More Google Earth images of Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif

I discovered a few days ago that someone has created a wonderful overlay on the Temple Mount of the Dome of the Rock, the Al Aqsa Mosque, and many of the smaller buildings on the mount, as well as the trees. It's also possible to go inside the Dome of the Rock and see the building from that perspective as well.

It Gets Better

Ithaca College participated in the "It Gets Better" campaign initiated by Dan Savage, and I was one of the people who volunteered to appear in the Youtube video. The Trevor Project works against the epidemic of suicides by young LGBT people, which is much higher than among heterosexual youth. I participated in the project because of a series of recent suicides, some of them provoked by anti-gay bullying, and also because of the horrible gay-bashing hate crime that just occurred in New York City, where a gang called the "Latin King Goonies" set upon and tortured three gay men.



Hillary Clinton and President Obama have also just made videos for the "It Gets Better" campaign: Clinton;  Obama - It Gets Better.

Carl Paladino: our homophobic gubernatorial candidate

Carl Paladino, the rich nutcase who is running on the Republican ticket for governor in New York, just blasted forth some more hate speech - this time about gay people. He was addressing an Orthodox Jewish audience at Congregation Shaarei Chaim in Brooklyn (source: Paladino Attacks Gays in Brooklyn Speech).

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address.
And then, to applause at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.” Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

One of the rabbis accompanying Paladino is named Yechezkel Roth, who is quoted on the "Jews Against Zionism" site with virulently anti-Zionist remarks (in Hebrew) on this page: Jews Against Zionism. Rabbi Roth also participated in a demonstration this summer in New York against the building of a new emergency room for the hospital in Ashkelon (on the pretext that it was being built on a Jewish graveyard from late antiquity, which it isn't - the archaeological remains clearly show it was a non-Jewish cemetery because a pagan temple was also found there). See VosIzNeias for a photo of him at the demonstration: Anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidim Protest.

Is this a man that Carl Paladino really wants to be associated with? It certainly won't endear him to the New York Jewish community, which is mostly quite Zionist.

Another gay teenager commits suicide

When is the hatred going to end?

Pam's House Blend: Oklahoma: 19-year-old commits suicide after week of 'toxic' comments

We have a long way to go

BBC News - Serb anti-gay protesters attack political party offices

The BBC's Mark Lowen: "It has got very nasty"
Serbian police have clashed with protesters trying to disrupt a Gay Pride parade in the capital, Belgrade.Police used tear gas against the rioters, who threw petrol bombs and stones at armed officers and tried to break through a security cordon. A garage attached to the headquarters of the ruling Democratic Party was briefly set on fire, and at least one shot was fired at the building. At least 50 people were injured, most reported to be police officers. A number of people were arrested.
This was the first Gay Pride parade in Serbia since a march in 2001 was broken up in violent clashes provoked by far-right extremists. While the Gay Pride parade was moving though the city, several hundred protesters began chanting at those taking part as they tried to get close to the march.
"The hunt has begun," the AFP news agency reported them as saying. "Death to homosexuals." Reports told of gangs of skinheads roaming the streets, throwing petrol bombs and setting off firecrackers as police battled to hold them back.

When does anti-Zionism become anti-semitism?

Excellent article on "when anti-Zionism becomes anti-semitism" in Shiraz Socialist.

“Absolute anti-Zionism” can be summed up as as a one-sided hostility to Zionism (ie: Jewish nationalism) that willfully refuses to place it in its proper historical context (the pogroms, persecution and genocide of the last century), that whitewashes bourgeoise Arab nationalism and reactionary, fascistic Islamism, applies double-standards to Israel and ultimately winds up denying Israel’s right to exist, even behind pre-1967 borders....
What needs to be spelled out plainly is that this sort of stuff is anti-semitism, pure and simple. The fact that the people putting it about regard themselves as “left wing” is neither here nor there. [Dan] Glazebook (book reviewer for the Morning Star, the British newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain], significantly, also writes in what is probably the world’s leading “left” anti-semitic publication, the US magazine Counterpunch. In fact, the roots of this type of “left wing” anti-semitism are in Stalinism and the Stalinist bureaucracy’s campaigns against “Zionism” from the 1930′s through the 1952-3 “Doctors’ Plot” in the USSR and the ”anti-Zionist” campaign in Poland in 1967-68.
In fact, given their political tradition’s foul history of promoting the “Socialism of fools“, Mr Haylett and his Stalinist colleagues really aught to be more careful about their pandering to ‘absolute anti-Zionism’: or, as it is more properly called: “left wing” anti-semitism.

Good comment also:

We could call it the anti-zionism of fools, but that sounds too mild, too much like the criticism of a few blameless ignorants. They aren’t blameless and they aren’t ignorant. They are racist scoundrels. And they have infected the left with a disease that should have died in 1945, certainly by March 5, 1953.

Why are Muslims being scapegoated?

What is happening to my country? One of the things that I was proud of after the 9/11 attacks was that Muslims in this country were not targeted by the U.S. government and that despite an increase in hate crimes against Muslims in the following year, there was not generally an upsurge of hatred against Muslims. I am sure that it was uncomfortable for Muslims then - I have certainly heard and read stories that do not shed a good light on the tolerance and acceptance of America for Muslims - but there was nothing like the groundswell of open hatred that has happened this year. No one was threatening to burn Qur'ans in the wake of 9/11. President Bush made a conspicuous point of saying that we should not blame all Muslims for the actions of a few. The Republican Party did not scapegoat Muslims en masse - perhaps because of the President's strongly expressed views.

Now, we have leaders of the Republican Party (for example, Newt Gingrich) openly engaging in anti-Muslim demagoguery that reminds me of the rhetoric historically used against Jews by anti-Semites. The former President Bush has not spoken up to reprove members of his party.

And ordinary Muslims and people from the Middle East are being turned into scapegoats for no reason whatsoever - as if they are to blame for all of the ills in American society.

The New York Times today published a very affecting article about the Muslim prayer room that used to exist at the World Trade Center before the 9/11 attacks: Muslim Prayer Room Was Part of Life at Twin Towers.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.

Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.

“Iftar was my best memory,” said Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”

Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdoul-Karim Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

The people quoted in this article are good, honest people who deserve to live as securely as anyone else of any religion in this country. Why can't they?