http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0628-05.htm
Published on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
Out of Left Field - and into the Bush Backyard
Surprise lead for leftwing presidential candidate shakes political
establishment
by Jo Tuckman
Andrés Manuel López Obrador rails against "the privileged" in a
staccato voice which softens as he turns to the virtues of "the poor"
and a cheeky grin accompanies the thumbs up to go with his slogan:
"Smile, we are going to win."
Depending on who you talk to, the presidential candidate, who holds a
narrow lead in the opinion polls ahead of Sunday's Mexican elections,
is the great hope of the downtrodden, a messianic danger to stability or
a crafty pragmatist. This son of a shopkeeper from the marshy back-
waters of south-eastern Mexico is striking a chord and inciting discord
in a country where half the population is poor and the richest 10% own
45% of the wealth.
As the election approaches, opinion polls give the candidate of the
Party of Democratic Revolution a slight lead over Felipe Calderón of the
governing centre-right National Action party.
If Mr López Obrador wins, Latin America's much talked about leftward
march - through Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile -
will have reached the United States' back door. If he loses, in the wake of
electoral disappointments in Colombia and Peru, it will look like the
retreat has begun.
Not that there is much uniformity among the region's leftwing leaders
from the pugnacious bravado of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to the
eminently reasonable Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Most observers put Mr
López Obrador somewhere in the middle.
The 52-year-old former mayor of Mexico City is a strong leader with a
certain magnetism, a sense of mission and an apparently limitless belief in
himself. But he also seems happy to accept that at least half of Mexico's
electorate is traditionally conservative, which, together with the country's
2,000-mile border with the US, puts important limits on how far left he can
go without a backlash.
So though his rhetoric can sound radical, Mr López Obrador's policy
proposals are hardly revolutionary. They include food handouts for the
elderly, household energy subsidies and massive investment in
infrastructure to kick-start Mexico's sluggish economy - to be paid for
by cutting top bureaucratic salaries in half, including the president's.
"He will head a progressive government," says Manuel Camacho, one
of the candidate's small inner circle. "It is not possible for a genuinely
leftwing government to take power in Mexico, not via the ballot box, and
not through force either."
The Bush administration seems to agree. Though it openly voices
concern about President Chávez and his Bolivian ally Evo Morales, there is
no sign of alarm at the possibility of a López Obrador victory. Not so among
Mexico's business community, which spits fire at his name and has thrown its
weight behind his main rival, Mr Calderón.
A comparatively grey candidate with little obvious political charm, Mr
Calderón, 43, promises job creation through market-led reforms in a stable
environment. But polls show that his chance of winning rests on the success
of a negative campaign to convince voters that Mr López Obrador is a closet
authoritarian prepared to throw fiscal responsibility to the wind and plunge
the country into economic crisis.
Few Mexicans can forget the devastating crisis of 1995, the last of
the meltdowns that dogged the final decades of the deeply corrupt
single-party regime that installed itself in power in 1929. The
Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) kept political control for 71 years
through patronage, selective repression and electoral fraud. Its legendary
electoral machine has kept its candidate, Roberto Madrazo, only a few points
behind the frontrunners today.
The PRI lost the last presidential elections in 2000 to Vicente Fox of
the PAN, who unified opposition to the regime behind his slogan "Change".
President Fox leaves office appreciated by the public for keeping
crisis at bay, being pleasant and relatively honest. But he also departs
vilified as weak and ineffective, having failed to push through most of his
reform programme.
Mr Fox's limp legacy allows Mr López Obrador to claim he is the "real
change" that the electorate has wanted all along. With many of his diehard
supporters convinced that only fraud can snatch victory from their hero, the
possibility of tension on the streets is real if his main rival wins by a
narrow margin.
Love him, hate him or just watch him, Mr López Obrador is the
candidate to beat, and may well remain at the centre of the post-electoral
show even if he loses.
Mexico
Population 106.4 million, of which about 71.4 million are eligible to
vote
Main language Spanish
Main religion Christianity
Life expectancy 72 (men), 77 (women)
Ethnicity Mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, mainly Amerindian 30%,
Caucasian 9%, other 1%
Main exports Machinery and transport equipment, fuels and lubricants,
food and live animals. Nearly a third of government revenue comes from oil
exports, mostly to the US
Per capita income US $6,790, the highest in Latin America.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
***
A letter to the Toronto Daily Star....
Jun. 27, 2006. 01:00 AM
Attack sparks Mideast crisis
To the Editor:
As someone who has served in an Israeli tank unit near Kerem
Shalom, I have nothing but sympathy for the bereaved families of
Lieut. Hanan Barak and Sgt. Pavel Slutsker, killed in a daring
Palestinian commando raid in which Corp. Gilad Shalit was taken
captive. But some perspective and some context are necessary.
This tank base was one of the locations from which Israel has been
relentlessly shelling the Gaza Strip for several weeks. Further, just one
day earlier, on Saturday, Israeli commandos had raided Rafah, in the
Gaza Strip, and captured two brothers, Mustafa and Osama Mu'ammar.
All of this is well-known, but did not make it to the front page. Can it be
that Palestinian lives are nothing, Israeli lives everything?
Naftali Lavie, Toronto
---
----- Original Message -----
From: Jeff Blankfort
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 12:29 AM
Subject: A Guide to understanding what is happening in Gaza?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=724870
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 06:33 09/06/2006
Purim will never be the same
By Ruth Meisels
"Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence" by Elliott
Horowitz, Princeton University Press, 340 pages, $35
Allow me to begin with a confession: For as long as I can remember, I
never liked the holiday of Purim, with its story of the massacre of the
gentiles and its message of revenge and rejoicing at the downfall of others.
As if hanging Haman's 10 sons were not enough, the Book of Esther goes on to
boast that "the other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered
themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their
enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand" (Esther 9:16). In
addition, we read Esther's appalling request that the Jews of Shushan be
granted another day to act "according unto this day's decree" - i.e., to
slaughter their non-Jewish neighbors brutally. To eliminate any doubt, the
author of the Book of Esther emphasizes that this was not a case of
self-defense, and that "no man could withstand them; for the fear of them
fell upon all people" (9:2). And so every year all that's left for me to do
is to grit my teeth during the synagogue reading of the Megillah, taking
comfort in the fact that historically, at least, the veracity of this story
is very much in doubt.
But then, just after the holiday this year, Elliott Horowitz's book,
"Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence," fell into my
hands, and I was glad to find in it allies for my aversion to Purim. Since
the mid-19th century, I learned, criticism of the Book of Esther seeped into
liberal Jewish circles, especially in Victorian England, and various leaders
of the community sought to play down the killing and the element of revenge
that underlies the holiday.
A "Bible reader adapted for the use of Jewish schools and families,"
published in 1877 and endorsed by the chief rabbi of Britain, Nathan Marcus
Adler, left out many of the gory details that appear in the final chapters
of the Book of Esther. Claude Goldsmid-Montefiore, a great nephew of Sir
Moses Montefiore, created a stir in 1888 when he published an article in the
London-based Jewish Chronicle, harshly criticizing the message of Purim.
Choosing his words with care, he declared that he "would not be sorry" if
the festival "were to gradually lose its place in our religious calendar."
In his later comments on the Book of Esther in "The Bible for Home
Reading," published in 1896, Montefiore was perhaps the first Jew to
describe the events of its final chapters as "a massacre of unresisting
Gentiles." "If the Bible had not included the Book of Esther," he concluded,
"it would have gained rather than lost in religious value and moral worth."
But 19th-century liberals were not the first to criticize the Book of
Esther. Censure first came from ecclesiastic circles, and especially the
Protestant Church. Back in 1543, in his infamous essay entitled "On the Jews
and Their Lies," Martin Luther remarked on how much the Jews "love the Book
of Esther, which so well fits their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous greed
and hope." Elsewhere, he described the book as "too Jewish," and in a
seemingly unholy alliance with Jewish liberals hundreds of years later,
Luther wrote that he wished the book had never existed. Over the
generations, his disciples continued to portray it as the most bloodthirsty,
and hence the most "unchristian," book in the Old Testament.
In the Jewish world, however, criticism of the Book of Esther was
always a minority view, not reflective of the mainstream. And it is the
mainstream approach that stands at the basis of Horowitz's central - and
provocative - thesis regarding Jewish violence against non-Jews, especially,
though not exclusively, on the festival of Purim.
In contrast to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as weak, passive
and effeminate, Horowitz postulates that throughout the ages, Jews committed
their share of violence, which has always peaked around Purim. Even if the
bloody account in the Book of Esther lacks historical credence, the very
fact that the acts described in it were glorified every year created a
tradition of vengeance and violence, as well as the opportunity to act those
feelings out.
It is true that Zionism, especially after Israel's occupation of the
territories following the Six-Day War in 1967, allowed Jewish violence
against the Arab "Amalekites" to flourish, but according to Horowitz, the
seeds for such behavior were planted long before. Haman "the Agagite" is
described in the Book of Esther as a scion of the Amalekites - a label
applied over the years to the Romans, the Armenians, the Christians, the
Nazis and in our day, by many rabbis, to the Arabs. And Amalek, as is well
known, must be wiped out.
Mocking Jesus
In the year 408 C.E., the Roman emperor Theodosius II issued an edict
prohibiting the Jews from "setting fire to Aman in memory of his past
punishment, in a certain ceremony of their festival, and from burning with
sacrilegious intent a form made to resemble the saint cross in contempt of
the Christian faith." In other words, the custom of mocking Jesus and the
cross in Purim processions, which Horowitz discusses at length in the second
half of the book, was already common in the fifth century C.E. Theodosius'
edict, explains Horowitz, did not put an end to the anti-Christian
traditions of the holiday. The combination of a narrative of divine
salvation of the Jews and the vengeance taken on their enemies with the
carnival atmosphere and the drinking that is characteristic of Purim, led to
behavior that was very different from the stereotype of the meek Diaspora
Jew.
The second half of the book begins with various accounts of Jewish
debasement of the cross during the Middle Ages, not only on Purim. Horowitz
cites dozens of instances, many of them conspicuously missing from modern
Jewish historiography, of symbolic Jewish violence - or "violence against
symbols," to be more exact - that included setting fire to, and spitting and
publicly urinating on, the cross. Such acts often ended in "martyrdom,"
i.e., the death of the perpetrator, or harm to the entire community. These
are the "reckless rites" that give the book its title, and are linked to
Mordechai's stubborn but unexplained refusal to bow down to Haman in the
Book of Esther.
To return to the present, in October 2004 a student at the Har Hamor
yeshiva in Jerusalem, Natan Zvi Rosenthal, spat at the Armenian archbishop
as he was walking in a holiday procession in Jerusalem's Old City, carrying
a large cross. This incident, which sparked a public outcry and was reported
widely in the local media, is portrayed in the book as a link in the long
chain of Jewish violence against Christianity and Christian symbols. (To
complicate matters further, the Armenians have been described in Jewish
writings since the 10th century as descendents of Amalek.) Rosenthal's
shameful act must thus be viewed in its historical context: as a direct
continuation of the Jewish tradition of public disdain for the cross.
Unconcealed agenda
In the final chapters of the book, Horowitz broadens the historical
discussion, moving from violence against Christian symbols to physical
violence against Christians themselves. The most serious charge discussed at
length here is that Jews participated in the massacre of tens of thousands
of Christian captives in Jerusalem in the year 614 C.E., after the Persian
conquest of the city.
Other incidents cited by the author are few and far between: the
murder of a Christian boy during a Purim parade near Antioch, Syria in the
fifth century C.E.; the 12th-century execution on Purim of a Christian who
murdered a Jew in Brie, in northern France (carried out with the approval of
the authorities); and a violent incident within the community, when a Jewish
couple accused of adultery in 14th-century Provence was physically assaulted
at a Purim parade. What is interesting here, more than the incidents
themselves, is Horowitz's brilliant historiographical analysis of what
inspired the documentation of these incidents - from the enthusiasm of a
handful of Christian historians seeking to draw attention to Jewish
violence, to the efforts of modern Jewish historians to whitewash and
downplay them.
Meanwhile, the author himself makes no attempt to conceal his own
agenda. On the contrary, in his introductory chapter he lays all his cards
on the table: "I have therefore chosen, somewhat recklessly, to begin not at
the beginning but at the end," drawing our attention to the lessons for
today that emerge from his historical research. Since Baruch Goldstein's
massacre of Muslims at prayer at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron on
Purim 1994, he writes, "for me and for many others, Purim has never been the
same." In effect, it was this event that brought him to widen the scope of
his study, which had originally been planned to end with the 19th century.
His moral compass is Mordechai's warning to Esther: "For if thou holdest thy
peace at this time" (4:14).
As a Jewish historian, Horowitz felt that he could no longer hold his
peace and not speak up about the connection between the legacy of Jewish
violence and the current actions of "Jews in the Holy Land [who] are still
avenging the 'old and new quarrel' against those they consider to be
'Amalekites,' [while] their malice is hardly as impotent as it was in the
distant days of Theodosius II."
Horowitz quotes rabbis and settler leaders who equate the Palestinians
with Amalek. He describes the Purim processions in Hebron that are becoming
more violent from year to year, ever since a group of Jews moved into the
Beit Hadassah neighborhood to "renew" Jewish settlement in the city in
1981 - and chose to do so, significantly, on Purim.
Toward the end of his sweeping study, Horowitz returns to his breaking
point - the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs - and concludes with
sadness: "The continued celebration of Purim in the streets of central
Jerusalem after the news broke of the bloody massacre in Hebron [is] one
particular instance in which I would agree with [Samuel Hugo] Bergman's
prophetic assertion that the holiday's continued observance is best
understood as a consequence of the 'deep decay of our people.'"
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