Jewish Press: Obama's 'not some ogre'

There has been an obnoxious number of stories lately about Obama's Jewish problem.

I found Jodi Kantor's much-discussed NYT piece yesterday to be heavy on anecdotes and light on evidence. Last week, Jeffrey Goldberg published his interview with Obama, in which they discussed Israel, Hamas and the "kishke question," a conversation that has had more traction than any in recent memory and to which the New York Times followed with this piece on Obama's Jewish campaign.

Thomas Friedman added to the din this Sunday with "Obama and the Jews," a good column about the whisper campaign against the Illinois senator, but, frankly, I'm a bit tuckered out.

I don’t want a president who is just going to lean on Israel and not get in the Arabs’ face too, or one who, as the former Mideast negotiator Aaron D. Miller puts it, “loves Israel to death” — by not drawing red lines when Israel does reckless things that are also not in America’s interest, like building settlements all over the West Bank.

It’s a tricky business. But if Israel is your voting priority, then at least ask the right questions about Mr. Obama. Knock off the churlish whispering campaign about what’s in his heart on Israel (what was in Richard Nixon’s heart?) and focus first on what kind of America you think he’d build and second on whether you believe that as president he’d have the smarts, steel and cunning to seize a historic opportunity if it arises.

I've argued before that the claim that American Jews need to choose between Obama and Israel is false. The right-wing Jewish Press agreed, and quoting from Goldberg's interview ran this editorial:

Sen. Obama is very forthcoming about his commitment to the survival of Israel. This is not some ogre with a hidden anti-Semitic agenda. The devil, however, is in the details.

That's where, of course, they question just what his commitment would look like. And I'd say that's a fair exercise to do with any presidential candidate on any issues you as a voter care about. (Again, this is why I don't vote for politicians based on their purported religious beliefs.)

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

Getting furry for the Omer

Jay Firestone has given us a matzo taste test, shown the post-party perils of Purim and hit the streets to talk politics in Pico-Robertson, but this is by far his best video dispatch so far.

God gets a blog to discuss stuff He hates

This supposedly sayeth the Lord:

Of the many human body parts I intensely dislike, there is none I hate more than the foreskin. I believe this small stretch of penile tissue is responsible for turning more men away from Me, the Almighty Lord your God, than anything Lucifer has ever done.

See, back when I was designing the first man, I decided to just make him look exactly like Me. Perfect in every way. I sat naked in the Heavenly Hall of Mirrors for a couple of hours and sculpted Adam’s body to look just like Mine.

And so I gave Adam a huge penis. With some balls. And a foreskin.

And as you all know, that accursed foreskin made sex such a wondrous experience for Adam that he turned away from Me for that dirty-slut-whore Eve.

I blame Eve, but I mostly blame the foreskin, with its thousands upon thousands of pleasure-inducing nerve-endings. Damn you foreskin!

Despite all My best efforts, of the total number of penises worldwide today, 87% still have foreskins. This is a travesty!

I consider every male attached to those foreskins My forsworn enemy! I also consider any woman who has sex with an uncircumcised man equally culpable! As Myself as My witness, they will all burn with Eve in the fiery pits of hell!

These are the alleged ruminations of the Almighty on His new blog dedicated to Stuff God Hates. It's not very believable, what with the pettiness and f-bombs. I did, however, enjoy the post about cats.

A little while back, my editor suggested such a gimmick might be a cool addition to The God Blog -- a regular feature called God's Blog, in which I would speak as the Lord on the big news of the day. I liked the idea, and still might try it, but when I thought about how to make it work, I realized my voice would likely be either dull or melodramatic.

Stuff God Hates opts for the latter. The tone might not work, but the blog has the exact same design, and even object-noun-verb domain, as Stuff White People Like, and that has certainly been successful. It's not clear, but I'm going to gander that they're written by the same Christian Lander of Culver City. Lander launched that blog in January, which has had 28 million hits (that's ridiculous), and by March signed a book deal for their musings on white people. Example:

Plain and simple, white people don’t just like Apple, they love and need Apple to operate.

On the surface, you would ask yourself, how is that white people love a multi-billion dollar company with manufacturing plants in China, mass production, and that contributes to global pollution through the manufacture of consumer electronic devices?

Simple answer: Apple products tell the world you are creative and unique. They are an exclusive product line only used by every white college student, designer, writer, English teacher, and hipster on the planet.

The writing as God doesn't work as well. Instead of being sharp it sounds silly and mean (when is the last time I packaged those two words together?).

Asia is a huge waste of space and I despise every last country, animal* and heathen-commie-bastard living there. However, I don’t hate the topography. Unlike Africa - which I am deeply, deeply ashamed of – I’m actually kind of satisfied with the land I made in Asia (with the exception of the Russian, Mongol and Kazakhstani areas).

No, it’s strictly the people and the governments of Asia I loathe. Why you ask? Because they don’t Worship Me! I mean, for f--ks-sake! I’m only the Flawless Creator of the Entire Universe, but do they care? No!

This was posted May 14, right after the cyclone death toll in Burma had passed 30,000 and at least 10,000 Chinese had died in a massive earthquake. Heaven help us if a book publisher wants to ink this too.

Monday morning editor

In a letter to the editor this week, Paula Van Gelder, like Shoded Yam, argued that The Jewish Journal was the wrong place to report on the "ridiculous ramblings" of Kevin MacDonald. She went on to make a strange comparison that, if it were appreciated, would mean few articles about the environment should ever be written again.

This editorial decision makes about as much sense as The Journal's recent publication of a thick "green" issue, thereby destroying even more trees than usual in order to decry the destruction of our environment.

The dangerous world of religion reporting

I've been there, attacked by fellow Christians for critical articles I've written about them.

Religion reporting has proven not only challenging but humorous for a Christian named Greenberg. Christians blame negative stories on my Jewish byline; Jews offer guilt-laden responses to articles that buck the corporate line (or what they wish were); and Muslims, I think, don't know what to expect.

Once considered a backwater of journalism, the God beat feels to me quite chosen, home to immensely important and interesting news. Religion, after all, is the rubric through which each person uniquely sees the world. Science, education, politics, entertainment -- it regularly serves as an undercurrent in these fields. (That was, in fact, part of my pitch at The Sun three years ago when they were looking for a reporter for the newly created position and I was eager to get out of Rialto.) The religion angle also is occasionally relevant when trying to understand peoples' beliefs in God, their perspectives on the life hereafter and that which gives every day meaning.

Think of the God beat as the Jerusalem of journalism. Seriously.

On this topic, Tim Townsend, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's excellent religion reporter, has an amazing piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review. He discusses the religious origins of the United States, the Dover monkey trial in 2005 and the challenges of sensitively reporting on other peoples' religious beliefs.

The portion I found most fascinating, however, was the ugly description of what happened when Townsend wrote an article that was considered too favorable to CAIR and got on the bad side of the Little Green Footballs blog community. Here it is (and was):

Just a few weeks ago, in late February, I got an e-mail from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This was not unusual. Like most beat reporters, I get hundreds of press releases a day. Some I look at, some I don’t. From CAIR alone, I typically receive from one to three e-mails every day, and I had never acted on one before. But this one was different. It involved a mosque I cover in south St. Louis. The CAIR press release said that the FBI had been asked to investigate several comments on two blogs, which threatened a minaret being built outside the mosque.

I had covered the groundbreaking of the minaret—the first to be built in St. Louis. The mayor had been there to praise pluralism and throw a little dirt around for the cameras. In Muslim countries, the minaret is the tower from which the muezzin chants the call to prayer. But as I noted in the original story, this particular 107-foot minaret was symbolic, not functional.

Now I wrote a second story, which was maybe twelve column-inches long and ran the next day on the bottom of B2. It was workmanlike—it did what it had to do for our readers—and nothing more. I wrote that the author of a local blog, Gateway Pundit: Observations of the World from the Heart of Jesusland, had posted some photos of the minaret covered in scaffolding. One of the photo captions read, “Those calls to prayers ought to go over really well with the people of this South St. Louis neighborhood.”

I quoted the imam, who confirmed what I’d already written—that the minaret had no sound system or speakers and would not be used to call Muslims to prayer. I also quoted an FBI spokesman as well as a CAIR spokesman, and then detailed some of the comments that had alarmed Muslims and caused them to inform the FBI.

For example, one visitor to Gateway Pundit had written: “It is really hard on us white, nonMuslims to have to live with these folks taking over our neighborhood and community. Our government helping these people relocate into America’s heartland is like inviting the enemy into your camp. It’s totally disgusting.” On another blog, Little Green Footballs, a visitor named “Amer1can” upped the ante: “Would be a shame if it were to be vandalized or destroyed. Just a shame I tell you….wink wink STL youth.” Another visitor to the same blog added: “I suppose dynamite would be considered an extreme response.”

That was it. Twelve inches. Bottom of B2.

But of course, B2 doesn’t really exist anymore. Not on the Internet. The next morning, the e-mails started coming in at around nine. Many of them complained that I had written a story “planted” by CAIR, which was, I was told over and over again, a front for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and a fundraising arm for other Islamist terrorist organizations. But it was only after my testy e-mail exchange with Charles Johnson, the proprietor of Little Green Footballs, that the real fun began—especially after Johnson posted our correspondence on the blog.

Over the next two days, I received more than one hundred e-mails from Little Green Footballs readers. One suggested I should look into a job at Taco Bell, since I was obviously going to be fired for messing with Johnson. (Little Green Footballs fans credit Johnson with taking down Dan Rather after his 60 Minutes story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service.) Another called me “a self-righteous numskull with the literary prowess of a dodo bird. A dodo bird that dropped out of college and is on drugs.” Still another suggested that there was “no way you could possibly be any more of a dick.”

In two related threads on Johnson’s blog, which ran to nearly 1,500 comments, my photo, bio, and home address were all posted. Someone ran my name through an anagram site and listed the results (Demon Shitty Town, Howdy Mitten Snot, Hindmost Yet Wont). Another participant wrote a song, to be sung to the “Toys ‘R’ Us” theme: “I don’t want to be a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist, because if I was. There wouldn’t be heaven after death.” And let’s not forget the haiku:

Tim shills for haters While wearing moderate robes He does not fool us

Besides being called ignorant, arrogant, balding, stupid, rude, fat (my new nickname was Burger Boy), lazy, and incompetent, I was depicted as a Satanic baby. My mother was insulted. I was accused of lying about my academic degrees, having a comb-over, being a paid agent of the Saudi government, and acquiring “numerous social diseases.” I was, apparently, a plagiarist and a terrorist. Someone did a search to see if I was a pedophile. Others stuck with more generalized invective:

Tim Townsend—you’re a smarmy little f---, aren’t you? [my editing]

Townsend really should have checked on Dan Rather’s career before he messed with Charles.

What a chickenshit little cocksucker. Another journalouse prick with a face for radio.

Finally, there were suggestions that I should be murdered. To his credit, Johnson deleted the death threats and the comments with my address. Blessed are the peacemakers.

It's 'alleged' anti-Semitism: a-l-l-e-g-e-d

Like the Wall Street Journal last week, the liberal Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, carried a story this week that convicted the Rev. Eric Lee of saying, "The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us."

Prominent California reverend and black activist Eric Lee has apologized for anti-Semitic comments he said last month at a Los Angeles event commemorating the assassination of Martin Luther King.

The Los Angeles Times on Friday reported a "reconciliation" meeting between the Pastor and Daphna Ziman - an Israeli-American philanthropist and the recipient of this year's Tom Bradley Award for community service, for whose honor Lee made the keynote speech at an award ceremony in Los Angeles.

During his speech, Lee, the local president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group, is reported to have suddenly launched an anti-Semitic rant, stating that Jews have made money on blacks in the music business.

In fact, there has been much dispute, which I reported several times over, about exactly what Lee said. And the word missing from the above story is "alleged." It is what Lee is "alleged" to have said. But Ha'aretz' Shlomo Shamir, like so many people who read Lee's apology, assumed, apparently without talking with Lee or Daphna Ziman, the Jewish philanthropist whose emailed account of Lee's speech went viral.

The difference between Shamir's news article and the Wall Street Journal op-ed by MLK's former lawyer is just that: One was news and the other opinion. Both, though, need to be accurate.

We likely will never know what exactly Lee said during his April 4 keynote before members of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Ziman and Lee, however, appear to have moved on with the ceremonial breaking of bread. My colleague, Tom Tugend, has a report from the publicized meeting.

Judging by the determinedly upbeat comments of the participants, their private deliberations had touches of a peace summit, a revival meeting and an exploration of past, present and future relations between the African American and Jewish communities.

Ziman and Lee, sitting side by side and occasionally linking hands, were a picture of amity and good will, with both crediting their reconciliation to "divine intervention."

Ziman noted that in the past three weeks she had moved "from shedding tears to a sense of hope" and stressed that those present had a responsibility not to damage future generations through prejudice.

"I request the pledge of every religious leader in the United States that no racism be spouted in public places and places of worship," she said.

Lee described Ziman and himself as "two passionate and well-intentioned people who both love God."

(Thanks to Richard Silverstein for emailing me Shamir's dispatch)

NY Post: Financier allegedly bribed Israel's Olmert

A Long Island mogul is at the center of a sensational bribery scandal that could bring down embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, The Post has learned.

Millionaire financier Morris Talansky -- who runs an investment firm out of his tony home in Woodmere -- allegedly passed money to Olmert while the politician was mayor of Jerusalem in the '90s, sources said.

In a highly unusual move, Israeli authorities have barred the country's media from publishing Talansky's name - revealed now in The Post - saying it could hamper their investigation. Israeli media has referred only to the involvement of an "American businessman."

Talansky is apparently set to sing to Israeli authorities about his alleged role in the scheme, sources said.

"It looks serious, and it looks like they have a state witness" in Talansky, one source said.

Talansky - a philanthropist and political contributor to everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Bill Clinton - is in Jerusalem, where he has an apartment, preparing to head to a closed-door court hearing as early as today, sources said.

The 75-year-old was earlier questioned about the alleged scheme almost immediately after arriving in the country for Passover, and he implicated Olmert, sources have said.

It was unclear what the alleged payments to Olmert were for, but sources said they involved hefty amounts of cash.

Talansky repeatedly appears - sometimes under the nickname "The Laundry Man" - in the logs of financial dealings kept by Olmert's longtime aide, Shula Zakan, a source said.

Olmert was grilled by investigators Friday. He has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

Let's see: A botched war against a terror outfit, an approval rating in the single digits, a reputation as spineless but arrogant. Olmert's outlasted every good reason for a resignation so far. I wander what happens next.

Gonzo journalist goes on Christian retreat; says 'Jesus made me puke'

Rolling Stone's gonzo political reporter, Matt Taibbi, who has been called a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson (over and over again), has a new book about his "tales from the evangelical front lines." Taibbi is a great reporter and a fantastic writer, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would be inducted into GetReligion's hall of fame. Not with writing like this.

"The Great Derangement," his cynically named book, does, however, offer a number of interesting windows into life in the Rev. John Hagee's "apocalyptic mega-ministry." It is with Hagee's Cornerstone Church that Taibbi attends a weekend retreat through which he tells his tale.

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an "Encounter Weekend" — three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of "knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don't get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there's a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won't scare the advertisers — and then there's the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director's cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn't know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

Taibbi, of course, fails to remain inconspicuous. How could he after fabricating his "wound" -- a concept, which Taibbi calls "schlock biblical Freudianism," from John Eldredge's "Wild at Heart" -- as being the abused son of an alcoholic circus clown?

Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father's life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:

I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.

Taibbi later seems dismayed his fellow retreaters actually believe his outlandish story of hardship. He chalks this up to their pathetic lives. And that is sad.

I'm the first to agree that "Wild at Heart" was a sappy manifesto about how all the pain in our life is caused by some single trauma. And I was understanding when one of my friends said he literally tossed the book across the room when Eldredge's son asked, "Am I a wild man dad?" (That is supposed to be a good thing.) And I wish Christians writers were more critically introspective of their own community.

But there is something positive to be said about a group of "desperate congregants," as Taibbi terms them, who are willing to come alongside you and help you along, even if your major malfunction is the consequence of being beaten with clown shoes. This is not, as Taibbi later calls it, your "basic cultist bait-and-switch formula," even if it is coming from a rather fundamentalist congregation. Fear and loathing, anyone?

If you want to read more, a lengthy excerpt can be found in Rolling Stone's current issue.

When religion is evil

Faith Central, one of two religion blogs on the Times of London's site, has held a special place in my heart since they plucked The God Blog, seemingly out of thin air, for their list of the 30 best religion blogs. It is one of many faith blogs I read intermittently, and this morning I noticed a post about some undue hype given to a report that noted religion as a 21st century source of evil. Read on:

Fascinating, the way surveys get reported. Yesterday with some glee it was reported that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, set up by a deeply religious Quaker, had with delicius irony done a survey which concluded that a great 21st century evil is religion - which "not just in its extreme form - is intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution". So the paper said. So the National Secular Society echoed, with glee. The faith school issue, clearly, has fuelled this view, as has Islamist terrorism. The Bish of Southwark is wheeled out to protest.

But get this...a fuller reading of the research makes it utterly clear that long before they got to religion people were worried about violence, gun crime, binge drinking, knives, drugs, child exploitation, poverty and inequality. Moreover, somewhat bigger than religion was the observation that the media "propagate negative and damaging attitudes" and that the big businesses which fund them "fuel inequality and consumerism". Moreover, earlier Rowntree research points out the usefulness of much religion as "social capital".

I think we all can agree that religion -- defined sociologically as a body of thought that bonds people in community and connects them to something greater than the world we know -- can, has and will continue to be used for evil. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The Holocaust. The Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. The 9/11 terror attacks. The writings of Dan Brown.

Indeed, we see barbarism and abuse in all religions, throughout history. (Yes, Hindus do it too.) But does this make religion evil or does it speak more to the depravity of man?

'Expelled': Ben Stein promoting Intelligent Design

Ben Stein, the monotone voice of Visine, conservative politics, that game show I watched in junior high and Ferris Bueller's civics teacher, has a controversial new movie out.

"Expelled: No intelligence allowed," which has been flogged by liberals, like this one, "assumes the position not only that the theory of evolution and the faith-based hypothesis known as "intelligent design" are on close-to-equal scientific footing, but that there's an Illuminatian cabal among the science community, no doubt sitting in a Star Chamber somewhere, seeing to it that any developmental view but Darwin's is suppressed at all costs."

Stein recently spoke with Beliefnet about what he thinks is wrong with Darwinism.

Why did you make this film? Why was it important to you?

The creator is Walt Ruloff and his merry band. I decided to work on it because I've always had questions about Darwinism. I have always been very concerned that Darwinism gave the basic okay to terrible racism and to the idea of murder based upon race. And I think most people don't realize what a sinister role Darwinism has had in the history of the 20th century, and I guess part of the history of the 19th century too.

As I got working on the movie, I got to realize how many holes there were in Darwinism and how little of the world's great questions about existence and life Darwinism answered, and I wanted to share my understanding and learning on that subject with the wider world.

Then, I got to be very concerned about the academic suppression that goes on in terms of not letting people who have differing views from the Darwinists have any place at the table for talking about their scientific insights.

Aren’t there plenty of scientists who might subscribe to Darwin's theory of evolution but not accept social Darwinism?

I don't doubt that there are. It is extremely well documented in a book called "From Darwin to Hitler" by an author named Weikart that the people who read Darwin's book in Germany and then became important influential thinkers in German political life believed that Darwin's views could be translated into the social realm. [They believed that] immediate actions should be taken to put those ideas into effect, especially by attempting to exterminate entire native African tribes.

The explicit connection of Darwin's work with the Holocaust and with the belief of the Nazis that they were furthering Darwin's agenda and Darwin's discoveries and theories is explicitly documented in not just one, but many annals of the life and death of Nazi Germany.

Of course, today with the current intellectual beliefs, nobody's going to say, "I'm in favor of exterminating the indigenous tribes in Southern Africa," but they were then. And they explicitly said, "And Darwin says it's the right thing to do."

That echoes some thought made last fall by William Saletan at Slate. As for Intelligent Design, you can read more about that here.

(And on an unrelated note, Ben Stein wrote a great column about the housing market for the New York Times 24 years ago that could have been found in the paper last summer.)

Singleton confuses Osama and Obama

Yeah, the guy who is running into the ground the parent company of my old papers, media baron Dean Singleton, showed the error today of axing so many of his editors when he referred to Mr. Most Wanted as "Obama bin Laden." From the AP wire:

Sen. Barack Obama’s name has been mangled plenty of times, though not always in the presence of 1,200 news executives and TV cameras.

It happened Monday at The Associated Press’s Annual Luncheon, where the Democratic presidential candidate spoke and took questions. Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP’s board of directors and head of Denver-based MediaNews Group, slipped when asking the senator if he could envision sending many more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where "Obama bin Laden is still at large.”

Obama gave a quizzical look and said, “I think that was Osama bin Laden.” Singleton quickly replied, “If I did that, I’m so sorry."

“No, no, no,” the senator said. He called it “part of the exercise that I’ve been going through over the last 15 months, which is why it’s pretty impressive I’m still standing here.”

The crowd laughed and gave him a sympathetic round of applause.

Here's more from Editor & Publisher.

Goldberg: 'Is Israel Finished?'

This is the cover of the new issue of The Atlantic. The article by Jeffrey Goldberg, whose last cover was on the future fracturing of the Middle East and who wrote that great book "Prisoners," is not yet online. I'm going to try to read it later today.

The twilight of daily journalism

More from the Department of Dying Newspapers, I just got around to reading this article that appeared in the New Yorker two weeks ago, and I can't think of a better set of Cliff's Notes on what's happening to my industry. Here's a choice nugget near the top:

Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, "At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, 'How are you?,' in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce." Keller's speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline "NOT DEAD YET."

Singleton: 'Digging for marrow'

The LA Weekly has caught up with the carnage in Dean Singleton's Southern California media empire.

“They’re way past stripping the paper to the bone,” said Joe Segura, of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “They’re digging for marrow now.”

I wrote last month about the bloodletting at my last paper, the LA Daily News -- which appears to have received a final, fatal blow this week -- but the Weekly also discusses the pain being felt at the papers where I started my career, the two-for-one Sun in San Bernardino and Daily Bulletin in Ontario.

WHEN SINGLETON BOUGHT a controlling interest in the Bulletin in 1997, it was part of a blitzkrieg that before long led him to own every daily in the region, outside of the Times, the Register in Orange County and the Press Enterprise in Riverside. The Times became part of that story when it was revealed that its then–parent company, Times-Mirror, had helped to finance Singleton’s purchase of the Daily News, arguably in order to prevent a serious journalistic competitor from moving into town to challenge it.

For Daily News staffers like Mariel Garza, who covered Los Angeles City Hall for two years and has been a Daily News editorial writer for the past four years, the slow bleed in Woodland Hills has been akin to watching a friend succumb to a terminal illness.

Garza said the recent layoffs, coupled with a long period of attrition, have left the San Fernando Valley newsroom demoralized and fearing the paper’s demise.

“It’s like watching a loved one that’s wasting away from Alzheimer’s,” Garza said. “It’s tragic to watch.”

The mystery of Jewish-controlled media and its anti-Israel bias

No single element of American Jewish power is more tangled in myth and mystery than the relationship between Jews and the media. Nowhere is the gulf wider between the way Jews see themselves and the way their neighbors see them.

Put more starkly, the gap in perception is this: non-Jews commonly see the mass media as a key stronghold of Jewish power, a major source of whatever influence Jews wield in American society. Jews, by contrast -- especially affiliated, activist Jews -- commonly describe the media as a major source of anti-Israel bias.

The two views seem like polar opposites, either-or propositions, thesis and antithesis. They cannot both be true. And yet, to a great degree, they are.

This is how J.J. Goldberg begins the 11th chapter of his phenomenal book, "Jewish Power." He notes that in 1989, at the start of the Intifada, 79 percent of American Jews felt the news media applied a double standard in judging Israel more harshly than its Arab neighbors.

Today, many still believe mainstream magazines and newspapers and radio stations are anti-Israel. They point to the "Protocols of Christiane Amanpour" on CNN, the phony footage of a murdered Palestinian boy from France 2, and, my favorite, the reportage of "National Palestinian Radio."

I have agreed on specific occasions, though in hindsight I'm not convinced the bias is deliberate. Neither is Jeff Jacoby, an op-ed writer for the Boston Globe, who speaking last night at Syracuse University said the phenomenon has more to do with ignorance than malevolence.

Jacoby read excerpts from two New York Times editorials about the deaths of terrorists. He showed a picture that's caption described an Israeli police officer standing over a beaten Palestinian youth. In reality, the youth was a Jewish boy from Chicago who had just been mugged. He was running to the police officer for protection.

"Nobody in news media questioned the storyline of Israeli brutality and a Palestinian victim," Jacoby said.

Jacoby said one factor that contributes to this bias is ignorance. A good journalist is expected to be able to cover a story with no prior knowledge of the situation, Jacoby said. Too often, these inexperienced reporters "get bamboozled."

"If they go in with ignorance, very often they will get the story wrong," he said.

An over-emphasis on Israel in the news is another factor in coverage bias, he said. Many reporters are based in Jerusalem because Israel defends the right to a free press. Thus, more investigative stories about Israel are produced because there is no fear of the government harming reporters.

"Where journalists are concentrated, coverage tends to be negative," he said.

That anti-Islam film getting all the attention

Geert Wilders' new film, "Fitna," has been getting a lot of attention. A former Malaysian diplomat said the film, which is highly critical of Islam, would make the rioting and violence sparked by the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad look like a "picnic."

The film was originally posted at LiveLeak today but was taken down after 3 million views and a lot of threats.

In place of the video Friday afternoon, a brief and poignant message appears on-screen: "Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature.... LiveLeak has been left with no choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

"This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net.... We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support."

GoogleVideo still has a 17-minute clip from "Fitna." Many images are very, very disturbing -- from the physical brutality of a beheading to the rhetorical venom of a 3-year-old girl who says Allah told her Jews are pigs and apes -- and some resemble segments of "The Path to the Final Solution." Fortunately, most Muslim Americans shy away from such extremist attitudes. Most.

(Hat tip: Bloggish)

The media battle for a denomination's soul

There is an interesting dust-up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a more theologically conservative version of its mainline Protestant brethren. It deals with the abrupt and unexplained cancellation of the synod's popular radio program, "Issues, Etc." And I was notified of it by M.Z. Hemingway, who blogs for GetReligion and wrote this article for the Wall Street Journal.

Usually radio hosts have to offend sacred moral sensibilities to be thrown off the air. Opie and Anthony were fired after they encouraged a couple to have sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Don Imus lost his job after using racist and sexist epithets against the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

But when the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod canceled its popular, nationally syndicated radio program "Issues, Etc.," listeners were baffled. Billed as "talk radio for the thinking Christian," the show was known for its lively discussions analyzing cultural influences on the American church. It seemed like precisely the thing that the Missouri Synod, a 2.4-million-member denomination whose system of belief is firmly grounded in Scripture and an intellectually rigorous theology, would enthusiastically support.

Broadcast from the nation's oldest continuously run religious radio station, KFUO-AM in St. Louis, and syndicated throughout the country, "Issues, Etc." had an even larger audience world-wide, thanks to its podcast's devoted following. With 14 hours of fresh programming each week, the show was on the leading edge of what's happening in culture, politics and broader church life. The Rev. Todd Wilken interviewed the brightest lights from across the theological spectrum on news of the day. Guests included Oxford University's Dr. Alister McGrath, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's Albert Mohler and more postmodern types, like Tony Jones, national coordinator for a church network called Emergent Village.

On its last show, on March 17, listeners learned about the life and faith of St. Patrick; scientific and philosophical arguments in defense of the human embryo; the excommunication of two Roman Catholic women who claimed ordination; and the controversy surrounding the sermons of Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Despite the show's popularity, low cost and loyal donor base, Mr. Wilken and Jeff Schwarz, the producer of "Issues, Etc.," were dismissed without explanation on Tuesday of Holy Week. Within hours, the program's Web site -- which provided access to past episodes and issues of its magazine -- had disappeared. Indeed, all evidence that the show ever existed was removed.

So what happened? Initially, the bureaucrats in St. Louis kept a strict silence, claiming that the show had been canceled for "business and programmatic" reasons. Yesterday the synod cited low local ratings in the St. Louis area and the low number of listeners to the live audio stream on the Web site. But the last time the synod tracked the size of the audience was three years ago, and it did not take into account the show's syndicated or podcast following. The synod also claimed that the show lost $250,000 a year, an assertion that is at odds with those of others familiar with the operating budget of the station.

The Rev. Michael Kumm, who served on three management committees for the station, said that the explanation doesn't add up. " 'Issues, Etc.' is the most listened to, most popular and generates more income than any other program at the station and perhaps even the others combined. This decision is purely political," he said.

He may well be right. The program was in all likelihood a pawn in a larger battle for the soul of the Missouri Synod. The church is divided between, on the one hand, traditional Lutherans known for their emphasis on sacraments, liturgical worship and the church's historic confessions and, on the other, those who have embraced pop-culture Christianity and a market-driven approach to church growth. The divide is well known to all confessional Christian denominations struggling to retain their traditional identity.

The Rev. Gerald Kieschnick, the synod's current president, has pushed church marketing over the Lutherans' historic confession of faith by repeatedly telling the laity, "This is not your grandfather's church."

Cartoonist a catalyst for 'adaptation of Islam'

Kurt Westergaard made a life-changing decision when he penned the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. He's been living on the run, hiding from those who have swore to his death. But he doesn't regret it.

"I would do it the same way (again) because I think that this cartoon crisis in a way is a catalyst which is intensifying the adaptation of Islam," he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday, speaking in English.

"Without a cartoon that provoked the Muslims, it would have been something else; a novel a play, a movie, this situation would have occurred sooner or later anyway."

He said: "We are discussing the two cultures, the two religions as never before and that is important."

(skip)

"I have no problems with Muslims. I made a cartoon which was aimed at the terrorists who use an interpretation of Islam as their spiritual dynamite," he said.

And now, the fake news

The Jewish Journal's annual Purim cover is out now, and it's got a few gem jokes that reference news of note mentioned here in the last year. There's Eliot Spitzer and the whore of Babylon, the U.N.'s response to continued rocket attacks on Sderot and, of course, Ann Coulter and The Perfect Jew. My favorite "headline" though is about Israeli PM Olmert's ridiculously low approval rating. (Truth to be told, his approval rating spiked in July to, gulp, 8 percent.)

'Ha! Ha! Your medium is dying!'

"The Simpsons" seem a bit late on this joke, which is so sad because it's so true.

(Hat tip: The old boss.)