Caucasus Table Reports

During the height of this summer's Caucasian crisis, the Russian Foreign Minister responded to the British Foreign Secretary's demands by asking, "Who the fuck are you to lecture me?"

Apparently, someone. Foreign Secretary David Miliband is the grandson of a Red Army vet and the son of a leading Marxist. Who knew?

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Secretary of State (or Foreign Minister in Israel, for that matter) with such illustrious parentage? Screw Black Republicans and the Irgun, gimme more Jewish commies.

The mirth of tabrets ceaseth

Continuing from last Wednesday's post, the BBC has brought us a much fuller and more interesting account of the kosher music patrol. They've even printed the rules; unsurprisingly, there are ten in number.

My favorite is #4:
"The use of percussion accompaniment in slow, quiet music is generally ridiculous"

Apparently, inspired by Isaiah 24:8.

The day that changed everything

As always, Tom Segev tells it like it is:

"Everyone also spoke about the patriotism that had swept America, a clear expression of insecurity and a conservative attempt to hold on to the values of the past. I remember a large American flag that was hung above the entrance to one of the last sex shops that still survived in New York. Most of those shops have since disappeared, one reason being that porn today is purchased via the Internet; in the past seven years the Web has changed the lives of far more people than did the attack on the World Trade Center. "

Thanks Al Gore. If only you could have been president...maybe we wouldn't have had 9/11 in the first place. True.

Ridiculous

Was airport security screaming "Dance, boy, dance!" in Southern accents? Ugh, I want to vomit at the thought.

Meanwhile, the Pensioners' Party is planning to go abduct Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Eichmann-style, yo), a sitting democratically-elected president, and send him to the Hague for a trial. I doubt they'll take him.

Stories like these make me think even "a nation like all the others" is overly idealistic.

Disclaimer

I know it's fucked up to joke about these things, but I just want to state clearly that the infanticidal mother currently gracing the front pages of Israeli newspapers is not me:

Das Goyenthum in der Musik

The Jerusalem Post reports that a Bnei Barak NGO, the Guardians of Sanctity and Education is formulating a series of guidelines to "add transparency to the delineation between acceptable or 'kosher' Jewish music and forbidden or 'treif' music." Senior member Mordechai Bloi that "Bach or Beethoven, music with class" is kosher. The treif list includes:

• 2-4 beats
• rock and disco
• 'improper' use of bass, guitar, and saxophone
• profaning sacred texts
• mixing of milk and meat instruments
  

In response to a growing number of Haredi pop-style musical acts, the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox declare: "We want to protect ourselves from what we see as negative foreign influences. We are trying to maintain our own authentic music styles...stay(ing) loyal to our roots."

Compare to 1850, Richard Wagner wrote:
The Jews could never take possession of this art, until that was to be exposed in it which they now demonstrably have brought to light— its inner incapacity for life. So long as the separate art of Music had a real organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the formative stages of that life. Only when a body's inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it. Then indeed that body's flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect-life: but who, in looking on that body's self would hold it still for living?"

Threat to world peace? Oompa Loompa?

Haaretz front page photo asks you to decide for yourself: