Michael,  I share your concerns about the excessive expectations of many Obama supporters.  In all of their optimism, they may become disenchented over the realities of political expediency.  Their enthusiasm makes me think of Auden's line "The greater the love, the more false to its object." This is not an ideal election, and in the final analysis I think many of us voting for Obama are just as confused by the wild hopes of many of his fans as we are by the bizarre Republican campaign. 

And yes, the word socialism has grown so wearisome in the last month of this campaign season...the more vicious the rhetoric about Obama's socialism, the more I wonder how people who've supported one of the least fiscally responsible American presidencies can justify calling themselves conservatives after a litany of wasteful and expansionist policies ending with bail-out season.

All that rambling to say, I never thought things would work out quite this way.

That is a great idea...perhaps bad Philip Roth adaptations could be redeemed one way or the other. 

And this film sounds very interesting.

Yeah, I really don't see what's offensive about what Tamar wrote.  I'm sure that random pro-lifers will find curious ways of using this story to their advantage, maybe even throw in some digs about the (I think undervalued) stem-cell research groups in Israel too.  Having within watched my father, grandfather, and a few other relatives die over the past few years, I've dealt with a great deal of death, but I really don't understand the obsessive "extra" sensitivity about subjects like infant mortality.  Premature birth, infant deaths, and abortions are widespread in nature and among humanity.  To point it out without breaking into tears is hardly cynical. 

 Of course, it could be my cynical Philly coldness bleeding through...oh, and Max (and whoever else wants Jesus performing alchemy on their vital organs) that verse - Ezekiel 36:26 - you're misquoting has nothing to with Jesus.  

 

I've wondered if the lack of precision among military journalists and historians writing about Israel (at least in English and some Romance languages) reflected some translation issues.  Similar effort might also pay off in working on pre-state documents dealing with security concerns in the 1930s and 40s, clarifying the decisionmaking of Zionist leaders for a larger audience.

This is a strong argument against naming anything Zoltan.

I can't help wondering if older, pluralistic use of words like "holocaust" to refer to great conflagrations, sacrifices, and annihilations will ever return now that a permanent article has been attached to it. I don't think there's any doubt that - as Monica puts it - the circumstances of The Holocaust are different from many other events of mass murder or racial persecution.  But at the same time, "holocaust" has a meaning in English long established prior to the Shoah, just as genocide does.  Perhaps allowing more pluralism in use of words like holocaust goes a long way...I realize it's a semantic concern, but labels, particularly when used to predicate distinctions of suffering or loss, matter a great deal.

I wonder/worry, though, if Turkish scholarship on Islam could wind up going the same route as a lot of the moderate South Asian scholarship - accepted by Western academics and many secularized Muslims, and ignored or banned in many places.  Precisely because the so-called "fringes" have produced such strong syncretist traditions (India being perhaps the strongest of them all), religious leaders in places like Saudi Arabia and even Egypt tend toward marginalizing those traditions.

But that picture crosses the line from daring to sadistic...

The most disturbing (to me) aspect of current administration rhetoric about Iran is this idea that they can somehow truly threaten the world (and of course their own region), while Pakistan remains our ally.  Sending some terrorists into Iraq is the most they can pull of without the Russians and the Israelis getting "concerned" (and by concerned I mean the good-old Cold War connotations of "you're scaring us, we may have to cripple your offensive capabilities").  Iran's government and president are hardly worse than Pakistan's - a point not enough journalists have pointed out - and the number of religious fanatics and religious terrorists in Pakistan is possibly greater than in Iran.  

The dearth of American understanding of the Middle East and South Asia is about a woeful ignorance not just of semantics, but of languages, linguistics, and a precise use of terms.  Many analysts in and outside the Bush administration never bothered to understand reasons for post-Cold War political arrangements in the Muslim world, nor do they now seem concerned about how the same religious and linguistic pressures shape politics in places like Iran or Pakistan. This is, of course, a group of people who may actually believe that Saudi Arabia does the West good...

This is sad. Really sad.