Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

New *Bible* Evidence that Obama Is the Antichrist!

Just, y’know, not good evidence.

Consider the following video, which has been going around the Internet, with over a million hits on YouTube between different versions.

Okay. So that kind of settles it.

NOT.

I don’t know who is behind the video, but whoever it is clearly has only the most rudimentary understanding of the things he’s talking about, and he makes mistakes left and right. (Put another way: He’s totally out of his depth.) This is made clear by the annotations that start popping up in the video (you can shut them off with the controller in the lower right hand corner) that, among other things, advertise an updated version of the video, in which he tries to eliminate some of the most blatant errors that critics have pointed out.

The new one doesn’t work any better. It’s just got a few of the worst mistakes cut out.

Like this one: The claim that Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is the most ancient form of Hebrew.

NOT.

While Jesus did speak Aramaic, Aramaic is not an ancient form of Hebrew. It’s a related language, but neither is an ancestor of the other.

What he’s done is the equivalent of saying that English is the most ancient form of Dutch.

It reveals how utterly devoid of basic competence in the biblical languages this person is.

His overall strategy then becomes clear: He knows that the New Testament is recorded in Greek, but he wants to get back behind that to Aramaic so he can jump (quickly!) back to Hebrew. This is where his real interest is: Talking about Hebrew, because he’s got access to a rudimentary Hebrew dictionary. He doesn’t really know or care about Aramaic. It’s just a way of getting quickly to the Hebrew dictionary he’s discovered.

And by the way, it is evident that this man has no training in biblical Hebrew or he never would have made the mistake of saying that Aramaic was a form of it. You can’t take a class (or even read a whole book) on biblical Hebrew without learning how the two languages are related, since they’re both used in the Old Testament. He’s just some guy (possibly a minister, possibly not) who has access to a Hebrew dictionary.

A particularly, old, problematic Hebrew dictionary.

In fact, what he really has is a copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. As its name suggests, it’s not really a dictionary; it’s a concordance—a book that allows you to look up where words occur in the Bible. For example, if you looked up “faith,” you’d find a list of all the verses in which the word “faith” occurs in the King James Bible.

Strong’s happened to assign numbers to the words, and it offers a numbered word list to give a basic idea of what the original Greek or Hebrew word meant.

The problem is that Strong’s definitions are (a) more than a hundred years old, (b) extremely brief and lacking in detail, and (c) very, very prone to misuse.

Whenever I hear anyone starting to use Strong’s numbers when making an argument, I cringe because I know that misuse of the original languages is almost certain to occur.

The problem is so common that the Wikipedia entry on Strong’s Concordance devotes two paragraphs to warning people not to misuse the numbers:

Strong’s Concordance is not a translation of the Bible nor is it intended as a translation tool. The use of Strong’s numbers is not a substitute for professional translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English by those with formal training in ancient languages and the literature of the cultures in which the Bible was written.

Since Strong’s Concordance identifies the original words in Hebrew and Greek, Strong’s Numbers are sometimes misinterpreted by those without adequate training to change the Bible from its accurate meaning simply by taking the words out of cultural context. The use of Strong’s numbers does not consider figures of speech, metaphors, idioms, common phrases, cultural references, references to historical events, or alternate meanings used by those of the time period to express their thoughts in their own language at the time. As such, professionals and amateurs alike must consult a number of contextual tools to reconstruct these cultural backgrounds.

I don’t know who wrote that in Wikipedia, but whoever it was, God bless him (or them)!

So let’s see how the video manages to botch things with Strong’s numbers.

First, it cites Hebrew words number 1299 and 1300, which Strong’s lists respectively as meaning “to lighten (lightning)—cast forth” and “lightning; by analogy, a gleam; concretely, a flashing sword—bright, glitter(-ing sword), lightning.”

Okay, fine. Fair enough. But here is where not knowing what you’re doing comes in. It’s true that the Hebrew word(s) for lightning come from the root BRQ, but that is not where Barack Obama’s name comes from. It comes from a different root: BRK.

We don’t distinguish the sounds of K and Q in English very well, but in the Semitic languages, they do. K is pronounced towards the front or the middle of the mouth, while Q is pronounced toward the back of the mouth, on the soft palette. In other words, these are two different sounds in Hebrew and Aramaic, and you can’t count on a word derived from BRQ to have the same meaning as a word derived from BRK any more than you can count on the meaning of the word “cab” to have a meaning similar to the word “cap” (B and P being similar sounds that English speakers use and distinguish but that some, such as Arabic-speakers, don’t).

(There are also other variants on the K sound in these languages, but we won’t go into them for simplicity’s sake.)

So what is the real meaning of Barack Obama’s first name?

It has nothing to do with lightning. But if Mr. Video Maker hadn’t been so fascinated by Strong’s numbers 1299 and 1300, he might have looked up at 1288 which is the real source of the name: barak, which can mean a variety of things, but the relevant one is this: blessing. People see their children as blessings, and they want them to be blessed by God, and so variants on the root BRK have been used in Semitic and Semitic-influenced languages for thousands of years. Which is why lots of people from Bible days down to ours have had names based on this root, even in other languages than Hebrew.

EVEN THE PEOPLE AT BABYNAMES.COM HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT.

So much for the Barack = baraq business. President Obama’s first name has nothing to do with lightning, and a native speaker of Aramaic or Hebrew would have distinguished the two words as easily as we distinguish “cab” from “cap.”

We already have plenty of evidence that the vid is a load of hooey, but let’s keep going.

To get the word “Obama” into the picture, Mr. Video Maker seems to reason like this: Jesus said something about the devil falling light lightning from a high place, so let’s find somewhere in the Old Testament (so it’ll be in Hebrew) where the devil falls in connection with a high place.

He settles on Isaiah, which he says is the source of the Christian concept of Satan (???), and specifically on Isaiah 14.

Now the thing is, Isaiah 14 is not about the devil. Certainly not in the literal sense of the text. It involves a series of prophesies against neighboring kingdoms that have been persecuting Israel: the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Philistines—all of whom the text explicitly names, so we don’t have to be confused about it. The verses that Mr. Video Maker applies to the devil are, in fact, part of a taunt song directed toward the king of Babylon, telling him that although he is high and might now, he’s going to die and end up rotting, with all his pomp and glory coming to nothing.

Over time, Christians have lifted some of the imagery from this passage and applied it to the devil, but that is not what the text is literally talking about. It’s talking about the death of a Babylonian king.

So: More problems for Mr. Video’s thesis.

Now, it’s true that the word bamah can mean height or high place. It’s also a term referring to pagan shrines, which were built on elevated platforms (that’s the kind of high place the prophets often rail against). But it’s not the normal word for “heaven,” in Hebrew, which is shamayim. If you took Jesus statement that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Greek, ouranos) and you translated this back into Aramaic or Hebrew, the word you’d use for “heaven” would be shmaya (Aramaic) or shamayim (Hebrew). Bamah would not be the expected word.

So: Another problem.

Then there is the bizarre things that Mr. Video Maker does with the conjunction waw- (or vav-). This functions as the equivalent of the word “and,” and it is prefixed to words in Hebrew and Aramaic.

Video Guy tells us that this is often transliterated “U” or “O” by some scholars.

Uh . . . no. Not when it’s used as a conjunction. (The same letter can be used as an O in the middle of a word, when it’s functioning as a vowel, but not when it’s on the front of a word functioning as a conjunction.)

When it’s used as a conjunction, it’s pronounced “veh-” in modern Hebrew, and it’s pronounced “u-” (as in “tube”) in Aramaic (and Arabic).

So this is just wrong. waw as a conjunction is not pronounced O.

Mr. Video then strings it all together: baraq + o- + bamah and suggests that this would be used “in Hebrew poetry” to mean “lighting from heaven” or “lightning from the heights.”

GAH!

Okay: Here is something Mr. Video should understand just from his days in grammar school. Just from English.  Conjunctions are words like “and,” “but,” and “or.” “From” is not a conjunction. It is a preposition.

PLEASE REVIEW THE RELEVANT EPISODES OF SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS DISTINCTION: CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, BUSY PREPOSITIONS.

So in Hebrew and Aramaic, U- is a conjunction. It means “and,” not “from.”

What you want for “from” is min. “Lightning *from* heaven” would be something like baraq min ha-shamayim (Hebrew) or barqa min shmaya (Aramaic) or similar variants.

So things aren’t going well for this thesis.

But now let’s pull the rug out from under it entirely.

Consider the context. Read Luke 10, where the quotation in the video comes from. Jesus has sent out the Seventy-Two on an evangelization mission and when they come back . . .

17 The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”

18 He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. 20 However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

21 At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.

So what is the context of “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”? Is it a prophecy referring to the 21st century? No! It’s a remark about the evangelization mission that the Seventy-Two have just completed!

The disciples went out, preached, worked miracles, and struck a blow against the kingdom of Satan. So Jesus congratulates them telling them that before their evangelistic effort, King Satan fell from his throne like lightning from the sky (which is where lighting falls from; “sky,” “heaven,” same word in all these languages).

He’s not prophesying the future. He’s congratulating them on the past and how effective they were by God’s grace.

So, Mr. Video Maker is just wrong on all kinds of fronts. There is no prophecy of the Antichrist here. His video is all bunkum.

What do you think?

Ten Top Books: Fiction Edition

A reader writes:

I searched your site to see if you had a list of suggested books.

I didn't find one though.

So, I was wondering if you would suggest some of your favorite books. I would be really interested in your top 10 fictions books, but also your top 10 books on apologetics/Catholic thought.

Thank you for working on your blog.

God bless

P.s. If you like, I can send you my lists as well.

I'd be happy to provide some book recommendations, only I don't know that I can provide a proper "top 10" list. So instead let me give "ten top" books (i.e., ten books that I like a lot, even if I can't rank them from 1 to 10 and even though there are others I'm not thinking of that I might put on the same level.

Let's do fiction in this post, and I'll follow up with theology/apologetics.

And I invite the correspondent, and other readers, to share ten of their top fiction picks in the combox!

Here we go (alpha by title) . . . 

Continue reading “Ten Top Books: Fiction Edition”

Why So Few Gospels?

A correspondent writes:

I’m just in need of a helping hand from you, because I’m in the middle of a debate with a muslim friend.

While we’re in the middle of discussion, he happen to addressed me with a question that blew me away, because I don’t have any idea on how I could tackle his question.

This is what he said, “Could you also tell me that there are hundreds of Gospels, then how come only four made it through the New Testament?”

I know that the “Books or Gospels” contained in the New Testament are all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but I think there are much more broader explanation regarding this matter.

I hope you could give me a helping hand regarding this subject Sir. I would really appreciate it if you could give me at least a brief explanation and answer regarding this.

The correspondent is correct that the canonical gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and false gospels aren’t. The question is how the Holy Spirit guided the Church into a recognition of which were inspired and which weren’t.

Here’s how that happened . . .

I don’t know that there are literally hundreds of gospels (that would mean 200 or more), but there are a large number of purported gospels that were written between A.D. 100 and A.D. 400. There may have been hundreds written back then (and people continue to crank out false gospels even today, like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi), but only a few dozen survive from those centuries.

The reason that they are not in the New Testament is that they are all fakes. The Church recognized them as such because (1) they often theologically contradicted the canonical gospels that had been passed down from the apostles and their associates and (2) they showed up out of nowhere, with no history of having been read in the churches down through the years.

The canonical gospels, by contrast, all date from the first century, they were written by the apostles or their associates, they were given to the first churches to read, and the churches read them all the way down through history. Also, the doctrine contained in them agreed with the doctrine passed down by the apostles to the bishops and handed on by them.

The later-written “gospels” thus were spotted as phonies because they had not been passed down like the others and they contained bad doctrine.

Eventually, as a warning to the faithful who might be confused by the new gospels, some of the early Church councils—like Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 (among others)—published official canon lists naming the specific books of Scripture that had been handed down as sacred from the time of the apostles.

Incidentally, the image is Matthew 23:3-15 from an Arabic New Testament. (Note also that it reads from right to left.)

Hope this helps!

See Ya, Helen!

So Helen Thomas has resigned.

Fine with me. I always found her obnoxious, abrasive, partisan, rude, and mean-spirited.

But don’t count her out just yet. She previously resigned from UPI in 2000 but had a new gig at Hearst Newspapers within a few months, so we may see her again.

Though she is gone (at least for now), the question remains: Was what she said in the video clip anti-Semitic or merely anti-Zionist?

In the combox of my previous post, many commenters disagreed with me and said that the clip did provide proof of Thomas’s anti-Semitism.

That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with disagreement.

Other commenters agreed that the video didn’t provide proof of anti-Semitism and said that I was right to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.

That’s fine, too. I also don’t have a problem with people agreeing.

Even though Thomas has resigned, the issues involved in the exchange are still with us—and will be in the future—and that makes them still worth talking about. So I’d like to explore them a little further.

Specifically, I’d like to evaluate the following claims by critics:

1) That wishing a group of people would leave a particular land automatically constitutes racism

2) That the Jewish people have legitimate title to the land of Israel

These issues were not created by Helen Thomas. They have been with us for a long time, and they will be with us for a long time in the future. I can’t treat them in a single post, but let’s tackle the racism charge in this one.

Some commenters suggested that “Go home!” is the unmistakable cry of the racist, and at first glance, this seems plausible. But does this claim hold up to careful consideration?

It certainly doesn’t apply to all racists. Some racists don’t want those against whom they are prejudiced to leave at all. The runaway slave laws that used to exist in America are proof of that.

But what about the reverse? If you do want a group of people to leave, does that automatically make you a racist?

As is often the case, a matter of principle like this can be demonstrated by changing the scale of the problem. Suppose that we aren’t talking about a whole nation full of people, like Israel, laying claim to a particular territory. Suppose it’s just one person and a much smaller territory.

Specifically: suppose that you are in your house and one night someone breaks in. Further suppose that you are a member of race X and the home invader is a member of race Y. You naturally want the person to leave. But—and here is the key question—why do you want him to leave?

Is it because of his race? Because you don’t like race Y as a whole and don’t want its members around? If so then you are a racist with regard to race Y. No doubt about it.

But the reason you want the person to leave may have nothing to do with the home invader’s race. You may want him to go because you don’t want people invading your home. In that case, your motive is not racism but anti-home-invasion-ism.

Now let’s scale the issue up to where groups of people large enough to control national territories are in play.

Suppose, that you are a citizen of Vichy France and the Nazis have rolled in on their tanks and taken control.

If you want the Germans to leave, are you a racist?

It depends. If you hate all Germans and want them to leave simply because of that fact, then yes, you are an anti-German racist. (Be sure to remember that the word “race” originally applied not just to skin color but to national/ethnic/cultural origin, as in “the German race,” “the British race,” “the Japanese race,” etc.)

If you want Germans out because they are Germans, then yes, you are a racist.

But if you want them out because you don’t like people occupying your homeland—and if you would object whether they were German or British or Japanese—then you are not a racist. You are an anti-occupationist.

In the same way, if it’s 1800 and you are a Native American and you don’t like people of European descent—British, Spanish, or Portugese—occupying your homeland then you are a racist if you hate all British, all Spanish, or all Portugese—even the ones who aren’t occupying your homeland; but you are not a racist if you just hate foreign occupiers.

Or if it’s A.D. 60 and you are a Jewish person in Jerusalem, you may well hate the Romans occupying Judea and Galilee. If you hate all Romans everywhere, then you are an anti-Roman racist. But if you don’t mind Romans that aren’t supporters of the occupation then you are just an anti-occupationist.

They key is whether you want someone to leave because they are an occupier (of whatever race) or whether you want them to leave because they are of a specific race, apart from the occupation issue.

It should be pointed out that hating occupiers and lead to racism.

* If you are a Jew in second century B.C. Judea and you hate the Greek occupiers, you may be led to hate all Greeks.
* If you are a Jew in first century A.D. Judea and you hate the Roman occupiers, you may be led to hate all Romans.
* If you are a Native American in the nineteenth century A.D. Americas, you hate the European occupiers, you may be led to hate all Europeans.
* If you are a twentieth century Frenchman and you hate the German occupiers, you may be led to hate all Germans.
* If you are a twentieth century Palestinian and you hate the Jewish occupiers, you may be led to hate all Jews.

If so, your hatred of occupiers has led you into racism.

But just because occupation can lead one into racism doesn’t mean that it always does lead one into racism.

Should we assume that Maria von Trapp became an anti-German racist just because the Nazis perpetrated the Anschluss and seized control of Austria?

This seems implausible.

We can’t just assume racism on the part of a person who opposes a particular occupation. We can’t just leap to conclusions. We must strive to be fair and accurate about others, even if we don’t like them.

Specifically, we need to watch out for potential offenses against the Eighth Commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor”; Exodus 20:16). One commits calumny who “by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them”; also, if on the basis of an emotional reaction one leaps to an unwarranted conclusion, one commits the sin of rash judgment who “even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2477).

I understand how easy it is to get caught up with emotion when one encounters the kind of venom that Thomas displayed in her recent remarks (even chuckling—or as some have said, cackling—at her own provocation). That’s human. But it is at precisely such times that we have to check ourselves and make sure we are not being misled by our emotions (see above on rash judgment).

That’s why Scripture is full of exhortations like:

* “Reckon others better than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3)—i.e., give them the befit of the doubt

* “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12)—would you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, or to have people stop and check their emotions before lashing out at you?

* “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31)

These are part of the Jewish tradition as much as the Christian, as illustrated not just by the quote from Leviticus, but also by Hillel the Elder’s teaching a Gentile, “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary” (Shab. 31a).

The ethical requirements of both Judaism and Christianity thus require us to be careful in this area and make sure that we are not being swept up by our emotions. But that’s not the only consideration here.

In America today, in the wake of the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany, there are few more damning things that one can say against a person than that they are an anti-Semite.

The only things that compare with it are calling someone a racist, a sexist, or a pedophile.

But that’s changing . . . rapidly . . . because the word “racist” is loosing its punch. The word has been so over-used that its force is wearing off, just as “Help! Wolf!” lost its punch in the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

If you use an emotionally-charged term too often, when it isn’t clearly warranted, it will lose the charge it has. People will start rolling their eyes when you use it, and their sympathies will shift from those who make the accusation to those against whom it is made.

If you don’t want that to happen to the word “anti-Semitism” then you don’t want it over used.

So there is one more reason we should be careful when charging someone with anti-Semitism.

This applies especially to Helen Thomas when you look at the things she said in the video, because she specifically suggests that Israelis who immigrated from America should return to America.

America is Helen’s native country. It’s her own neighborhood. Her own back yard.

And by saying that Israelis who came from America should return to America, she’s saying, “Let’s have more Jews here!”

If she hated Jewish people in general and wanted them to “just go away” on that basis then she wouldn’t be inviting them here. She’d want them to all die or something—or move to Antarctica, or the moon. But none of those is what she says. She just wants them out of a particular plot of ground in the Middle East, and she’s happy to have those of American origin come back to America, where she lives.

That shows she’s anti-occupationist, but it does not show that she’s anti-Semitic.

You can argue that what’s going on in Israel isn’t an occupation. That goes to the issue of who has proper title to the land in question (the subject of an upcoming post). But Helen perceives it as an occupation, and that’s what she’s objecting to.

So at least from what we see in the video, Thomas is clearly an anti-Zionist, but if you want to charge her with anti-Semitism, you’ll need to provide additional evidence.

What are your thoughts?


Shopping Expedition

This weekend I went to a local Middle Eastern food market and got some stuff.

I also made a couple of videos about the experience.

Links to the things I was talking about: Fava Beans; The Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song [video] (from Iolanthe; with Mixed Pickles); and Peter Piper.

More links: hummus, tahini, baba ghanoush, imam bayeldi, paneer, dolma

Is Helen Thomas an Anti-Semite

On May 27, long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas made remarks that have caused an uproar.

At the time, she was outside the White House, which was hosting a Jewish heritage event. An interviewer asked her if she had any comments on Israel.

Her reply was, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.”

She went on to say that “they” (meaning the Palestinian people) are an occupied people and that Palestine is “their land.”

When asked where Israelis should go, Thomas said that they should “Go home” and went on to identify “home” as “Poland, Germany . . . and America . . . and everywhere else.”

Thomas’s remarks caused an uproar in which many have called her remarks offensive, disgusting, anti-Semitic, hateful, and so forth. Some have been demanding that the White House strip her of her press credentials. Others have suggested that she should be fired from Hearst Newspapers, for which she currently works.

I’d like to look at one characterization of her remarks—that they were anti-Semitic.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have a long-standing disapproval of Helen Thomas. I don’t like her reporting. She strikes me as excessively partisan, mean, rude, and unpleasant. But if she’s anti-Semitic, I don’t see sufficient evidence of it in this clip.

Watch for yourself and then let’s discuss . . .

There are anti-Semites in the world, but “anti-Semite” is a term that one has to use with caution. After the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, calling someone an anti-Semite is to throw them in league with the Nazis. It has the emotional punch of calling someone a racist. In fact, anti-Semitism can be seen as a form of racism: racism directed toward Jewish people.

Terms like “anti-Semite” and “racist” are such damning terms that they should only be used when the facts justify them. They should not be tossed around willy-nilly, at whomever you happen to dislike. However convenient they may be for torpedoing your opponent’s reputation, indiscriminate use of these words only cheapens them and takes the focus off the horrors of real anti-Semitism and real racism.

So is Thomas an anti-Semite?

I don’t know. I don’t know her heart (or even her track record of publicly expressed opinions about Jewish people), but I don’t see evidence of anti-Semitism in the clip.

Why do I say that?

Well, for a start, she never even mentions the term “Jew.” Her comments are directed at Israel, which is not synonymous with the Jewish people as a whole. Her problem—at least as she articulates it in the clip—is not with Jewish people in general but with those Jewish people who are present in the modern state of Israel and who, in her view, are oppressing the Palestinian people.

That’s not anti-Semitism. It may by anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism, but it is not racism directed toward the Jewish people.

Her complaint in the vid is of a political and historical nature, not a racial or even a religious one.

She does not display hostility to Jews outside of Israel. If they went to other countries—“Poland, Germany, and America, and everywhere else”—then she would not appear to have a problem.

And note that she includes America in the list of where he wishes the people of Israel would go. It seems she would not mind more Jewish neighbors right here in her own country.

So I’m not seeing evidence for anti-Semitism—hatred (or whatever) of Jewish people as Jewish people. She is expressing—cantankerously (and taking delight in her own cantankerousness)—a historical/political opinion that is common among many people with her background.

For those who may not know, Thomas is a Maronite Catholic [UPDATE: I’ve since run across additional claims that say she is Greek Orthodox, so I’m not sure what is accurate here] whose parents were immigrants from Lebanon (so technically she is a Semite, though ironically not as the term is used in “anti-Semitic,” where “Semite” is improperly treated as a synonym for “Jew”). She was born in 1920 and growing up as a girl and a young woman hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were immigrating to Palestine, with increasingly tense relations between them and the Palestinians. She was a grown woman—age 28—when Israel became an independent state, and subsequently has seen—and felt in a personal way—the subsequent history of pain and violence of the region, including in particular the horrors that have befallen Lebanon on account of its proximity to Israel.

There is another side to that story—the Jewish side. (In fact, there are many sides to this story, including multiple ones within each ethnic group.) But it is understandable if someone like Thomas were to think, “Y’know, things would have been better off if all those immigrants and refugees had never come to Palestine. I wish they’d all go back to their previous homelands.”

Actually deconstructing the state of Israel and returning its citizens to other countries is not something that is presently on the table (though who knows what will happen if Middle Eastern states start getting nukes), and I don’t know that Thomas was literally proposing it. She may well have just been giving voice to an angry wish or fantasy scenario.

But that kind of thing is not uncommon or unexpected. In history people have conflicts, some people lose, and those who lose often harbor such wishes—sometimes for generations. It’s human nature.

Beyond that, the opinions one might reasonably attribute to Thomas on the basis of the clip—that it would be better if the Jewish migration to Palestine had never occurred and the state of Israel had never been founded, that the Palestinians have some kind of still-existing claim to the territory of Israel, and that it would be better if the Israelis migrated to other countries—are opinions which one could reasonably hold.

That’s not to say that they’re right, just that one could reasonably hold them. (I.e., they don’t flatly contradict the clear dictates of reason.) One also can reasonably hold diametrically opposite views. These are subjects of a historical and political nature that people can disagree about.

Were Thomas’ remarks inopportune? As they were made outside of a Jewish heritage celebration, oooooh yes.

Were they phrased with unnecessary cantankerousness? Uh-huh.

Was she foolish to make them? Most definitely.

Should she lose her job or White House credentials over them? One may reasonably hold this opinion.

But was she being anti-Semitic in her remarks? Not from what we see in the clip.

You can hold that Helen Thomas is as hateful, offensive, mean, venomous, outrageous, embarrassing a woman as you wish, but if you want to accuse her of anti-Semitism, you’ll need more than this clip. One can be angry about a historical situation without hating an entire people.

She is clearly an anti-Zionist—and an angry one!—but Zionism and the Jewish people are not the same thing. An angry anti-Zionist is not the same thing as an anti-Semite.

Unless evidence emerges that she hates Jewish people as an entire people (not just those Jewish people she views as occupiers of Palestine), let’s not call her an anti-Semite. It cheapens the word and thus makes it easier for real anti-Semitism to occur.

What are your thoughts?

New Awesome Win!

Web_sci_mentos_1  Great new vid from the folks at Eepybird.com! (CHT: GreenAutoBlog)

 Amazing new automotive fuel source . . . Diet Coke + Mentos! (Technically, Coke Zero, but, y'know.)

Behold . . . Experiment #321!

Impressive as always!

(And I had the same thought about a next destination as the guys in the video did, though I don't guess we'll get to see that one.)

Mind you, Experiment #321 is definitely awesome win, but it's no Experiment #214, which was truly epic win.

In case your memory needs refreshing, let's take a pause that refreshes.

Up from the archives . . .

You see? Totally epic! Experiment #214 is not only cutting-edge science, it also has amazing healing properties. It's the kind of thing that you want to keep bookmarked so that any time you're feeling down or hurt, you can watch it and remember how much there is to celebrate in the world.

Obama Asks *You* To Celebrate Gay Pride Month!

IT'S TRUE!

The President has asked all Americans to observe this month, so if you're an American, this means he is asking you to do so.

In a proclamation posted on the White House web site, he writes:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2010 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by fighting prejudice and discrimination in their own lives and everywhere it exists.

Earlier in the proclamation he detailed all the things he has done on behalf of these favored citizens:


KEEP READING.

America’s Secret Crypto-Dance Culture Exposed!

Circle2 A reader writes:

Hi, Jimmy,


You square dance. What is an old brass wagon and why would it circle to the right and left so much?

Let me take a guess at the context in which the reader encountered the old brass wagon . . . it was at a grade school or grade-school aged function.

Taking the first part of the question literally, an old brass wagon would be a wagon that is made out of a copper-zinc alloy and that is endowed with the property of not having been made recently.

It's also an American play party game.

Play parties are something that most people today don't have any knowledge of, but they used to be quite common.

As you may know, some Fundamentalist Christians disapprove of dancing and even the playing of musical instruments–or certain musical instruments, at least in certain contexts.

Well, 200 years ago those kind of views were mainstream in a lot of American Protestantism, and in many communities it was socially taboo to dance. You couldn't find dances to go to anywhere.

Which was a problem because the Internet hadn't yet been invented, and people needed something to do in their free time other than read the Bible (not that they shouldn't have read the Bible, just that they needed to do something in addition to that).

Another problem is that God wired into human nature the desire both to make music and to move to music (i.e., dance). So human nature was compelling people toward doing something that was socially taboo.

Fortunately, human creativity was equal to the occasion, and a solution was found: the play party.

Play parties were, as you'd guess, parties that were held at people's homes (often with the curtains drawn to keep pesky, holier-than-thou neighbors from watching) in which the participants would sing and clap (providing music and a dance beat) and "play" children's "games" (i.e., dances–without the name).

"We can't dance, a'course. Tha'd be wrong. But we have all'a our friends over for a play party and 'play' a bunch a' 'games.'"

Naturally, the dances used at play parties could be very simple (being forced to practice any art form in secrecy is going to have a hindering effect on the development of the art form).

And that's why the Old Brass Wagon that the reader encountered involved so much circling to the left and right. It's a rudimentary dance that is designed for people who don't have extensive dancing experience.

Circle Left and Circle Right are no-teach dance moves. You don't have to engage in lengthy explanations of them. With adults, you just have to say the move and people do it. The most you ever have to say is, "Join hands; Circle to the Left; just walk to the beat of the music"–which is why Circle Left and Circle Right are the first two moves I use when I'm calling for a beginner party. Then I quickly add other moves that I can teach without stopping the music, so people get the most dancing out of the least instruction. (People came to dance, not to hear a lecture.)

Old Brass Wagon is a particular dance set to a particular tune (.pdf) (whose lyrics include the phrase "old brass wagon") that begins with a Circle Left and a Circle Right and then goes into whatever other simple dance moves the leader wants that are within the capability of small children.

It is very simple and very repetitive, and the only context in which you are likely to encounter it today–now that play parties are gone with the wind–is when adults are trying to get children to dance. Hence: grade school or a grade-school aged function. (Or possibly something like a father/daughter or mother/son or all-family dance, where you have a mix of adults and grade-school aged children.)

Old Brass Wagon is thus not something you'd encounter at a typical Modern Western Square Dance. Not only would a western square dancer not have any idea what you were talking about, if you tried to get them to do it they would hate it and would be bored silly in the first 90 seconds. (Modern Western Square Dance is based on rapidly changing, substantially unpredictable choreography and attracts the kind of dancers who crave complexity, whether they realize it or not.)

Also, Old Brass Wagon isn't a square dance. It's a no-partner circle dance . . . as illustrated by the facts that you don't need a partner for it and it's performed in a circle. (You can also do it as a partner circle dance; in the video below, you'll see the kids doing elbow swings with their partners, though partners aren't required for the basic dance.)

It's also cornpone as heck.

Still, it's a survival of America's secret, crypto-dance culture, even if today you won't see it in the movies or on Dancing with the Stars but only in proud-parent YouTube videos.

BTW, another–probably more familiar–play party "game" is Skip to My Lou.