Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-06-07- 8:08 p.m.

This Week In The News

So President Bush wants to reorganize the entire executive branch to create the Department of Homeland Security now (presumably to do more than create color schemes for our national panic). Ever since this whole “Homeland Security” thing started, I’ve been feeling pretty sketchy about the entire thing, but wasn’t quite sure why. Well, I knew that part of it was because I was sort of under the impression that we had a lot of organizations whose charter sort of included homeland security. Y’know, small organizations like the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and well, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. I mean, sure, all those government agencies have a lot of other things on their mind, and I respect that, but I kinda hoped they might find the time to make sure that the United States was, well, secure.
But last night, as President Bush was busy preempting my plans to watch a repeat of Friends over dinner, I realized what I really had against the Department of Homeland Security. It’s the name. It’s just so fucking hokey. It could be behind the Department of Internal Security, or the Department of National Security, or the Central Security Agency. Or, for that matter, something like the Department of Defense or the Department of the Interior. But the Department of Homeland Security? Putting aside the point that the continental United States isn’t really the homeland of almost any Americans who don’t check the box marked “native” on their SATs (doesn’t our recent trend of making sure we’re all counted as African-American, Irish-American, and so on point that out?), it also just reeks of a level of feel-good parochial psychobabble that I just am not ready to handle in what is supposed to be a dispassionate government bureaucracy. We’re not freaking Soviets pledging our allegiance to the Rodina. If I remember my history from public school at all, I thought the whole idea was that America was an idea, and that it was the idea of American that meant a lot more than the particular land that we happened to live on.
The ideas themselves don’t seem too bad; we clearly need some sort of responsible organization that collates all this information (though, again, I don’t see why on earth the FBI or whoever wasn’t doing that already). But it needs to be something that we as Americans can respect, and that our enemies can fear a little. And I’m sorry, but I’m going to have a hard time respecting an agency with “Homeland” in the name. It’s just a little too Rod McKuen for my tastes.
R & B artist R. Kelly was arrested this week as well, for having sex with a fourteen year-old girl and videotaping it. I have nothing much to say about this, except to note with amusement that bootleg copies of the tape were being sold down on Canal Street today. I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know if it is the real deal or not, but I’m amused to no end that the tape managed to get around so quickly. I can’t help wondering a bit how these tapes of famous people having sex get out in the first place. Do the people make copies themselves? Do they hand them out to prospective lovers like a business card? I just have a lot of trouble imagining myself in a situation where I have friends over and I offer to show them a video of me in action. And then I’m creeped out by the idea of having friends who wouldn’t give me really wigged out looks before inventing previous engagements they needed to go to, like, right away.
And all of this without even mentioning the growing possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or the record lows in the stock market. Even so, my vote for the most disturbing news item of the week: An English company called “Innovative Minds” is marketing an educational CD-ROM video game called “Islamic Fun!” It is designed for children as young as five. Players are asked a variety of multiple-choice questions on Islam, Arabic, and the Qu’ran. As a reward for the correct answers, the player is loaded up with AK-47s, ammunition, and rockets, which prepares them for the next phase of the game: a “Doom” style attack campaign against the “Zionist Occupiers”. And if this wasn’t bad enough, there are the questions themselves. Questions include "What was the crime of the Jews of Khayber?" and "Who said: 'I know I have been elected thanks to the votes of US Jews. I owe my election to them. Tell me what I have to do for the Jewish people' to Ben Gurion?"
The game has been on the market for three years, but amazingly, only now has a small amount of controversy begun. When interviewed, Abbas Panjwani, the director of the company Innovative Minds, said: "The game does not target any human beings including soldiers, it targets Israeli tanks. From that point of view it's no different from any other war game. It does not target any religious or racial group including the Jewish community.” Wow, now I can see the distinction.
In the end, I’m not sure if I can say much about the game itself that isn’t obvious to you on its face. It is at best reprehensible, and at worst a conscious attempt to recruit future terrorists as early as age five, and not from an Islamic fundamentalist nation, but from within Great Britain. Worst of all, I can’t even hope that something will be done about it. I believe that as reprehensible as these things are, it is part of the idea of free speech and free expression. I’m not shocked that there are anti-Semitic video games aimed at children; I’m shocked it took so long. I’m shocked that the Ku Klux Klan didn’t come up with a ‘cross-burning’ video game yet.
But what blows my mind is that there seems to be no protest against this game from the English and American Muslim communities. If the Klan ever did release that game, among the first people to protest it would be white Christian southerners. They would protest because it reflects badly on them, because it is an implicit criticism of the sins of their past. Whenever the followers of Meir Kahane marched in New York, large among the protesters were always Jews, Jewish people who knew that his radical and violent policies made all of us look far worse than we believe we are.
When I was younger, I made a point of reading not only the Torah, but also the Christian Bible. I read the Qu’ran as well (in an English translation). I have studied Islam, and it is truly a great faith, with a fine tradition and a bedrock foundation of decency. After 9/11, I was glad to see Deborah of Chicklit post an essay entitled “10 Things Everyone Should Know About Islam” on a website called Hissyfit. These things were things people needed to know, and largely didn’t. People need to know that the Islam of Osama Bin Laden, Hamas, the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia isn’t true Islam, but rather a self-serving distortion.
A few weeks ago, one of the people on my notify list forwarded this to me. It was someone on my notify that I didn’t know personally, and what was forwarded to me offended me to my very core. I sent her back a rather harsh e-mail, asking her not to forward anything like that to me again. She wrote back to me, saying that she sent me the piece because she believed “that while you love and support Israel, you were at least questioning their approach to the current situation, and I sent the piece along as something which might clarify your own thoughts, even if just in opposition to what Starhawk had to say.” I did not respond; I was too angry at the time. But, to a certain extent, she is right: I do love and support Israel, and I certainly am questioning their approach to the current situation. That doesn’t make what she forwarded any less vile to me, but her intentions were of course good ones.
Because I love and support Israel, it is to my mind my obligation to question and protest its actions that I find objectionable. And I am not alone among Jews or Zionists; recently, over one hundred thousand Israelis attended a protest of the current actions of their government in Tel Aviv. If that number seems perhaps modest to you, think about the fact that there are only six million Jews in Israel. Imagine the American equivalent: four million, two hundred sixty-six thousand, six hundred and seventy people marching on Washington. These are people who live in places where terrorism is a weekly occurrence, where every bus they take or pizza parlor they eat in could be a target, and they still demand moderation of their government.
And what I want to know is where are the Muslims protesting the actions of Al-Qaida and Islamic Jihad? Where are the Muslims protesting against Innovative Minds? Even if we concede that the Palestinians and Saudis live under circumstances where the right to protest isn’t recognized, where freedom of information and assembly isn’t available, where are the American Muslims, protesting against the murderers who pretend to be killing in the name of their faith? I know they are out there; I’ve seen them march through Times Square waving Israeli flags with swastikas painted on them. I know that they are largely good and decent people of a good and decent faith. I want to know why it is they aren’t a little more pissed off at the so-called Muslims who are making them look bad.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
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