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Back in the 1990s I took high school seniors from around the country to the Middle East for a month of visitation and discussion.  We would spend two weeks in Jordan and two weeks in Syria.  In Damascus we would always go to the amazing covered marketplace, the Hamidiyah souk.  One summer, we had an unpleasant incident in which a young merchant engaged in an act of sexual harassment against one of my female students.  Decades later I still feel uneasy about what happened and how we handled it.  You are welcome to form your own opinions. 

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Netanyahu has apparently come back from the dead.  As of today (November 2, 2022) he is expected to form an exceptionally hard right government with Kahanist parties  that were previously considered poison.  What does this mean?  Here is my earlier podcast on the political model of Rabbi Kahane who was banned from politics because of his racist ideology.  

(There is a debate within Israel about whether those from the extremist Religious Zionism party should have access to security briefings.  That was the same debate that occurred in the US when Trump was elected). 

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This is a well-known pattern in electoral studies:  That the President's party loses seats in the House in the off-year election.   This podcast discusses recent patterns and the logic behind the patterns, as well as a few reasons why the rules may not hold. 

This podcast is posted exactly two weeks before the 2022 mid-term elections.  it is risky to post such a discussion at a time when the results will soon be in and you, the listener, will know what actually happened.   But I delivered a talk on this subject at a faculty forum on campus on Monday night and the students were interested enough that I thought you might be interested as well. 

I think I know what will happen, but let's save that for another season. 

thanks for listening. 

ps.  A point I meant to make.  At this point (14 days out) no one is changing their mind.  The whole effort is on mobilization.  I doubt that reading the polls will be as useful as in other races.  They may be  accurate, as they mostly are, but if  unexpectedly large numbers of people vote that will shift the balance of the outcome.  

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With the protests in Iran escalating, I am beginning to see some structural and political parralels with the first Palestinian Intifada of 1987-1993.  There may also be parallels with the anti-Shah protests of 1978 that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power but I have not had time to think  those points through.  However the common thread in all three sets of protests are that the security forces kill someone during a demonstration and then there are follow up demonstrations to protest that killing.  It just keeps escalating.  And the security forces go into stupid mode and keep thinking that they can suppress the protests with violence.

The current protests may be suppressed or may fizzle out.  We can't tell.  But as of October 9  over 150 people have been killed by the security forces, and many, many, many detained.  

ps.  Please don't tell the Ayatollahs that  I think they are behaving like Israelis.  

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I have been running this podcast over in my mind for twenty plus years, well before I even knew what a podcast was.  It started when a Muslim student, with curiosity and respect, asked me to explain Christian thinking.  It is certainly not an easy question to answer, but I have given it my best shot in this podcast.  

When I told a friend who was a priest that I was planning this podcast, he looked very nervous and said, "Be careful." I have tried to be careful, and have also tried to be informative and true to the complexity of the issue.  And maybe a little entertaining.  

I hope you learned something.  

And let me know if you have a thoughtful reflection.  

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Ken Burns has a documentary on the Holocaust starting tonight (September 18) on PBS. 

His focus is on US policy rather than upon the Holocaust itself. 

This is my attempt to help students understand what the Holocaust was, and was not. 

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Starting on September 16, 1982 and extending over three days, right wing Christian militia forces went into the Sabra and Shatilla camps near Beirut and massacred 800 (or was it 3,000?  Who knows for sure?) unarmed Palestinian refugees.  The protests within Israel and world-wide were so strong that the right wing government of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon was forced to set up a commission to determine what happened.  This is a discussion of those incidents, and of the report.  

Warning:  Not easy listening.  

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This is a difficult topic.  In my classes I had quite a few Lebanese students, mostly Shia but some Maronite Catholics, and a few Sunni.  Many were from refugee families.  Many were refugees themselves.  Over the years they told me stories of their families and of those terrible days. 

Even now I get angry at leaders who seem driven with delusions of changing the world and seem indifferent to the human costs of their adventures.  And who seem not to consider the downside of what might happened if everything does not work the way they hope. 

This is a complex war in which different leaders had different and often contradictory goals.  As I would often say to my students, "You have now had a unit on this war.  Would any of you have thought that these leaders could pull off their aspiration?"  Of course, none of them would have had such delusions.  

The thought that 20 year-olds spending two or three classes studying a war would know better than to do what powerful leaders obviously did NOT know is enough to make you spit.  

Remember, violence combined with political stupidity is like sexually transmitted disease.  It is a gift that keeps on giving.  

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Back in 2003 Jane and I were in Berlin visiting our friend Sibylle Laurischk.  Sibylle was a member of the Bundestag, the German parliament.  She was with the Free Democrats, the fourth largest party.  I had just completed a major project on Arab-Americans (the Detroit Arab-American Study) and offered to discuss the findings with any members of her party who were interested.  She was her party's spokesperson on what we might call minority or immigrant affairs so I thought that might be of intrest.  But she told me she was bringing in people who were specialists in foreign affairs.  That sent me scrambling.  What could I possibly tell them what they would want to hear?  What I came up was this talk, which I called Understanding the Americans. 

Questions for American listeners:  Is this like looking into a mirror?  

I am sorry to say that Sibylle died in 2020, much too early.