Segacs’s World I Know

A group of Jewish university students were attacked while touring Auschwitz by three French tourists:

Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults.

“He told us to go back to Israel and said that we were stupid and should be ashamed to walk around with an Israeli flag,” testifies Maya Ober, a 21-year-old Polish student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), which organized the 16-day summer learning program along with the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).

After the initial altercation, a second assailant grabbed Ober by the arm. “One of the guys held me by the arm and wouldn’t let go,” says Ober, who lost several members of her family at Auschwitz. “I was afraid. I couldn’t move and I didn’t know what he was going to do.

“I was shocked. Although I have met anti-Semitism many times, I never expected to meet it at Auschwitz, where so many of my relatives were killed,” she says she spoke to the assailants in French and that in addition to being “brutish and vulgar,” their sentiments “made absolutely no sense.”

That’s the thing about antisemitism. It “makes absolutely no sense”. But that hasn’t helped it disappear in the last 2000 years.

(Via Damian Penny, who astutely points out that we’re about to hear some lame excuses as to why this is “anti-Zionism, not antisemitism”).

The media is reporting that Svend Robinson is expected to plead guilty on Friday to stealing a ring at an estate sale.

So why am I so amused? Is it a simple case of schadenfreude? Maybe. Is it because I can’t stand Svend Robinson and his self-righteous arrogance and I enjoy seeing people like that having to face up to what they’ve done? Perhaps.

No… no, that’s not it.

It’s because his lawyer’s name is Michael Bolton.

Hahahaha.

I can’t help it! It’s too easy! There’s a reason they made a whole gag about it in the movie Office Space:

Samir: No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It’s not that hard: Samir Na-gheen-an-a-jar. Nagheenanajar.

Michael Bolton: Yeah, well at least your name isn’t Michael Bolton.

Samir: You know there’s nothing wrong with that name.

Michael Bolton: There was nothing wrong with it… until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.

Samir: Hmm… well why don’t you just go by Mike instead of Michael?

Michael Bolton: No way. Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.

Let’s see… horrible musician, character in a movie, and Svend’s lawyer. Sounds like the start of a joke. “Three men named Michael Bolton walk into a bar…”

Okay, I’m easily amused. The secret’s out now.

Palestinian terrorists tried to bomb an Israeli bulldozer, but instead ended up blowing up three other Palestinians:

The roadside bomb in the Rafah refugee camp went off a few metres from where the bulldozer — part of an Israeli operation to destroy weapons-smuggling tunnels from Egypt — was piling up dirt in a crowded residential area, Associated Press Television News said.

No Israelis were injured but three Palestinian men 200 metres away were hit by shrapnel, one so severely it took off half his skull.

Ten people were wounded, including a Reuters TV cameraman, witnesses and hospital officials said.

The violence came a day after extremists killed three Palestinians convicted of collaborating with Israel — two of them in their hospital beds — highlighting the progressive breakdown of law and order in Gaza.

I guess the security fence is so effective in preventing the terrorists from targeting Israelis, that they’re turning their bombs on other Palestinian terrorists instead.

I give it about 10 seconds until the terrorists claim that Israelis killed the three men, and start referring to them as “martyrs”.

Playing catch-up at work and filling in for vacationing coworkers is taking up pretty much all my time these days. Blogging will be slow for the time being but should be back up to speed shortly.

It’s like Murphy’s Law of Weather or something: it’s always nice during the week and rainy on the weekends. Or at least it seems like that.

Heavy downpours last night and today brought back flashbacks of the 1987 flood. That time, we ended up with an early emergency evacuation from day camp and three inches of water in our basement. This time, it doesn’t seem like there will be any consequences more serious than some water accumulation on the street corner. Nonetheless, all this rain is causing my apartment to feel like a sauna, humidity-wise… and my hair is very unhappy. It’s protesting. Which brings me to the other Murphy’s Law: when you pay to get your hair done, the weather will suck. Always.

Rain rain go away.

Saudi government funding terrorist groups? Someone explain to me why this is news to so many people?

The American and Israeli embassies in Uzbekistan were targeted by suicide bombers today:

Simultaneous bomb attacks struck the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Uzbekistan as well as the state prosecutor’s office in the capital Tashkent Friday, killing at least two people and wounding five.

The action appeared clearly coordinated, days after the start of a trial in Tashkent of 15 suspected Islamist extremists on charges of trying to overthrow the ex-Soviet state in connection with attacks in March that killed nearly 50 people.

The three late afternoon blasts in Uzbekistan, a mainly Muslim country that backs Washington’s “war on terror” and hosts a U.S. airbase, appeared to have been triggered by suicide bombers, almost certainly on foot.

I’m willing to bet most Americans and Israelis didn’t even know they had embassies in Uzbekistan. Well, they know now. Two people were killed at the Israeli embassy; no injuries were incurred at the American one.

And of course, there are no eyebrows being raised anymore. It’s just assumed to be logical for terrorists to target Americans and Israelis: the coalition of the international bullseye.

Damian Penny links to a post by James Lileks talking about how the theme of many Democrats these days is that terrorism is invented; George Bush is the only threat:

As Teddy Kennedy said in his convention speech: “The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush.” It’s really quite simple, isn’t it? We live in a manufactured climate of fear ginned up by war-crazed neocon overlords. There is no threat. The only thing we have to fear is Bush, who sits as we speak in the Oval Office sucking the marrow from Whoopi’s shin-bones.

If so, I wonder why anyone agreed to the stringent security policies that characterize this year’s conventions. Why the bomb-sniffing dogs? Why the snipers? Why the metal detectors, the invasive inspection of bags? Is it all an elaborate defense against Bush crashing the party and setting off a bomb belt, shouting God is Great, y’all!

No, they’re fearful of something else.

Damned if I know what, though. Damned if I know.

Reading this reminded me of something, and I racked my brain until I realized what it was: the same thing happened in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

(Er, for those of you who haven’t read all five books yet, what are you waiting for? And, um, spoiler alert.)

The parallels are uncanny: the real world is fearful of Islamist terrorism. The wizarding world is fearful of Voldemort. In both cases, it’s easier — and more reassuring — to believe that a known, relatively benign quantity is inventing the threat for some self-serving purpose. It sets our mind at ease to assume that, without Bush, the problems will disappear. Just as it set the minds of the wizards at ease to believe that Harry Potter and Dumbledore were inventing the story of Voldemort’s return in order to serve their own ends. To face the other possibility — that they were telling the truth — was too frightening for people to contemplate.

Dumbledore — the wise, great Hogwart’s headmaster — is certainly no comparison to George W. Bush. But the theory is the same. There’s something real behind the politics, the hype, or the threat. But much of the Western world is in denial.

In Harry Potter’s world, he and Dumbeldore had to suffer for a better part of a year before the truth of Voldemort’s return was made obvious to even those people who most wanted to deny it. In reality, one would assume that September 11th was evidence enough of the reality of the threat of terror — but the real world doesn’t even take that as proof. With idiots like Michael Moore calling 9/11 “fiction”, and the conspirazoid-freaks talking about how Israel, or Bush, or a Zionist cabal, or some combination thereof, were really behind the attacks… it’s easier to blame and attack what you don’t fear, than to face what you do, I suppose.

Just one more way in which Harry Potter’s world mirrors our own. And, in both cases, we’re stuck waiting for the next installment to see how it ends.

Update: Seems I’m not the only Canadian with Harry Potter on the brain these days.

Update #2: Jonathan had similar reflections last year when he first read Order of the Phoenix. He’s pegged the book as pro-war, and is bemused by the fact that it was penned by a self-described leftist. Go figure.

Osama Bin Laden’s half-brother liked “Farenheit 9/11” – though even he thinks that Moore is full of shit:

“It’s a moving film,” Yeslam Binladin, a Geneva-based tycoon and one of the al-Qaida leader’s 54 siblings, said in an interview with the French magazine VSD.

“I even laughed at times,” said Binladin, adding, “but a lot less when he states errors or inaccuracies about my family, knowing perfectly well that he’s deceiving the public.”

I hope it heartens Michael Moore to count the Bin Laden clan among his fanbase. I wonder if he’ll take their criticisms of his habit of playing loose with the truth seriously. Probably not.