Eideard

To the dismay of Israeli ice cream lovers, Haagen-Dazs may soon be disappearing from Israeli supermarket shelves following an announcement from the Chief Rabbinate banning the product.

A notice issued last week by the kashrut, a rabbinical body that sets Jewish dietary law, states that because Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made with real milk it is not suitable for Jewish consumers.

According to Talmudic law, milk produced by non-Jews can only be consumed if it is produced under Jewish supervision to ensure it has not been contaminated with milk from non – kosher animals. There is thought to be less chance of contamination with powdered milk.

As long as Haagen Dazs continues to use real milk, it will be off the menu for Jewish consumers. Selling the ice cream in kosher stores and restaurants also constitutes “a severe infringement of kashrut procedures”…

Israel’s largest supermarket chain Shufersal has already pulled the product off the shelves in all 270 of its stores. On Sunday a Shufersal representative confirmed they would not be selling the ice cream for the foreseeable future.

General Mills, which markets Haagen-Dazs in Israel, has hit back claiming its product has been sold in Israel and enjoyed by Jewish consumers across the world for years bearing kosher certification from the Orthodox Union in the US.

Why the ban has been issued now remains unclear. The rabbinate claim their notice about Haagen Dazs has been issued several times previously but gone unheeded, recommending Israelis turn to home-made kosher ice creams to fill the gap.

The crap regulation of public life by theocrats is as foolish and backwards in Israel as India, America as Afghanistan. Dedicating oversight of food purity to a religious circle-jerk is absurd. Bowing to so-called standards devised centuries ago and reinterpreted to satisfy a religion’s control rather than safety and nutrition based on science and reality – is absurd, inexcusable.

The historic meaning of “fool” is sanctified by a population that lets itself be led around by the nose by such foolishness.

Nicholas K. Peart is a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College
He has been stopped and frisked by New York City police officers at least five times

When I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk…

RTFA. Learn something about life outside your neighborhood, your community – unless, like Nicholas Pearl, you are non-white in a white-ruled American city.

Ain’t nothing much changed. The big stuff, the official crap, the “legal” crimes against Americans are gone. Daily practices ain’t especially changed. And what happened to Borinquen brothers in Bridgeport happened to Chicano brothers on Chicago’s near North Side – and still does in whatever side of whichever town folks are relegated to by skin color and accent.

Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem — a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they’re fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don’t feel safer as a result…

…I’m doing what I can to help change things and am acting as a witness in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights to stop the police from racially profiling and harassing black and brown people in New York.

Keep on rockin’ in the Free World.

Two men pleaded guilty on Thursday to a racially motivated attack on a developmentally disabled Navajo Indian man in which they branded him with a swastika…A third assailant had already pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy charges related to torturing the 22-year-old man in New Mexico in 2010. The victim’s name was not released.

“No one anywhere, but especially in a state like New Mexico that prides itself on its ethnic, racial and cultural diversity, should be victimized because of what he or she happens to be,” U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico Kenneth J. Gonzales said.

“The young victim in this case was assaulted, branded and scarred because he happens to be a Native American – that simply is inexcusable and criminal.”

The three men – Paul Beebe and Jesse Sanford of Farmington, N.M., and William Hatch of Fruitland, N.M., – are the first defendants to be charged under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009…

The defendants in this case admitted covering the victim’s body with white supremacist and anti-Native American symbols, including shaving a swastika in the back of his head and using markers to write the words “KKK” and “White Power” on his skin, a Justice Department statement said…

The men, who recorded the entire incident on cell phones including a recording of them coercing the man into saying he wanted to be branded, were indicted in November 2010 on charges of conspiracy and violating the hate-crime statute.

The statute is named after Shepard, a young gay man murdered in 1998 in Wyoming and Byrd, an African-American man who was decapitated in Texas in 1998 after he was dragged behind a truck by two white supremacists.

“Deplorable, hate-filled incidents like this one have no place in a civilized society,” Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Thomas Perez said.

A local example of the kind of hate crime that persists into the 21st Century – in the Land of Liberty.

I can still walk into any American town I’ve never been in – look around and pick out a popular successful bar to visit on a Friday night and have an in-depth conversation with as many white/male/ethnic supremacists as you’d ever want to record and quote. And puke in the gutter afterwards.

So, um, who’s winning this week?

A second man has been charged after an Islam convert was allegedly whipped 40 times for drinking alcohol with friends as part of a sharia law punishment.

The 43-year-old man was arrested when he attended Auburn Police Station this morning.

He has been charged with aggravated break and enter with intent to commit an indictable offence, detain person in company with intent obtain advantage, and two counts of steal from dwelling.

The man has been refused bail and will appear in Burwood Local Court tomorrow.

Earlier today Tolga Cifci, 20, one of three men accused of attacking a 31-year-old victim at his Silverwater unit on Sunday, appeared in Burwood Local Court.

The victim who converted to Islam recently was allegedly whipped up to 40 times for going out for alcoholic drinks with friends.

The man awoke in the middle of the night to find that four men had broken into his bedroom. As three men held the victim down on the bed, the fourth man is alleged to have lashed him 40 times with a cable…

Police opposed bail and said Mr Cifci put his religious rules above the laws of New South Wales…

Magistrate Tim Keady granted Mr Cifci bail but imposed strict conditions, including a curfew and reporting daily to police.

Nothing new about a lynching, mob rule to satisfy bigotry. Circumstances vary according to where in the world nutballs decide to take the law into their own hands. Whether the result is death or torture, torment or dishonor – the motivation is the same.

Only the uncivilized will justify the guidance of their god in harming another ordinary citizen who somehow offended their belief system.

Voters in Milan say goodbye to Berlusconi’s candidate, Letizia Moratti
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, suffered a humiliating and politically ominous defeat in his home city of Milan on Monday when his party’s choice for mayor, Letizia Moratti, was ousted in a runoff by a local leftwing lawyer, Giuliano Pisapia.

There was yet more bad news for the right in Naples where the candidate of the fiercely anti-Berlusconi Italy of Principles party, Luigi De Magistris, stormed home with more than 65% of the votes…

Milan was one of 90 towns and cities where runoffs were held after clear winners failed to emerge from the first round of voting on 15 and 16 May.

The contest there was by far the most important. Milan is the city from which Italy’s flamboyant prime minister launched his political career, 17 years ago. It is also the city in which he is on trial for a range of alleged financial and sex-related offences. And, not least, it is the stronghold of his key allies in the populist, Islamophobic Northern League…

Berlusconi tried to turn the ballot into a vote of confidence on his private life and his government. The results suggested that was a disastrous error of judgment…

The left’s victory was all the more remarkable, since its candidate was not the choice of the mainstream Democratic party but one whose past is tinged with radicalism. Pisapia, who once defended the Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, was elected to parliament in the 1990s as an independent on the slate of the hardline Communist Refoundation party.

His initial sponsor in the mayoral race was the Left, Ecology and Freedom party, which is led by the gay, formerly communist governor of Puglia, Nichi Vendola.

All the people Berlusconi loved to hate + ordinary citizens of Italy = kick this sleazy, corrupt, baronet of right-wing politics out on his wrinkly butt.

“Not intended to be a factual statement.”

The now-infamous statement from Sen. Jon Kyl’s office was released after he said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that abortions represent “over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

It turns out that the actual number is 3%, a mere rounding error of 87%. But it was presented to the American people and enshrined in the Senate Record as a means of arguing that Planned Parenthood should be entirely defunded in the current budget.

This has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility and everything to do with the disproportionate influence of social conservative activists.

Their most compelling argument is that the American people don’t support federal taxpayer money paying for abortions, which is true — and why federal funding of abortion has been banned since 1976.

But the facts are inconvenient, and so they are ignored. Instead, talking points taken from talk radio are repeated until they take on a life of their own and eventually get the validation of a U.S. senator.

The news wasn’t that Kyl made a mistake; it was his staff essentially acknowledging that in the current hyper-partisan environment, facts are a secondary concern, even on the floor of the U.S. Senate, even when they are paraded as statistics. The important thing is to scare the hell out of people so that they remember your political point and pass it on.

In this absurd spin cycle, there’s one dependable place to look for sanity: satire. And on cue came Stephen Colbert, who took Kyl’s statement as a challenge and dialed it up to 11.

Using the Twitter hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, Colbert unleashed a steady stream of Jon Kyl mistruths with the requisite denial. Among my favorites:

• Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.
• Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.
• Every Halloween Jon Kyl dresses up as a sexy Mitch Daniels.
• Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness.
• Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the ’86 World Series.
• Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.

This crap is properly called “lying”. That it is done for political gain and later followed by a rationale acceptable to politicians and fools – does not make it acceptable behavior. We all complain about the lack of ethics, the duplicity and deceit of Congress – but, this deliberate distortion of fact by the fiction of bigots is inexcusable. And anyone who does excuse it is as guilty as the salaried liar who invented the propaganda.

The opposition Socialist Party comprehensively won French local elections on Sunday as the far-right National Front surged, between them pressuring President Nicolas Sarkozy a year before he faces the electorate.

With most votes counted in the second round of polls to elect ‘cantonal’ councils in half of France, the left had 49.9 percent against 35.9 percent for the ruling conservative UMP, according to Interior Ministry figures.

Socialist Party head Martine Aubry said she welcomed the results “with humility” given the low turnout and a strong showing for the anti-immigrant National Front.

The National Front, which has surged in opinion polls under new leader Marine Le Pen, scored 11 percent even though it put up candidates in only a minority of departments. In some areas it scored as much as 40 percent.

Despite a low turnout of around 46 percent, the polls will be seen as the last big test of sentiment before the April 2012 election, set to pit the unpopular Sarkozy against left-wing rivals growing in strength and a surging far right…

The prospect that Sarkozy might not even make it into a runoff has caused alarm and disarray in the UMP.

Anyone think the “ethics of Sarkozy’s UMP will prove different from their kissing cousins in the Republican Party? Their response to bigotry and racism will be to embrace the National Front with open arms.

Hugs and kisses all round for the 19th Century.

One group of people who seem intent on being added to the list [of TV presenter bigots] are ‘Top Gear’ presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. It seems the trio are in the news on a monthly basis with some ignorant remark or another.

Last week Tweedledee, Tweedledum and The Other One insulted people from Mexico and Albania – an impressive feat to rile people from two countries in one week even by their standards. Here’s what they had to say about Mexican people:

Hammond: …Cars reflect national characteristics, don’t they, so German cars are very well built and ruthlessly efficient, Italian cars are a bit flamboyant and quick, a Mexican car’s just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight… leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle as a coat.
May: It is interesting, isn’t it, because they can’t do food, the Mexicans, can they? Because it’s all like sick with cheese on it, I mean…
Hammond: Refried sick!
May: Yeah, refried sick.
Hammond: I’m sorry, but just imagine waking up and remembering you’re Mexican: ‘awww, no’.
Clarkson: No, it’d be brilliant… because you could just go straight back to sleep again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mensch-in-chief

An Israeli group of prominent rabbis’ wives has urged Jewish girls not to date or work with Arabs, underscoring the rising power of the religious Right and fuelling fears of growing racism in the country.

A letter, signed by 27 wives, called on Jewish girls not to go out with Arabs, work with them or perform national service in places where Arabs are employed…

Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the head of Israel’s Reform branch of Judaism, condemned the letter. “Israeli society is falling into a deep, dark pit of racism and xenophobia,” he warned.

Among the women who signed the letter were the wives and daughters of senior rabbis, including the daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, a member of Israel’s coalition government.

The letter was distributed by a group called Lehava (Flames), an organisation influenced by the ideology of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was elected to Israel’s Knesset parliament in 1984 before his Kach party was outlawed as racist…

The incident is the latest in a series of anti-Arab initiatives by Israel’s religious Right. Earlier this month there was outrage after dozens of municipal rabbis signed a petition urging Jews not to rent or sell homes to non-Jews. The petition was widely condemned, including by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. But a poll published this week found that 44 per cent of Israeli Jews supported the rabbis’ call, while 48 per cent were opposed.

Racism and bigotry is always a useful adjunct to fascism. The Israeli government has learned well.

A judge has tossed out summonses against five men busted for playing chess at Inwood Hill Park.

The judge’s action Tuesday came after civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel agreed to take on the bizarre case…

“We won’t be satisfied until all of them have their cases dismissed,” said Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “There was no reason for the police to issue these summonses.”

The other two players opted for civil trials on Jan. 4 in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Charges against the five were dismissed on the condition they stay out of trouble for six months.

There should have been no conditions.

Here’s an earlier statement from the cops– per an earlier article by Shelby Lyman:

“It’s the broken-windows theory: Small things can turn into bigger things.”

Ah, yeah. Some kid might see them playing, take up the game, learn to think critically, go to college and get a degree, influence the world. You see the danger, from the government’s point of view. One thing leads to the next.

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Related Link: My earlier post about this story:
The new USA: Chess players, like Socrates, busted for corrupting the youth.