soldiers of shooting "people" (i.e. plural) whose hands were shackled. I did not read every word of this 575-page report, but I looked at every use of the words "tied," "shackled," and "bound." There was only one instance that I could find in which the Report alleges that an Arab prisoner died while his hands were bound, the case of Iyad al-Samouni, which the Report takes up in paragraphs 739-742. These tell a confused story, completely based on Palestinian sources, about which Goldstone himself, it seems, had some doubts:

741. While the fire directed at Iyad al-Samouni [in shackles] could have been intended to incapacitate rather than to kill, by threatening his family members and friends with lethal fire, the Israeli armed forces ensured that he did not receive lifesaving medical help. They deliberately let him bleed to death.

So, it turns out, there was no cold-blooded deliberate killing of "people," or even of one person, as far as the Judge's actual Report goes.

Judge Goldstone's Report, relying on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sources, paints the al-Samouni family as totally pacifist and innocent of terrorist activities. Other reports have claimed that this family has been involved in terrorist activities. On the whole, Judge Goldstone relies on biased sources, makes light of Hamas terror, and, overall, falls short of the blind justice that he is sworn to uphold. All that has been documented in the sources that I cite below. But in this case of "shackled hands" he has colluded with Bill Moyers in something that goes far beyond bias: a truly dreadful allegation, made orally on national TV, for which he could find no evidence in his own Report.

Watch the debate at Brandeis University between Judge Goldstone and former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold

Read more about Goldstone and his Report:

goldstonereport.org

thegoldstonereport.com

Other bloggers (from thegoldstonereport.com):

Goldstone Commission Report: Hamas Who?

Investigate the investigators: A time to rebuke Goldstone

The 'human rights' witch-hunt

Double Standard Watch: Goldstone investigation undercuts human rights

The Moral Inversion of Richard Goldstone

The Goldstone commission: A kangaroo court report

Goldstone commission non-credible

Goldstone Goldstoned Himself, Now a Gallstone

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 1

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 2

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 3

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 4

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 5

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 6

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 7

Goldstone Commission problems, part 8

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 9: Gaza Police

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 10 (updated)

Goldstone report inaccuracies, part 11

Goldstone report inaccuracies, part 12 (updated)

Goldstone report inaccuracies, part 13

Goldstone report inaccuracies, part 14

Goldstone Report inaccuracies, part 15 (updated)

Goldstone Report inaccuracies, part 16

Hannah Arendt

2009-10-19T11:53:00.005-04:00

I was 26 years old in 1952 when I devoted several weeks to a close study of Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism," which had appeared the previous year. I was a college graduate by then (from the then-famed CCNY), but otherwise innocent of the world of scholarship. "Origins" made a tremendous impression on me, as it did on many others at the time. Nobody was aware of, or would have cared if aware, her strange love life as the mistress of Heidegger.

First and perhaps foremost, "Origins" boldly proclaimed an equivalence between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. ( Since then specialists have pointed to the pitfalls in insisting on equivalence in history: two things are never exactly the same, and, it is now argued, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, while similar in many ways, were different in others.) To her great credit, Arendt went against the fashions of her time, a time when prevailing moods held the Soviet Union to be somehow on the Left and the Nazis on the Right. Of course, Arendt was neither the first nor the most incisive of the writers who insisted on the striking similarities between Soviet and Nazi domination.

The other noteworthy feature of Arendt's book, it struck me then and still strikes me now, was her observation that neither of the totalitarian movements could be explained by the self-interest of its supporters. The Marxist "materialist" explanations needed to be exposed. She was foremost in describing these movements as irrational and, in that sense, selfless. (Recent research, of course, has shown both self-interest and selfless "idealism" in these movements.)

Beyond these enduring aperçus, the book was full of what seemed to me erudite references to historical events and movements. Huge sections of the book were devoted to British and French history, and, I was led to believe, all this detail showed how profoundly educated the writer was, how deep a thinker. Now, more than half a century of commentaries by specialists, it is obvious to one and all that much if not all of Arendt's book place her into that category of know-all writers who start with having an idea (sometimes quite a good one) and then dress it up with whatever footnote references they can find to prove this idea. She had strong opinions, many of them valuable, but she had neither the inclination nor the scholarly habits to test these opinions.

A year or two after I studied her book, I enrolled in a graduate seminar with her at the New School. I thought then, and I think now, that she was the most arrogant person I ever met in my life, or at least tied for that position. She insisted that every one of her thoughts, no matter how fleeting or obviously ridiculous, be accepted as truth beyond any doubt.

Eleven years ago now, Walter Laqueur, in an indispensable article "The Arendt Cult: Hannah Arendt as Political Commentator," shows many instances of a petulant narcissism in her personal and professional life, and also demonstrates the irrationality of the admiration that her writings have inspired since her death. He also shows how prone she was to anti-Jewish prejudices (being Jewish herself was no inhibition).

So what is new ? Plenty. The Times Literary Supplement of October 9, 2009, carries a lengthy article entitled "Blame the victim. Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: the historian and her sources," by the distinguished historian Bernard Wasserstein (I have not been able to find an on-line version of this piece.) Much of Laqueur's older criticism is amplified here, with much new detail of Arendt's personal anti-Semitism, her haughty relations with others, the unscholarly nature of her "Origins of Totalitarianism:"

Her conception of the dynamics of historical change was confused, a mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial. She was painfully ignorant of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy and had little grasp or interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote. She snapped up unconsidered trifles of evidence and inflated them into richly coloured balloons of generalization.

But Wasserstein's most telling criticism comes when he details Arendt's ignorant use of anti-Semitic sources to reach her generalizations about the nature of the Jews. Sometimes she relies on such sources just carelessly, but more often she seems malicious. We all know, of course, that some years after writing her "Origins," Arendt repeatedly insisted that groups of Jews, particularly those incarcerated by the Nazis, collaborated with Nazis in ways that, presumably, she herself never would. She didn't much like Jews, and she didn't seem to care that her personal tastes and prejudices, and not only about Jews, ruined her objectivity as a writer.

A new website devoted to the "Goldstone Report"

2009-10-15T10:47:00.005-04:00

There is a new website, Understanding the Goldstone Report. I find the site marked by sobriety and restraint, and think that it is an important resource that you will wish to consult. The site's sponsors outline the conclusions that they have reached about the Report, as follows:

The report violates international standards for inquries, including UN rules on fact-finding, replicating earlier UNHRC biased statements.
The Commission systematically favored witnesses and evidence put forward by anti-Israel advocates, and dismissed evidence and testimony that would undermine its case.
The commission relied extensively on mediating agencies, especially UN and NGOs, which have a documented hostility to Israel; the report reproduces earlier reports and claims from these agencies.
At the same time, the Commission inexplicably downplayed or ignored substantial evidence of Hamas’ commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of terror, including specifically its victimization of the Palestinian population by its use of human shields, civilian dress for combatants, and combat use of protected objects like ambulances, hospitals and mosques.
The Commission openly denies a presumption of innocence to the Israelis accused of crimes (while honoring Hamas’ presumed innocence) and acknowledges that it made accusations of crimes without proof that would stand up in court.
The report contains numerous gratuitous digressions into issues beyond the purview of a fact-finding commission that are inaccurate and profoundly hostile to Israel and Jews.
The Commission distorted legal standards, imposing on Israel standards that reverse their generally understood and applied meaning, while ignoring important rules of international law that put the onus of responsibility on an organization as base, by Goldstone’s own standards, as Hamas.

Here is the testimony of Col. Richard Kemp of the UK Army, Ret.

When the Authority Figures Improvise

2009-10-12T00:02:00.012-04:00

If a person doesn't know, should he improvise an answer, or should he admit that he doesn't know ?

Here is an example from the field of Jewish studies, one in which I am not expert at all. It concerns a problem I have encountered in the Hebrew prayer book, and I have made an effort to consult a number of experts with whose help, and that of books they recommended, I found what I believe to be the correct answer.

The problem arises from the daily Amidah prayer, part of which I reproduce here:

(Text, transliteration, and translation courtesy of a Christian group).

Now here is the problem. In the first line shown above, the prayer addresses G'd twice, each time asking, rhetorically, "who is like you ?," each time using a personal, second person pronoun-suffix. The first time the pronoun-suffix is used, " in "khamokha," G'd appears to be addressed as a male, but the second time, in "lakh," G'd appears to be a woman.

How is this apparent inconsistency to be explained ?

Ask people charged with being knowledgeable about such things, and you will get one of three answers:

1) I do not know.

2) Since G'd is neither male nor female, the writers of this prayer here indicate the gender neutrality of the deity by alternating the grammatical gender indicators. Some variation of this is the most commonly elicited answer. It happens to be ignorant, wrong, and unacceptable from one whose professional responsibility is to either know better or, at least, to understand the limitations of his own knowledge.

3) The correct answer, which I will not fully give away here, can be found by consulting a work on pausal forms in the history of the Hebrew language, for example pp. 96-98 of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, Second English Edition, 1910.

The problem with improvising knowledge about materials that come to us from the past is that this improvisation tends to be in the direction of what is now, currently, fashionable. In the case at hand, the improvised interpretation looks at the ancient text in the light of current, fashionable "gender fairness." Historians call this error one of anachronism.

Why is this kind of error so bad ? To put it most briefly, it robs us of understanding the text at hand. It suggests meanings to the prayers we utter that these prayers do not contain. In short, in this case, it reduces the actual Hebrew text to a mumbojumbo of phrases that are recited by rote without understanding.

For a stimulating discussion of gender in Jewish prayer, see the article by Lois C. Dubin

A Lesson from the Torah

2009-10-08T12:26:00.005-04:00

Rabbi Wolpe, whose mini-column I read every week in the Jewish Week, had a particularly important lesson last month. Here is an excerpt:

The Dubno Maggid told a story that should be learned by every Jewish child. He told of a father in a small Eastern European village who was walking his child to cheder, to school. Suddenly they heard a fanfare of trumpets and an elaborate coach pulled by beautiful horses rode down the road. The coach stopped right by them and out stepped a man wrapped in lush furs and dripping with jewels, dazzling the onlookers.

The father whispered to his son: “Take a good look, my child. For unless you learn and live Torah, that’s what you are going to look like!”

Learning Torah — and living Torah — can save us from the excesses that masquerade as meaning. How many of us are wise enough to whisper those words to our children — or heed them ourselves?

Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. His latest book is “Why Faith Matters” (HarperOne).

From: Jewish Week, Sept. 15, 2009

Peace Now -- Peace in Our Time

2009-08-15T12:46:00.011-04:00

Mr. Neville Chamberlain (center), Pg. Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), Führer Adolf Hitler, Sept. 28, 1938

History has not been kind to Mr. Chamberlain. The agreement with Hitler that he so proudly displayed on his return to Britain proved to be worthless. In a way, mutatis mutandis, Chamberlain was the Barack Obama of his time: confrontation is noxious and dangerous, he believed, negotiation is the only reasonable way to go. Of course the situation then was not the situation today, and today's foes are not identical to the foes of 1938; Obama's path today may yet prove to be the wise one that his admirers hope it will be.

But there is something eerily similar between then and now. Hitler's Nazi movement made an appeal to dark human passions that sweet reason could not assuage. Sweet reason -- can't we all just get along ? -- does not solve all issues, pace Chamberlain, Obama, and the bien-pensant liberals of our day. Today, I fear, our (mostly liberal) chattering classes, so intent on getting on with negotiation and avoiding confrontation, simply fail to notice that Islamism, in this respect not unlike the Nazism of yore, appeals to passions that are not provided for by rational-man images of bourgeois society.

Today's New York Times tells us that "at least 6 die as Islamists clash with Hamas" in the Gaza territory. The story of bloody mayhem, members of one Islamicist faction killing those of another, is buried on page 7, with the front page taken up by more important news: "retailers see slowing sales in key season," "idle Iraqi date farms show decline in economy," a shooting in Harlem, etc. But the violence of Palestinian Islamicists against one another gets swept under a page-seven rug. And New York Times's readers are spared a confrontation with uncomfortable reality.

The sweet-reason, can't-we-all-just-get-along movement in Israel is called Peace Now, and is promoted by left-wing parties like Meretz. Peace Now was founded some thirty years ago with the proposition that if only Israel were nicer to the Arabs, the Arabs, in turn, would be nicer to Israel. If Peace Now has a guiding principle, it is that radical, uncompromising Islamicism is to be strictly ignored. But, alas, while Israel has tried to be as nice as possible to the Arabs (most notably at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001), more or less following Peace Now prescriptions, there have been no positive results, peace now being more elusive than ever. Consequently, as explained by Carlo Strenger in a recent issue of Haaretz, Peace Now has virtually disappeared from Israeli politics.

Update on the intra-Islamist violence in Gaza (Haaretz, 8/15/09):

Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said 24 people were killed, including six Hamas police officers and an 11-year-old girl. At least 150 people were wounded, he said.

When Everything is Black or White

2009-08-06T12:58:00.009-04:00

In the Photoshop program for editing photographs, there is a facility by which one can increase or decrease the contrast of an image. I took a black-and-white portrait of my youngest granddaughter (top), and then dialed up the contrast to a maximum (below). The result is a picture, interesting in itself, but lacking all nuance of shading. Everything is black or white.

I thought of this ability to rev up contrast, with its result of utter distortion, as I read the book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell is upset by the large Muslim populations in Europe, and, indeed, there are real enough problems. But Caldwell sees everything in black and white. The Muslim populations, he claims, have not assimilated, AT ALL, to European culture. Caldwell is not a scholar, and his use of statistics (and other data) is tendentious and naive. I think that he does point to things we need to worry about, but his highly contrasty portrait will not help us think about the problem intelligently.

I have reviewed this book for Amazon.

Sotomayor: My Mom Doesn't Get It

2009-07-22T14:19:00.008-04:00

Celina Sotomayor (AP)

The Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court were bland and brought little to surprise anyone. Certainly, if I were a US Senator I would vote to confirm. That said, I must report my unease at her response, which I heard on CSPAN, to comedian Al Franken's question: why do you want this job. I have so far been unable to obtain the transcript of her response, but the NY Times blog The Caucus gives an account very close to what I remember:

Franken and the Job | 12:16 p.m. Why does the judge want to join the Supreme Court? asks Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.

This prompts a lengthy story from the judge, in which her mother, Celina, and her stepfather, Omar, play a role. As she tells it, her mother couldn’t understand why she would take a job that involved a sizable pay cut from her lawyer’s work in private practice, would limit her foreign travel and would prohibit her from having friends who might come before her in court. Her stepfather apparently, at the end, turned to his wife, and said in Spanish, “You know you daughter and her stuff with public service.”
And the judge continued: “That really has always been the answer given, who I am, my love of the law, my sense of importance about the rule of law, how central it is to the functioning of our society …” Those have always created a passion in her, she added. “I can’t think of any greater service I could give to the country.”

As I recall the Judge, she said "all this was in Spanish," wink wink, suggesting, when taken together with her verbiage here, an unpleasant condescension toward her mother --how cute, my old mom, but alas lacking in the sophistication of all those Eastern schools where I learned my selfless morality. There is no doubt that the judge has great affection for her mother, whom she has praised repeatedly in the public record. But condescension nevertheless.

As it happens, Celina Sotomayor achieved graduation from college in New York and became a Registered Nurse, passing her RN boards in English, so the Judge's condescension is doubly misplaced.

Doubly: even if her mother had not had American higher education, or English proficiency, it is a bit outrageous to suggest that our immigrant parents and grandparents cannot be trusted with making ethical decisions as good as ours.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me"

2009-06-11T23:03:00.002-04:00

And as he tries to "explain," the Rev. Wright becomes even more rabid. See the New York Times treatment.

The Menace of "Alternative Medicine"

2009-06-04T19:58:00.005-04:00

Daniel David Palmer (1845-1914), Father of Chiropractic

There was a time, some thirty or forty years ago, when the elite medical schools and hospitals warned patients away from self-styled healers who lacked medical training. Then as now, "chiropractic," "naturopathy," "acupuncture," and many others, were popular and offered their wares, but then they were rejected without equivocation by established medical authorities. But oh, how things have changed.

To give but one example, New York University's Langone Medical Center now offers naturopathy, acupuncture, and herbalism among its treatments for a long list of ailments, including, yes, cancer. Unbelievable ? Click here to see for yourself.

The gradual change in attitudes by leaders of the medical profession is documented in a 2005 article by the sociologist Terri Winnick, "From Quackery to 'Complementary' Medicine: The American Medical Profession Confronts Alternative Therapies." The article is as much a symptom of the change as a description of it, thereby offering some clues to attitudes that caused it.

To Winnick, changes in medical positions seem all to the good. Her narrative is mainly one of sordid political power plays by the AMA in the 1960's, replaced by more reasonable positions now. Some fifty years ago, she tells us, the medical establishment had more power and could therefore fight off the claims of the rival "modalities." Today organized medicine is constrained to be more reasonable, and, she suggests, has therefore come to see the light of cooperation with "CAM" ("complementary and alternative medicine").

The striking shortcoming in Winnick's article, and in the many similar books and articles on the subject, is absence any sort of hard-headed examination of the claims made by these "alternative" practitioners and of their scientific credentials.

As for the claims, the short answer is that, now as before, there simply is no evidence that any of these alternatives to scientific medicine have any merit whatever. This may seem a harsh and intolerant thing to say, but it is the conclusion reached, despite much pressure in opposite directions, by the very government agency set up to find any and every possible scrap of merit in these "alternatives," namely the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

As for scientific credentials of the "alternative" practitioners, it is instructive to look at those of the man hired by NYU to cure cancer (among other ailments) by "alternative" methods. This is what we read

Dr. X, N.D., joins NYU Urology from the Center for Holistic Urology at Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. X. holds a four-year naturopathic doctoral degree and a two-year acupuncture degree from the University of Bridgeport. His clinical practice and research focus on integrative, holistic appraches to urological conditions.

Readers should ask themselves how these credentials compare to those of Board-certified medical practitioners. And they should ask the people in charge of NYU and Columbia whether they themselves, personally, would entrust their health and that of their families to the man from Bridgeport.

To be sure, there still are clear voices of warning. Edzard Ernst has recently written a no-nonsense book, and then of course there is Quackwatch. But given the prevailing anything-goes attitudes of our elite medical institutions, these voices seem to be coming from the wilderness.

On dotty judges, doctors, professors ...

2009-04-27T13:10:00.009-04:00

Humph, by Roger B.

There are two compelling reasons for the timely retirement of people in sensitive professions:

1) Institutions like courts, hospitals, and universities need new blood; they need those who have been trained in up-to-date science and technology to be in charge. True, the aged incumbents have experience (and, some would say, wisdom) that younger people may lack. This experience, where it exists, needs to be available to these institutions, but in advisory capacities. It is also a fact that the younger and more competent scientists and scholars receive lower salaries than their less competent seniors. So these seniors constitute not only an intellectual but also a fiscal drain on some of our most crucial institutions.

2) The diminution of human capacities in old age is very common indeed; it seems that by age 75 a majority of people have experienced some substantial drop in their mental acuity. When the very old still occupy positions of great power and influence, the decrepitude of the elders has proven to be a public menace. In response, and rather than rely on questionable tests of continued competence, many institutions have enforced mandatory retirement (but universities have been forbidden to do so by federal legislation). The oldest still-existing government in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, retires its priests at age 70, its bishops at 75, and forbids its Cardinals to vote in papal elections after age 75. The Supreme Court of Canada retires its justices at 75; the Israeli Supreme Court at 70. But there is no mandatory retirement at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The United States Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Its membership is small but it enjoys tremendous public attention. We know more about its Justices than we know about almost any other group of human beings. And some of these Justices stayed in office until they were old, very old. From my observations in my last paragraph, I expected to find that more than a few of these Justices became mentally decrepit while in office, and this proved to be the case: dozing during arguments, not knowing which side of an issue they supported, sometimes not knowing the difference between appellant and respondent.

The most complete accounting of this Supreme Scandal is now nine years old: Professor David J. Garrow, "Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment." Writing in 2000, Garrow finds evidence of decrepitude in twenty justices (roughly 20% of all) since the beginning of the republic. (We do not know how many more he would have needed to list had he written today.) In the more modern history of the Court, Garrow lists the following Justices as among those who showed signs of mental decrepitude while sitting on the Court: William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frank Murphy, Sherman Minton, Charles E. Whittaker, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, William H. Rehnquist, Lewis F. Powell, William Jr. Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall. (Again: would he have had to add any names from the Court of today ?) Quite reasonably, Garrow supports a constitutional amendment to control the open-ended tenure that obtains now.

The Medical Profession

Once a physician obtains a license to practice, it is extraordinarily difficult to withdraw this privilege from him, no matter what his age. It is not uncommon to see practicing physicians who went to medical school more than half a century ago. How much do they know about modern medicine ? Very few jurisdictions, if any, have procedures for re-examining the holders of medical licenses at regular intervals.

There is a general problem about licensing a person to perform a potentially dangerous act. Driver's licenses, among others, tend to be valid indefinitely, with very few restrictions. The person who performed well at age twenty at a driver's test is, for all intents and purposes, presumed to have his youthful driving abilities intact at age ninety.

If this is a problem in dotty drivers, so much more in dotty doctors. They can do a great deal of harm, but, unlike Supreme Court Justices, their cases do not enjoy great notoriety. In December of 2007 I reported on the famous inter-war German Doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch whose great prestige among his peers as a young man prevented the German medical establishment from coping with his senility when he continued to practice, and endanger his patients, as an old man. While the aged Justice Thurgood Marshall didn't know who was appellant and who was respondent, the aged Doctor Sauerbruch didn't know, in the operating room, which organ needed surgery. Since then, my family has had a number of sad experiences with dotty doctors, some of which endangered the health and even the life of the patient.

No physician should be allowed to practice (other than, perhaps, in a consultative capacity) at an age at which a substantial number of persons have been found to be impaired in their judgment. The self-policing by the profession, through voluntary referrals, etc., seems to have fallen far short of preventing substantial abuses. I think that the unlimited license to practice should expire at a reasonable age, say seventy, with perhaps some limited privileges allowed after that.

The Universities

Dotty professors are less conspicuous in the harm they do than their fellow-dotties behind the wheel, on the bench, or in the operating room. But even consider the not-dotty over-70's, do we really need so many elderly gentlemen teaching the students of today from a perspective, largely, of their own graduate studies in the 1950's ?

Some six years ago history professor Henry Huttenbach of City College in New York was seventy-three years old, and he explained for the Chronicle of Higher Education why he does not at all feel like retiring:

As long as one has something vital to contribute -- half a century of classroom experience, decades of research still filled with unexpressed ideas in as yet unwritten articles and books -- why stop? Why abandon the satisfaction of the daily give-and-takes with students and colleagues? For golf? For Florida? For full-time grandchildren-sitting?

And frankly, he also says, the money is better if you don't retire. He does not mention any need for new blood in the academy. Nor does he mention any new facts, or insights, or techniques that the graduate schools of today may have to offer to younger scholars that were not available in his graduate training. Nor the fact that, with his full professor's salary, his college could hire more of these younger people. But, by all means, read what he himself has to say by clicking here.

Where is the burden of proof ?

The argument against mandatory retirement is often phrased roughly as follows: If a person attains a certain chronological age, say sixty-five or seventy, or whatever, that fact alone does not prove that he is no longer competent to perform in his profession. He or she should be allowed to continue unless he is proven incompetent.

My argument is the opposite. Given the fact that society has a strong interest in competent judges, doctors, professors, etc., and given the fact that a substantial number among the aged suffer from at least some degree of mental diminution, the burden of proof should be on the elderly individual to prove his continuing capacity. If the eighty-year old physician can pass the equivalent of his specialty board once again, and can prove his mental competence, by all means, be my guest, keep practicing. But for all the others, for all those elderly doctors and judges and professors, etc., unwilling or unable to pass the tests that their younger colleagues need to pass, I say, please, it's time to move over, to make room for the young, to protect the patients and the litigants and the students.

Khalidi: At it Once Again

2009-03-16T13:02:00.004-04:00

www.daylife.com

Khalidi's new book, "Sowing Crisis," once again uses propaganda instead of history, and, worse, trickery in the guise of documentation. All this, at least, according to a review in the New York Times Book Review, dated March 15. Click here to read the review.

Even in retraction, the NY Times shows bad faith

2009-01-30T12:44:00.012-05:00

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher, NY Times
Portfolio.com

Seventy-six years, to the day, since Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the New York Times borrows a sleazy trick. It has been caught red-handed in publishing outright lies against Israel, and by implication the Jewish people. Now it offers a weirdly worded "Editor's Note" in which it says that, well, maybe we were wrong, maybe we were right, but since the "original source has not been found," the alleged quotation from an Israeli general "should not have appeared."

As readers of this blog know (see postings below), the offensive material appeared on January 8 in an Op-Ed piece by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Today's "Editor's Note" does not mention Khalidi, who, after all, was the one who made the original false allegation against the Israeli general. Let me try to guess why the NYT is so solicitous about the professor's reputation: so as to run more Op-Ed pieces by him in the future ?

This Editor's Note is completely disingenuous from beginning to end. It says that an "original source has not been found" when, in fact, there is a publicly available original source for General Moshe Ya'alon's views, and that these views are the very opposite of what Khalidi and the NY Times claimed them to be. (See my posting below). I nominate the Times, and Khalidi, for the Anti-Pulitzer Prize for Disreputable Journalism.

CAMERA has published a useful history of the Khalidi hoax.

See also Michelle Sieff's informative account of this whole affair.

Professor Rashid Khalidi Had Access to What General Yaalon Really Said

2009-01-14T11:22:00.009-05:00

Further on Professor Khalidi's piece in the New York Times (see my previous posting).

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has shown just how Professor Khalidi obtained his (false) quotation from General Moshe Yaalon. It would seem from this that Professor Khalidi had access to what General Yaalon really said, but chose, apparently deliberately, to turn the General's words into their very opposite. Here is part of CAMERA's article (click here for the whole piece):

Perhaps most egregious is Khalidi's conclusion of his column with a fabricated quote. He writes:

"Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: 'The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.'"

Khalidi uses the same fabricated quote in his book Resurrecting Empire, citing in the footnote an interview with Ari Shavit in Haaretz Magazine, August 30, 2002, as quoted in Arnaud de Borchegrave, "Road Map or Road Rage?" Washington Times, May 28, 2003.

But, in fact, Ya'alon said no such thing in the Shavit interview. On the contrary. He said that Palestinian Arabs must understand that terrorism would not make Israelis into a defeated people. Khalidi, in other words, reverses the meaning of Ya'alon's words with a fabricated quote.

Below is Shavit's question and Ya'alon's answer:

Shavit: "Do you have a definition of victory? Is it clear to you what Israel's goal in this war is?"

Ya'alon: "I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us."

Ya'alon repeated in the same interview:

"The facts that are being determined in this confrontation — in terms of what will be burned into the Palestinian consciousness — are fateful. If we end the confrontation in a way that makes it clear to every Palestinian that terrorism does not lead to agreements, that will improve our strategic position."

The story of how Khalidi first came to use this alleged Yaalon quotation, in his book "Resurrecting Empire," is described in more detail by Alex Safian in his contribution to the pamphlet "Israel's Jewish Defamers," Boston, CAMERA, 2008, pp. 42-44. For all those of us who had regard for Khalidi over the years, these disclosures of his sleight of hand will be profoundly disquieting.

Professor Rashid Khalidi and the Method of Indiscriminate Quotation

2009-01-11T22:30:00.012-05:00

Professor Rashid Khalidi
photo by Bryn Mawr Now

Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Middle Eastern expert at Columbia University. At various times of his life he has also been active in various Palestinian causes. His scholarly writings, not always uncontroversial, have earned him an international reputation. Whatever his political commitments, he has always maintained cordial relations with people of other persuasions. His friendly relations with Barack Obama, when both lived in Chicago, have become a matter of public notice. He has an enviable reputation for civility in personal and professional relations; in a recent interview, Professor Khalidi remarked that he has about a thousand Jewish friends.

On January 7, however, he published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that has caused consternation to at least some of his well-wishers. Not only does Khalidi here do what scholarly practice forbids -- use indiscriminate quotation as a method of proof -- but he also, as we shall see, claims a quotation is genuine when, in fact, it most likely is a forgery.

Khalidi's piece is entitled "What You Don't Know About Gaza," and suggests that Hamas had no part in causing any difficulty in the Gaza situation. Israel's Gaza operation, according to Khalidi, has no justification at all that he can detect:

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

So the war, according to Khalidi, "isn't really about rockets" but rather, exclusively, about the malice and the evil intentions of Israelis. This strong assertion, it would seem, needs strong evidence.

But what does he offer ? Nothing but a single quotation which, he says, stems from an Israeli general, some seven years ago. He does not tell us how he obtained the text of this alleged statement, nor does he give any information about the circumstances under which it is said to have been made. Nor did he seem to have searched for statements by other influential Israelis that may be relevant. ( Nor does he address himself to the question of a possible relevance of statements by Hamas leaders, who routinely threaten all Jews with death; but that is another matter.) In other words, he did not do what a scholar must do under the circumstances, viz. determine, assuming the statement is genuine, whether it represents Israeli policy today, as he claims it does. I am afraid that Professor Khalidi, to the dismay of those in academia who wish him well, has here abandoned the method of the scholar to embrace the method of the propagandist: the notorious Method of Indiscriminate Quotation (MIQ).

MIQ is bad, and routinely earns graduate students failing marks. The reason that MIQ is so disreputable is that literally anthing can be proven with it: the world is flat, the moon is made of green cheese. But quite often, when lucky, practitioners of MIQ can get away with it in the non-scholarly public because, on its face, the method looks so persuasive. Often its practitioners are even praised by their friends as great researchers, "scrupulously," as it is sometimes said, "documenting" all kinds of outrageous assertions. Unfortunately, people often do not ask whether quotations are presented with adequate context.

But in this case, Professor Khalidi is not so lucky. It turns out that the quotation on which he has so carelessly relied is most likely wholly specious. We now know, thanks to the excellent detective work of Jason Maoz, that Generally Yaalon apparently never said what Khalidi claims he said. (Please read the whole article by Maoz; just click on his name above.)

Remember, this is what Khalidi claims Yaalon said:

The Palstinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

Here, according to Maoz, is what Yaalon actually said

I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep internalization by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us….

What Yaalon wants Palestinians to understand, deeply, is that Palestinian violence will not defeat Israel. Professor Khalidi turns that into something completely different, viz. a desire by Yaalon to have Palestinians see themselves as defeated. As Maoz shows, other anti-Israel propagandists, before Khalidi, have twisted Yaalon's words in the same way, and it appears that the distortion is being handed around from one to the other. Perhaps Khalidi sincerely believed in the accuracy of what he was quoting, but that certainly does not explain away his irresponsibility of passing on this deception without checking the sources.

Professors are human, professors sometimes enter the political fray, and yes, professors sometimes discard all scholarly probity when they allow themselves to be propagandists. These are facts, but not facts that can make us happy. I do worry about that campus up on Morningside Heights and other such places (which, by the way, use up a great deal of public money in the form of grants and tax privileges); I worry about what is happening to the ethos of scholarly responsibility.

Machers -- The Jewish Oligarchy

2008-12-19T15:49:00.017-05:00

The Madoff story has put the Jewish community in the news in the most prominent possible way. But not in ways that its members would have wanted. It seems that some, many, of the most prominent Jewish machers -- movers and shakers -- have left the community vulnerable at the hands of a stupendous Ponzi scheme. The man accused of guilt in the Ponzi scheme is Bernard Madoff. One of the men accused of facilitating the scheme -- without being criminally responsible himself -- is J. Ezra Merkin. Both have been known as big machers among the Jews of the land. (A front-page article by Diana Henriques in the New York Times of December 20 tells the story in great detail.)

[Here is a personal aside. I have had a bit of mole-view of the Merkin family since my mother had been a baby nurse (domestic servant) in the Merkin and allied families some fifty years ago.]

Who are these machers, these movers and shakers, and what is their role ?

In a word, the machers constitute the oligarchy that has by and large run the Jewish community. The idea that nominally democratic institutions are actually run by oligarchies was most forcefully argued by the 19th century German-Italian thinker Robert Michels, especially in a classic description translated in English under the title Political Parties.

Michels speaks of an "iron law of oligarchy," a view that has led later social scientists, notably Seymour Martin Lipset, to refine the concept and specifyy limits to the phenomenon. And indeed, macherdom was defeated in those institutions that, throughout, maintained a high degree of self-criticism and due diligence. The UJA-Federation of New York, with some others, stands out as a bastion of good sense.

Wikipedia describes the oligarchy concept as traditionally formulated:

Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society distinguished by royalty, wealth, family, military powers or occult spiritual hegemony. The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for "few" (ὀλίγος olígos) and "rule" (ἀρχή arkhē). Such states are often controlled by politically powerful families whose children were heavily conditioned and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy. This type of power by its very nature may not be exercised openly; the oligarchs preferring to remain "the power behind the throne", exerting control through economic means. Oligarchies have been tyrannical throughout history, being completely reliant on public servitude to exist. Although Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group.

President Joel (Yeshiva University) presents an honorary degree to Trustee J. Ezra Merkin as Ludwig Bravmann, vice chairman, Board of Trustees, looks on. November 26, 2003

J. Ezra Merkin & friends, charity function, June 16, 2008

Mr. Bernard Madoff

In the American Jewish community, as far as I can tell, the machers play a diffuse, inconsistent, but often dominating role.

I cannot offer a tightly delineated definition. Take the level of synagogue leadership. The concept of macher overlaps, but is not identical, with elected officer and board member. Not every macher has a formal role; not every formal leader is a macher. But as I have observed it in at least some synagogues, you cannot hold an elected post without the behind-the-scenes nod from a consensus of the machers. A macher tends to be rich, well-connected, and very influential. Influence, of course, is the stock in trade of macherdom.

Macher-led synagogues and other organziations have formal elections, but these elections are essentially sham because there is no more than one candidate per post. (I have heard of a venerable Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan, however, in which there is a lively democratic tradition with real, i.e. contested, elections.)

Literally tranlated, a macher is one who does things, who makes things happen. The membership of macher-run groups often could not imagine how things could happen without these machers. The machers tend to be thought of as despots, perhaps, but benevolent despots. The groups keep running, at least that seems to be the impression, largely because of the work and ceaseless energy of the machers.

Machers are thought to be very wise. During the planning for a synagogue renovation, it was the judgement and wisdom of the machers that prevailed, even though expert-backed contrary views were offered. Disagreement with machers -- especially on problems where expert advice might suggest that the machers are actually beyond their depth -- is scorned. As I see it, this is one of the greatest dangers to Jewish public life: an unwarranted faith in the wisdom and benevolence of the machers. Macherdom tends to prevent the one activity that saved some individuals and institutions in the current Madoff affair, due diligence.

How do you become a macher ? What are the qualifications ? These questions await careful treatment by scholars. But there are two institutions that seem to foster and develop macherdom. One is the honorary degree bestowed by prestigious institutions, the other -- more important because much more pervasive -- is the "award dinner" at which groups promote the idea that prestige can be fostered and created artificially. Awards are bestowed for apparent financial prowess, for handing over money to institutions, and for, well, being a macher.

No doubt there are many recipients of such "honors" whose merit can be objectively verified. A scientist or scholar who has made verifiable contributions to his field, or an artist or writer whose work can be independently assessed, may well have at least some of the merit that is attributed to him. But as for the merit of all those other honorees and awardees at award dinners and award dinner-dances, well, that merit partakes more than a little of the great investment returns offered by Mr. Bernard Madoff. It is widely talked about, very widely praised and admired, but it is not verifiable. It does not withstand due diligence.

It is often said that a synagogue, say, relies on such award dinner-dances to raise the funds that it needs. There are three problems with this proposition. 1) It has not been empirically tested -- nobody has tried alternate, more ethical methods. 2) Whatever the financial value of such activity, there is a terrible moral price that is paid, viz. claiming merit where no such merit can truthfully be claimed. 3) At least in the current environment, it has been shown that there was no financial gain to the institutions in this counterfeit traffic in honor.

Finally, I wish to offer two thoughts on how to strengthen Jewish communal activity:

1) Due diligence. When the combined wisdom of the machers in your congregation, say, urges a path of action, resist. Ask for outside expert advice. Independent expert advice is the antithesis of macherdom. Insist on it. Be a trouble maker. You won't earn an award at a dinner dance, but that, as I see it, is an added benefit.

2) Do not in any way approve of or participate in the bestowal of honorary degrees. Ever. Those who have the merit to deserve such degrees probably have earned, real degrees.

3) Do not, ever, attend an award dinner-dance. Do not praise the big machers in display ads. Do not be part of the macher claque. Ever.

Kennedy or Kaye ?

2008-12-16T17:35:00.007-05:00

Pat Moynihan, US Senator from New York (1977-2001)

Who is more similar to the late Patrick Moynihan -- Caroline Kennedy or Justice Judith Kaye ?

Caroline Kennedy

Ms. Kennedy has had an excellent education at elite schools. She has a law degree, and, as a co-author, is responsible for two journalistic books dealing with civil rights issues. Beyond that, she has served on many charitable boards and has given much volunteer time. But is this background enough to be an effective US senator ?

The late Patrick Moynihan held this position for 24 years. Before that he had been a distinguished professor and scholar, and had contributed profound works on public policy. Ms. Kennedy would qualify as a student to Mr. Moynihan, but not as a successor. Unless we look at the US Senate as an entry-level position...

There may not be another Patrick Moynihan on the immediate horizon, but there are many people who have had more extensive records in public service and/or the scholarly study of society than Ms. Kennedy.

One such person is the current Chief Justice of New York, who is forced to retire from that position at the end of this year because she has reached the mandatory retirement age of 70. Here is what a New York Times editorial had to say about her a few days ago:

In her 15 years as chief, Judith Kaye has excelled ... earning national praise for her jurisprudence and as a court reformer. Her mandated retirement at the end of the month, at age 70, leaves Gov. David Paterson with a high standard in choosing her successor.
Judge Kaye was the first woman on the Court of Appeals and the state’s longest-serving chief judge. She is the author of hundreds of majority opinions, works of uncluttered prose that include groundbreaking decisions: holding the state accountable for failing to provide the “sound, basic education” its Constitution requires; allowing gay people to adopt their partners’ children; striking down provisions of a death penalty statute.
Her dissents also exerted great influence, like her eloquent demolishing of the flawed reasoning behind the 2006 decision denying same-sex couples the freedom to marry in New York. It was cited prominently this year by the court majorities that recognized same-sex marriage in California and Connecticut.

Justice Judith Kaye

Sidwell Does So Help Public School Kids

2008-12-05T13:12:00.003-05:00

In my "Modest Proposal for the Sidwell Friends School" (see my blog of November 22), I wrote, among other things

At least some of Sidwell's resources could be made available to all students in the District. Perhaps there could be classes in art appreciation, or college-entrance preparation, or music, or whatever, free of charge to all children. Perhaps the STO funds could be used for these services.

I have now had the chance to talk with Mr. Ellis Turner, the Associate Head of the School, and learned that Sidwell has a number of specific programs to help children in Washington's public schools. For example, Sidwell has a relationship with the (public) Brightwood Elementary School to help in a "lap reading" program. On the high school level, it has a relationship with the (public) Duke Ellington School, which, among other things, provides scholarships for math students. And these are only two examples of programs in which Sidwell cooperates with public schools.

Bravo Sidwell !

African Americans at Sidwell Friends

2008-11-26T11:06:00.005-05:00

I have now had word from Ellis Turner, the Associate Head of Sidwell Friends School, with further information on the racial composition of the school. He reports that 12.8% of his students are African-American. But when we compare this percentage with US Census figures for the District of Columbia, where 55.4% of the population is Black, we can see that African Americans at Sidwell are not doing well -- they have less than a quarter of what their share would be if the student body were representative of the District.

Mr. Turner also reports that a further 13.2% of the student body reports itself as "multi-racial" (the Census figure is 1.5% for multi-racial in the District). The significance of this figure is not clear to me, and, unlike Mr. Turner, I cannot see that it mitigates the very low African American presence at the school.

Moreover, given this low African American presence, I must repeat that the only figure published by the school for "students of color" on its website -- 39% -- is misleading.

Finally, Mr. Turner has taken me to task for my suggestions that Sidwell share some of its resources with the public. I have made these suggestions for two reasons: 1) Like all non-profits, Sidwell is the recipient of significant public financial aid by way of tax benefits; and 2), more important, such sharing is required by the professed values of the school. Here are Mr. Turner's comments:

Further, you make an erroneous assumption in stating that we do not
"share some of your resources with the public, especially with those
children who have no hope of ever attending your school." We have many programs and co-sponsored activities which do just that.

Please investigate before you publish.

I have invited Mr. Turner to let me have details on these programs and co-sponsored activities, and I will put them on my blog as soon as I receive them. It would indeed be good if there could be a public discussion of what SFS does to share its bounties.

Three Athletic Fields, Five Tennis Courts, and a Six-Lane Track

2008-11-25T17:21:00.008-05:00

Facilities on the fifteen-acre Wisconsin Avenue campus ... include the Earl G. Harrison, Jr. Upper School Building; the Middle School Building; Kogod Center for the Arts; Richard Walter Goldman Memorial Library; Zartman House ... three athletic fields including one with all-weather turf surface; five tennis courts; and a six-lane track.

The five-acre Edgemoor Lane campus in Bethesda includes the Manor House ... and athletic fields and two playground areas with climbing equipment.

So who wouldn't want to go to Sidwell Friends School in Washington, the new center of learning for the Obama girls ? Can you imagine, three athletic fields, and all those tennis courts, and six whole lanes of track ? Or rather, who couldn't go ...

For starters, those not judged "academically talented" cannot go. The school says as much. Moreover, there is a requirement to submit to intelligence tests as part of the application process: the WPPSI, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence for the youngest, then the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children), and then on to the SSAT, etc. etc. Sidwell demands (conventionally defined) intelligence and rejects those who do not perform well on standard tests. What of the "Quaker values" of the school, proclaimed on its website, that would require a more egalitarian approach ?

The Quaker belief that there is "that of God" in each of us shapes everything we do at Sidwell Friends School. It inspires us to show kindness and respect toward one another. It motivates us to recognize and nurture each person's unique gifts. It teaches us to apply our talents in service to others and to work courageously for peace.

So there is a disjunction between what is professed (egalitarianism) and what is practiced.

The (in my view) immoral notion that power and the good things of the world should be distributed unevenly to those judged to have "merit" -- i.e. the advocacy of a "meritocracy" -- was savagely satirized by the most profound sociologist I ever met, the late Michael Young, in his widely quoted but rarely appreciated "The Rise of the Meritocracy," 1958. Forty three years later he revisited the topic in an op-ed piece, "Down With Meritocracy."

Back to the Sidwell Friends School admissions. Doing well on conventional tests is a hurdle, but, so it would seem, is money. It costs around $30,000 in tuition and fees, and even those who have benefited from financial aid, roughly a third of the student body, still pay an average of $10,000 per annum.

Finally we come to the problem of the race of the students. Does it matter ? Well, according to the professed "Quaker values" all races should have equal access to all those athletic fields and tennis courts. The school prides itself on its "diversity," and has in fact appointed a number of "diversity coordinators" (at least one of whom has a Ph.D.). But in fact the school equivocates more than a little on how racially diverse it is.

We are told on its website that "39% of the student body [2008-9] are students of color." "Of color" is not a census term, so it's a little difficult to evaluate exactly what it means. We do know that the US Census reports the current population of D.C. as being 34.5% White, and 63.6% as belonging to other races. So, as a first approximation, we know that a white child has almost twice the chance (1.76 times) of going to Sidwell as someone "of color."

But what exactly does "of color" mean in the Sidwell context ? The Census categories are white, black (African American), Asian, and "other races." Now there is a world of difference, from the point of view of educational opportunities, between African Americans on the one hand and Asians on the other. I would suspect that Sidwell's "students of color" include Asians and children of diplomats, among others. To know just what Sidwell's profession of diversity means in practice, we would need to know the percentage of African Americans in its student body. I have written to Sidwell's administration and my inquiry was duly acknowledged, but I have not yet received the figures. If and when I do, I will report them here.

A Modest Proposal for the Sidwell Friends School

2008-11-22T19:32:00.017-05:00

Washington's Sidwell Friends School

The Sidwell Friends School in Washington is in the news: once more, important and powerful people are sending their children there. It is by all accounts an excellent school. It has the resources to assure the best in teachers, in equipment, in curriculum, and in caring parents. In all these areas Sidwell, like other such private schools in the District, stands in sharp contrast to the public schools of the nation's capital. These are struggling, and, the affluent and influential having deserted them, are now ghettos for the non-white and non-privileged.

Like other non-profit institutions, Sidwell would be exempt from local taxes, and contributions to Sidwell would be deductible from income taxes. So taxpayers, including the poor who cannot afford to send their children there, are nevertheless asked to pay for some of its costs.

But many of Sidwell's parents are on record for improving the lives of the poor. This is certainly true of the powerful politicians that are now preparing to send their little ones to Sidwell in the coming year. Sidwell's own Board of Trustees has voiced similar sentiments:

We cultivate in all members of our community high personal expectations and integrity, respect for consensus, and an understanding of how diversity enriches us, why stewardship of the natural world matters and why service to others enhances life

It isn't cheap to go to Sidwell, in fact it's downright expensive. Tuition and fees come to over $30,000 per child per year (with twenty-two percent of the student body receiving some degree of financial aid). At these prices, "service to others" means, primarily, others who are well off.

And here is another disquieting thing about the Sidwell philosophy:

We seek academically talented students of diverse cultural, racial, religious and economic backgrounds.

Those who are not "academically talented," whatever that term may mean, what are those students, chopped liver ? Is that the meaning of the "Quaker way" that is so proudly touted by Sidwell ?

In other words, there is a bit, more than a bit, of a disjunction between the high-minded sentiments of parents and Board on the one hand, and the elitist nature of the program on the other. It doesn't look good.

But wait... this blog has some solutions.

Sidwell and its parents have tremendous resources that they could make available, to some extent at least, to that vast majority of District children who have no hope of ever becoming Sidwell students. Here are some ideas, submitted with all the humility for which this blog has become justly famous:

● Sidwell parents could be asked to make financial contributions to enrichment programs at the public schools. Whenever a Sidwell parent makes a tuition payment, a "Service to Others" (STO) surcharge could be added.

● At least some of Sidwell's resources could be made available to all students in the District. Perhaps there could be classes in art appreciation, or college-entrance preparation, or music, or whatever, free of charge to all children. Perhaps the STO funds could be used for these services.

● Some of Sidwell's parents command considerable venues on their own. The White House itself will soon be one. Perhaps such facilities could be used for regular enrichment programs for all of the District's children.

P.S.: How many of the Sidwell folk can be found in this part of Washington ?

Truxton Circle, Washington DC

How the Jews Voted: Exactly 78 Percent for Obama ?

2008-11-17T17:23:00.009-05:00

Hasidim of Brooklyn: Strongly for McCain
photo by wayupnorthtonowhere

Upper Westside: Probably Obama Country
photo by Ed Yourdon

My friend was an Obama supporter. "Seventy-eight percent of the Jews," he told me, "voted like me." How did he know, how does anybody know anything ? The New York Times. Of course. All the news that's fit to print.

Nobody in authority asked me my religion when I voted. That doesn't happen, and if it did it would be illegal. But it appears that there are "exit polls" in which professional pollsters place themselves in front of polling places and importune voters who have just voted. I myself have never encountered such a pollster in more than 60 years of voting, but I have been told that this is, roughly, how the conversation goes:

Sir, would you mind telling me for whom you have just voted ? Thank you so much. Just a few more questions .... years of education ?, occupation ?, etc. etc., and yes, "religious preference." And then of course there is a quick peek to ascertain race.

As a result of such exit polling, we have information on a national scale that has been shown to be more-or-less accurate for the broad demographic groups. We know that McCain, like Bush before him, received a convincing majority of the white vote. And, this time round, we know that Black people voted Obama in overwhelming numbers. The same reports that tell us these well-established things also purport to tell us about the Jewish vote: 78% for Obama. The trouble is that unlike the large demographic groups, the small minority of Jews in this country (between one and two percent of the population) make any such precision illusory.

The New York Times, for example, carried a report on the exit poll that was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky on November 4. It seems that 17,224 voters, at 300 polling places nationwide, were interviewed that day by E/M. Among these there were about 350 Jews, of whom 78%, or about 270, said that they had voted Obama, with almost all the rest having voted McCain.

To what extent can these 350 individuals be said to be representative of the American Jewish electorate ?

The sample of 300 polling places, or about 5 per state, represents about one quarter of one percent of the nation's voting districts. It was drawn as a random sample of all the nation's districts, and, for purposes of the larger population, can yield reliable results. But to accept its validity as representative of the Jewish population, we have to assume that the Jews of the country (roughly one or two percent of the population) is randomly distributed, more or less, over all the voting districts, all over the country. The proportionate size of the Jewish communities of Williamsburg and Borough Park would have to be similar to those of Idaho and Utah. If that assumption does not hold, there is no validity in the result. (There are statistical techniques -- oversampling -- used for the larger minorities, to correct for some of these problems. There is no indication that such techniques have been used for the Jewish population. I have written to Edison/Mitofsky to get details of their methods, but so far I have had no reply.)

The Brooklyn Paper has reported overwhelming support for McCain in Hasidic neighborhoods. No doubt there was heavy support for Obama on the Upper West side. The Jews of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah ? It is doubtful that the national pollsters ever encounter any of these at all. A valid sample of the American Jewish electorate would have to encompass such diversity. A national sample of all American voters, if it is of practicable size and complexity, cannot do this.

These exit polls almost certainly overstate the extent of Jewish support for Obama, for this reason: since they are based on methods that seek to create representative samples of the American population as a whole, they may do an adequate job of reaching Jews who are well dispersed in that population. But they cannot adequately reach those dense pockets of Jewish population that consist, to a large extent, of Orthodox Jews. And it is probable that these Orthodox pockets were much more favorable to McCain.

Did the Jews generally favor Obama over McCain ? Probably yes. But to the extent of 78 % ? Not likely.

What Obama Thinks About Israel

2008-11-06T00:52:00.002-05:00

Here is a video of Obama speaking at the AIPAC conference during the 2008 compaign.

Sarah Palin and Her Cultured Despisers

2008-10-26T23:05:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska

In the City of New York, the enlightened are smarter, more cultured, more couth than the Governor of Alaska. The woman is a redneck ! Could you find her at MOMA ? Could you see her reading The New Yorker ? Or, for that matter, The New York Times ? Would you find her at a parents' meeting of Brooklyn Friends ? None of the above, obviously.

And she is not an Episcopalian, not a Reform Jew, not a member of Ethical Culture. She does not attend mass at St. Patrick's. Her religious affiliation, Pentecostalism, can be found in Spanish Harlem, but since when is that part of New York, part of Culture ?

Way back in 1799, the German theologian Schleiermacher had a message for the "cultured" of his time. But did this put an end to mindless, ignorant, snobbish judgmentalism ? What do you think ?

Friedrich Schleiermacher, author of
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799)