Video: Obama's Holocaust Day Speech

Meaningful remarks. [Hat tip to Mimi.]

Friday Fun Features: Noah's Ark Model, Temple Model, Undercover With the Fundamentalists

From WSJ.
Hong Kong Christens an Ark of Biblical Proportions
The First Built as Big as Noah's, It Joins a Global Regatta of Replicas
By JONATHAN CHENG

HONG KONG -- This city's three billionaire Kwok brothers have just the answer for the rising waters threatening the global economy: the world's first life-size replica of Noah's ark, built to biblical specifications off the coast of this recession-struck Chinese financial center.

The message in its 450-foot-long hull, its rooftop luxury hotel and 67 pairs of fiberglass animals: "The financial tsunami will be over," says Spencer Lu, the Kwoks' project director at Noah's Ark, which is opening soon....more

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From MINA.
Farmer spends 30 years on model Biblical Temple
Brick by brick, tiny figure by tiny figure, Alec Garrard has painstakingly worked for 30 years on an astonishing recreation of Herod's Temple....more

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From AP.
Ivy Leaguer `infiltrates' Falwell's university
By ERIC TUCKER

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Kevin Roose managed to blend in during his single semester at Liberty University, attending lectures on the myth of evolution and the sin of homosexuality, and joining fellow students on a mission trip to evangelize partyers on spring break.

Roose had transferred to the Virginia campus from Brown University in Providence, a famously liberal member of the Ivy League. His Liberty classmates knew about the switch, but he kept something more important hidden: He planned to write a book about his experience at the school founded by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell.

Each conversation about salvation or hand-wringing debate about premarital sex was unwitting fodder for Roose's recently published book: "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University."...more

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[Hat tips to Yochanan Hashlishi.]

Jonathan Mark in the Jewish Week Pens a Disrespectful Jewish Blog Post

It's one thing when you disagree with an issue, express that and advance an argument in favor of your POV.

It an entirely other thing when you purely and persistently mock young idealistic and sincere religious leaders.

To read pure disrespect without a point to be found in it, see the blog posted at the Jewish Week under the rubric "Route 17: Associate Editor Jonathan Mark on Just About Everything" with the mocking title, "A Rabbi Named Sue."

For another strong view on this issue see the essay by Leora Tanenbaum, (author of "Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality") -- 'A Rabbi Is Not a "Rabbi" in the Jewish Orthodox Twilight Zone', Huff Post. She concludes with this flourish:

Hurwitz is already a role model and many people will come to regard her, if they don't already, as a Judaic authority. If now is not the right time to call female rabbis "rabbis," then when?

Well Leora how about, Never!

Orthodoxy defines itself as a boys' club. It's not some peripheral value. We've argued for naught over women's issues in Orthodoxy. Forget about it.

Want to be a woman rabbi? Join up with the Reform, Reconstructionist or Conservative movements where you will be welcomed. End of story.

Is Judge Jay Bybee Jewish?

No, Judge Jay Bybee is not a Jew. Bybee is a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Bybee graduated from Brigham Young University and earned his Juris Doctor from BYU's Law School.

On April 16, 2009, President Barack Obama released an internal memorandum signed by Bybee during his tenure at Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Justice Department addressed to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo and dated August 22, 2002, which concluded that waterboarding did not meet the legal definition of torture ["Bybee memo"].

On April 19, 2009 an editorial in The New York Times ("The Torturers’ Manifesto") argued that Bybee is "unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution" and called for Bybee's impeachment from the federal bench.

A Naive Nicholas Kristoff Announces the Reformation of Islam

Funny, the Taliban in Pakistan don't look like moderate Muslims.

Based on a single conference held at Notre Dame, a Catholic Christian university in Indiana, Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has concluded that Islam has moved towards the mode of reformation that is "analogous" to the reformation of Christianity and the modernization of its thought and theology more than a century ago.

To this we say, Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps.

And read your own paper, we say to Kristoff, as the Taliban march ever closer to the capital of Pakistan ("Alarm Grows Over Pakistan’s Failure to Halt Militant Gains"), for there is immense danger in misrepresenting what is the current state of Islam. In the Times, opinion need not coincide with fact:

"Islam, Virgins and Grapes"  If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be treated equally, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy....

Times' Sorkin: US Banks Lying About their Profits

It's amazing to watch how our news media inches ever closer each day to reporting the actual facts about our big US Banks.

Andrew Ross Sorkin writes today on the topic. Although to describe how our big banks have been characterizing their recent performance as businesses Sorkin does not use terms like lying, deceitful, dishonest, two-faced, insincere, untruthful, mendacious, double-dealing or false, he does cite sources who say that Banks report profits "out of thin air" or that they claim to "pull a bunny out of a hat" or that they engage in "sleight of hand" or that "they pulled the same trick" or that their reports are "perfectly delusional."

This is the how the Times describes our banks.

Vatican Stays to Hear Iranian President's Anti-Semitic Diatribe in Geneva

It was really disappointing, but not at all unexpected, to hear that while other civilized diplomats walked out when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lapsed into his (utterly ironic) anti-Semitic tirade at the UN Geneva conference on racism, the Vatican's boys stayed to listen. According to the AP story, "Ahmadinejad dropped Holocaust denial from speech,"

Ahmadinejad's accusation that the West used the Holocaust as a "pretext" for aggression against Palestinians still provoked walkouts by a stream of delegates including representatives of every European Union country in attendance. But others, including those from the Vatican, stayed in the room because they said he stopped short of denying the Holocaust.

The walkout came after Ahmadinejad accused Western nations of complicity in violence against Palestinians surrounding the foundation of Israel.

The original text of his speech said, "Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust."

The notion that, "the Vatican stayed in the room because they said he stopped short of denying the Holocaust" is not at all credible in light of the Bishop Williamson affair and should have been questioned by the AP.

The Vatican rehabilitated the Bishop within the church hours after he publicly denied the Holocaust on television. Vatican actions show that they support Holocaust deniers while at the same time Vatican words claim they do not. Such dissonance is the stuff which erodes an entity's credibility.

Reminder: Google Search has no sense of humor

Just a random thought based on a report from a blogger about my Purim post that Rush Limbaugh is Jewish.

Google can retrieve all kinds of information from the web but it cannot tell you which of the hits are funny.... yet.

David Holzer's book "The Rav: Thinking Aloud"

My son brought me a gift that he purchased in a book store in Monsey NY today - David Holzer's new book "The Rav: Thinking Aloud" subtitled "Transcripts of Personal Conversations with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik."

We studied with the Rav for four years when preparing for my ordination at Yeshiva University.

After turning the pages, we can say with certainty that this book is in a class by itself. We have heard that it is causing quite a stir in the modern Orthodox community.

On page 53 for example we get some insight into the Rav's "cooking." We are told that he liked to eat sour cream and cottage cheese mixed together (so do we and it was a big favorite of my mother) and that the Rav cooked his own scrambled eggs.

The book is printed is large type on glossy paper. It is well bound and professional in appearance with a nice cover.

Blogger Asks Why Pope Benedict Supports the Durban II Hatefest

Damian Thompson at his UK Telegraph religion blog asks, "Why is Pope Benedict supporting the UN's 'anti-racist' hatefest against Israel?"

Here, here. Indeed his reference is to the pope's enthusiasm for the upcoming and rapidly disintegrating United Nations conference on "racism" in Geneva, Durban II. He says,

With respect, Holy Father, it's not an opportunity to fight racism; like the disgusting fiasco in Durban in 2001, it's an opportunity for African dictators and Jew-baiting Islamists to fulminate against Israel and the neo-Nazi, anti-Arab hordes that are sweeping across racist Europe, while dismissing any trifling Muslim assaults on other faiths as Islamophobic myths.

I wonder if the Vatican is sending any bishops to Geneva. I can think of one who'd feel at home there, can't you?

Well put, and just when we were just thinking we hadn't seen a reference to British Catholic bishop and Holocaust denier Richard Williamson for a few days.