Post-Catholic Politically-Correct Pseudo-Consensual

Counterpoint! : His reputation is that of a “sensible conservative” right wing ballbag, and the magazine he works for is dreadful, so this source is about right!

Well, I read him as implying that being a good Catholic prevents anti-semitism. I don’t see why Goldberg has to repudiate him. He can easily support the conservative authorities of other religions because he supports conservative religious authorities on the principle that all conservative religious authorities are deserving of support (with a few false premises regarding inconvenient facts).

“a state law governing private Catholic sacramental practices” turns out to be about requiring disclosure of admissions of sexual abuse by priests.

He seems to be saying that if the Jews try to stop the priests from raping children, well then, circumcision will be illegal, too. Ha! Gotcha, Jews! My goodness, that is one bizarre column.

Not that I mean to defend Kevin Myers, but teh sacramental practice in question is confession. He’s not really claiming that Irish priests must diddle altar boys because of Jesus – just that if an Irish priest learns of child abuse through confession, then teh right thing to do is to assign an extra few Hail Marys and forget about it.

The law in question may well require priests to break the sanctity of the confessional, but nowhere in what Myers wrote is there anything to suggest it does. He quotes a passage that is entirely compatible with what is law in the US now for all religions; in the next paragraph he waxes rhetorical on the sanctity of the confessional; and in the next paragraph he suggests that anybody who disagreed with the previous paragraph is an bigot.

Well, if we accept this ridiculous parallel for the sake of argument, rabbis who hear other rabbis mention that they perform circumcisions should report this to the authorities. The rabbis and the authorities both will get quickly annoyed, since the practice in question is not illegal, so it will just clog up the phone lines. In the case of kiddydiddling, the practice is already illegal, what is at stake is the the requirement that Catholic priests go against the religious strictures under which confession is practiced and betray confidentiality. I wonder if the Pope will sanction this or rather insist that the sanctity of confession must be respected regardless of the requirements of secular law.

Hey, while we’re on teh topic of “nothing to see here, do-de-doo” Kevin also asks ,,,a criminal offence for anyone not to disclose “information” that a child is being sexually or physically abused. What is information? What is abuse? How long is a piece of string? And where does this nonsense stop?

“Scare” “quotes” or “not”, a confession by teh abuser probably counts as “information”.

So if I’ve got this right, the flow of Myers’ argument is not that liberals are too anti-semitic about Israel, but that they’re not anti-semitic about Jews at home.

And back to the original story of how anti-semitic Ireland is – from Jeffrey’s quote of Kevin:
“But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all. But by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past month.”

That’s an odd surname. Oh it’s just a typo. Well what did DeRiedmatten actually have to say? That teh Gaza Strip is totes fine – do-de-doo nothing to see? I believe teh correct phrase is Sadly, No!

Dee @20 No he didn’t. Goldberg writes –

Either you get it or you don’t, I guess, but “German engineering” connotes the mechanized, efficient, aspects of the program of Nazi extermination. The word “scream,” well, means “scream.”

Those are two separate sentences. Goldberg explicitly equates ‘German Engineering’ as a phrase evoking the holocaust. Which is silly.

Yes, you’re right that the victim has more sensitive antennae, and that should be taken into account. But we should also take into account that lots of people like to scream (oops!) ‘racism’ over and over again in order to maximise the benefits of victim status – without, y’know, enduring the pain of actually being victimised. I think its hard to dispute that’s what Goldberg is doing in this case.

i actually cant believe he said that. its incredible. a new low for the indo. its must be up there with mary ellen synons hate rant against the special olympics(good the indo is a truly terrible paper!)

@14 Jim Pharo – I know its not very crookedtimber-style, but I just have to lol at that image – nuns chasing rabbis down corridors etc… lol lol

Dee @26

I think if Goldberg’s ouevre proves anything, its that he is incapable of being ‘sly.’ Or subtle. Or coy, or any other variation thereof.

As to your anecdote. First – I dislike the implication that myself and Henry are insufficiently sensitive to the tragedy of the Shoah and that meeting a holocaust survivor face to face would set us straight. Its both a cheap shot as well as being completely untrue. Second – there is a world of difference between someone who actually experienced the death camps and lived through one of the greatest atrocities in human history, and a middle class New York Jew whose greatest hardship in life is traffic on the beltway. If the former thinks someone driving a VW is automatically shady, I’m inclined to give them a pass. It doesn’t mean their right – it just means living through the holocaust buys one a lot of leeway in my book. However, when the latter prattles on about omnipresent anti-Semitism to a degree that Alvy Singer would find obsessive I call shenanigans. One is an actual victim. The other is an insufferable dickhead desperately trying to accrue the benefits of victim status without enduring anything more traumatic than bloggers and commentators like me laughing at him. Hell the man has been writing astonishingly inaccurate stories for years about Arab WMD and how Israel is going to strike Iran any minute now that were spoon-fed to him by government officials obviously looking to plant fake stories in the press without even suffering any professional sanction. The idea that he would have anything in common besides religious belief and ethnicity with a holocaust survivor is ridiculous.

Finally – did you ever ask the little old lady in question (who, I’m sorry to say, bears more than a passing resemblance to one of Tom Friedman’s taxi drivers) if the VW was the reason she didn’t accept your lift? Seniors, especially those who have enjoyed great hardship, tend to be proud and stubborn (I know a former Italian partisan who is one of the most obstinate people I’ve ever met, god bless him.) She might just not have wanted to take the help. And if she really thought everyone driving a VW was a clost Nazi, she’s probably suffering from PTSD and could do with some counselling IMHO, for her own benefit, not mine.

In conclusion – ‘German Engineering’ has been a shorthand for ‘high quality’ in ad copy for decades. Whether screamed, whispered or spoken in a deathly teutonic monotone it means nothing more, nothing less, and Goldberg is trolling. Simple as that.

@ mise

perhaps good to remember that very-much-still-Catholic Ireland is also under fire for its anti-semitism

Unfortunately, you then went on to link to rabid Likudniks as your ‘authority’.

@Daragh MacDowell

I don’t get why personal “victimization” has anything to do with it though.

As Dee pointed out, a refusal to admire the most well-known example of “German engineering” (often because the manufacturers have historic ties to Hitler’s regime) is hardly something Goldberg can claim for himself uniquely. That others (some of whom, say, may have lost more close relatives in Stalingrad than in Auschwitz) share some of their beliefs with someone who may be a bad journalist, annoying, and kind of a jerk isn’t much of an argument against those beliefs. He isn’t trying to persuade people who don’t already agree with him, saying something like, “You know what that means: Nazis.” And it’s well within the range of the standard Nazism is the negation of religion trope.

NO ‘e’ in phony.

ice

Has he no shame, how can he work for that magazine? Every time I read The Atlantic, all I see is SLAVE TRADE…

Dee @32

Now I’m really confused. Your post on the old lady (sorry for inserting ‘little’ – just rounding out a traditional descriptor) coupled with your initial defence of Goldberg seemed to be indicating you thought he was on to something and that the modern advertising and design of German industrial goods is subtly anti-Semitic in a way a gentile such as I couldn’t possibly detect, let alone fathom. Now you’re talking about people boycotting German industry due to lingering (and entirely understandable) resentment of Germany.

Now even if I think both of these things are deeply silly (Its been almost 70 years, modern day Germay is not the Third Reich and has done a lot to repent, including financing large chunks of the IDF war machine – Israel’s Dolphin submarines are German built and supplied at well below cost) they aren’t the same phenomenon.

And frankly, if you can’t see how a Jewish man claiming that he is assaulted on all sides by encroaching anti-Semitism, whether through horrifying ads for washer-dryers or hordes of anti-Semitic Irishmen, is trying to claim victim status, I can’t help ya.

Bruce writes: So if I’ve got this right, the flow of Myers’ argument is not that liberals are too anti-semitic about Israel, but that they’re not anti-semitic about Jews at home.
It’s even better: Myers is saying that Irish liberals are both at the same time. We are anti-Israel because that’s PC, and therefore anti-Semitic towards foreign Jews, while anti-anti-Semitic political correctitude at home blinds to the insidious Jewish evil within Irish society that is Alan Shatter and his coterie of winky-slashing Rabbis.

Daragh @37,

… I can’t help ya

Yes (from one “gentile” to another), that’s what I suspected.

Daragh @39 (hoping the number doesn’t change post-comment),

So now it’s not anything to do with “German engineering”, eh? It’s all about Israel and pop psychology (I should have suspected from your reference to PTSD) about how “they have become what they beheld”. Now I’ll know how to “read” Goldberg. Thanks.

@ Skippy 23
Indeed, exhibit A:
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/rupert-as-flawed-father-of-the-world-2823573.html

With Myers it’s the little things, the pointless daily articles that don’t stir up controversy, that most capture the man’s bizarre nature:
His recent obituary of an acquaintance he hadn’t seen in decades in which, after acknowledging her guarded and private nature, he began to speculate wildly on her sex life, culminating with the observation “Yes, as a teenager, she had once wrapped those long elegant legs around a man’s body and had abandoned herself to lust.’
His revision of an earlier ‘analysis’ of the Reagan Presidency in which he reached the thoughtful conclusion that ‘Few men in world history have ever achieved so much for so many hundreds of millions.’
And of course his indescribably unintelligent weekly critiques of feminism, his one man campaign to ban the Burqa (which in Ireland could literally be done in a few hours by personally visiting every person that actually wears one and asking them politely to desist), and his seasonal musings on the wonders of nature which, although unreadable at best, at least allow you a rare morning to enjoy your breakfast without being forced to picture a series of erect penises.
Then there was his much derided first novel, his brief television career, and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1MqEs0c28g

Whatever Jeffrey Goldberg’s faults he’s a bonafide genius compared to these dopes. Myer’s has the intelligence, writing skills and, oddly, the head of an embittered old drag queen who’s spent the past number of decades savagely abusing her brain with lashings of gin and oxycontin. To use imagery Kevin might be more comfortable with, and risk a deletion and banning from CT, he has the head of an 80 year olds ballsack recovering from a recent botched ball removal surgery. It’s still unclear to me whether he’s a real person or a sick joke Jackie Collins is playing on us all.
(Apologies, Professor Farrell, for bringing down the tone of your post. Generally I’m not intelligent enough to comment on your postings so when I get the opportunity I tend to get over excited. Feel free to ban if you see fit)

Bosch is an enormous company with billions in annual revenue.

Somehow I suspect that Bosch’s marketing firm tested the ad before releasing it.

Which means Goldberg’s impression is likely a small minority impression. Thinking “Holocaust” whenever you see “German engineering” is a bit like thinking “death march” whenever you see “Japanese efficiency.” It’s certainly not a fair association from a broad perspective (though I can well understand why certain individuals might draw that association), and it’s probably offensive to Germans and Japanese.

As to Myers, I think his point is that Ireland is anti-Semitic already, and a Jewish Minister of Justice implementing this law will not help matters. I don’t agree with his point, and it’s not a point well made, but being charitable, that’s the only semi-reasonable assertion I can draw from the article.

From a separation of church and state vantage in American jurisprudence, the law is completely acceptable. That a law interferes with religious practice is fine, so long as the law was not implemented deliberately to target a particular religious practice out of animus for the religion.

Bosch’s white goods are made by a joint venture with Siemens (if you see Bosch and Siemens appliances next to one another in a showroom, you can tell immediately that they are the same underlying product with a different fascia). And in the early 2000s

“Bosch Siemens Hausgeraete (BSH), the firm’s consumer products joint venture, filed two applications with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the Zyklon name across a range of home products, including gas ovens ” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2233890.stm).

I used to work for Siemens and whereas to the British people of my generation, the use of “Zyklon” seemed inexplicable , I seem to recall that to the Germans it was just the word for “cyclone”. I’m surprised about Umbro, but then I’m constantly surprised by the things that advertisers and marketeers manage to come up with. I think they must live on a different planet to the rest of us.

There’s a scene in some novel or other, perhaps someone can help me with it, in which an elderly American Jew is met by his relatives at the airport and refuses to get into the cab they’ve hired because it’s a Mercedes. They explain to him that all the cabs are Mercedes – still no go. The airport of course is Ben Gurion.

@ Niall McAuley

Myers specialises in developing and holding mutually-refuting beliefs in advocating for his pet hobby-horses. One day he will decry war and ‘blood sacrifice’, the next gush at length about some battle that the British Army engaged in.

Daragh,

Your “dot-connecting” makes me a bit uncomfortable. So, now that you’ve connected them so clearly, I think I’ll join Bianca in bowing out.

Dee, if any of this truly seems surprising or fantastic to you, you either A) have never heard any public discussion about criticism of Israel or B) have never read anything by Goldberg before. Goldberg is a a well-known hasbara hack, and irresponsible and baseless accusations of anti-semitism have been so often used as a truncheon against critics of Israel that it’s almost become a joke. I’m not sure what your issue is here, but it sure looks a lot like trolling.

I’d like to second Daragh’s “They have become what they beheld.” The parallels are increasingly clear: For ‘master race’ read ‘chosen people’. For ‘lebensraum’ read ‘settlements’ and so-on. Many continue to oppose fascism. Even jews today in israel do, despite that their government has now made it illegal.

PS – As an aside, I get the impression that Dee’s neighbor would accept a lift in a VW driven by anyone else.

Late to the party here, but just wondering: Does Mr. Myer offer a Modest Proposal for the victims of the Somali famine?