Recently in Politics Category

The Christian Science Monitor has an insightful read today on Sen. Barack Obama's lackluster start courting the much needed "Jewish vote" in his quest for the presidency. (I put that in quotes because, despite the relevance of garnering the votes of Jews, God's people do not vote as one.)

Washington - For a candidate intent on courting the Jewish vote, some of the headlines for Sen. Barack Obama in recent weeks have been less than heartening.

"Obama comment draws fire from Jews," the Des Moines Register declared after the senator's unscripted remark at an Iowa campaign stop in March that "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" from stalled peace efforts with the Israelis.

"Obama on the Mideast: Not quite comfortable," The Chicago Jewish Star said after his first major policy speech on the Middle East, to a pro-Israel group in his hometown.

And at last week's Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina, Senator Obama's omission of Israel in response to a question about America's top allies gave moderator Brian Williams an opening to revisit the Iowa flap in front of a television audience of more than 2 million.

No mention was made of Obama Christ.

The Forward has a biting piece tomorrow about the newfound friendship between "John Hagee, the firebrand evangelical Christian minister from San Antonio, Texas," who stole the show at Aipac's convention in March, and a growing number of Jewish federations:

“If you search through Jewish stories around the U.S., a lot of us have pieces of personal memory where non-Jews were there for us — not because they had a hidden agenda, but because they believed it was the right thing to do,” said Michal Kohane, the Israeli-born executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region. “There is a strong aspect of CUFI in which they are the descendants of that ideological concept.”

Just as liberals have criticized Aipac for giving Hagee the dais, they are now speaking out against the pastor’s grass-roots fundraising dinners. Most recently, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Betty McCollum, declined an invitation to attend an April 29 “Night To Honor Israel” in Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, citing what she called “Hagee’s extremism, bigotry and intolerance.”

Employees at LA Councilman Jack Weiss' district office in Sherman Oaks found three red-and-black swastikas taped to the front of the building and a "short manifesto," via LA Times:

"We have no time to listen to Jewish American children!!! If you don't believe us, just try talking to us." Then there is an obscene reference to "a homoerotic cop" and what that cop should do to Weiss. It concludes "Heil Weiss!"

Weiss, who is Jewish, plans to run for city attorney in 2009. He has been under fire for his pro-development policies (not that I am drawing any parallels between that and the vandalism).

Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who came out of the closet while in office and resigned because of an alleged affair, has converted into the Episcopal Church and will enter its General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. (The ordination of gay priests has become, to put it mildly, a contentious issue in the U.S. branch of King Henry's church.)

Here's the word from the Newark Star-Ledger, which broke the story online today:

It's May Day, and for the second year in L.A. that means marches for immigrant rights will be snarling traffic in the city's busiest corridors. (Avoid downtown and Koreatown.) Last year, massive walkouts and work boycotts drew more than half a million people to L.A. streets, including Cardinal Roger Mahony, once a compatriot of Cesar Chavez.

Here is what the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had to say in advance of today's protests:

While only the U.S. Senate passed meaningful immigration reform legislation in 2006,May 1" 2007 once again gives us the opportunity to support our immigrant brothers and sisters by calling on our legislators to bring an end to the persecution of immigrants and the separation of immigrant families, and fix our broken immigration system that benefits from the hard work of immigrants, while keeping them in the shadows of society.

Massive protests in Turkey yesterday highlighted the growing tension between religious Turks and their secular sisters in the predominantly Muslim country.

Two weeks after three Bible sellers were murdered by Turkish zeoloats, the at least 700,000 secular protesters were concerned about what Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's campaign for presidency would mean for non-religious Turks living in Istanbul and other major cities.

“People here are the real Turkey," one protester told the New York Times:

"Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

Hitler reportedly asked that question of his commanding generals in 1939, as he prepared to rid the world of Jews. Holocaust historians site this quotation when trying to explain Hitler's rational for how his acts would escape world condemnation. And yet, Jews -- who have so much in common with Armenians -- have struggled to embrace Armenians as true kindred spirits, diaspora people like Jews, who, though they did not suffer the Holocaust, suffered a holocaust.

Today marks the 92nd anniversary of the beginning of what most historians call the Armenian Genocide. And though most Western countries have recognized the acts as genocide, the United States and Israel have not. The U.S. has not wanted to offend an important military ally, and Israel has been hard pressed to condemn the founding fathers of the best friend in the Muslim world.

But the tide has shifted.