Week of April 9, 2007

The oddest thing [about the bombing of Iraq's parliament] is that I hardly saw anything about this on American cable television news. They had some small town murder mystery again, or stories about white shock jocks being shocking and racist (as if the owners of the cable television news weren't the ones purveying white shock jocks with racist views to the world). It is tragic that corporate media get away with using public resources to divert the attention of the people from what is important and to baby sit them with pablum.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a Jew that I take the determination of Hamas to kill me personally; or that I find it morally repellent that the Speaker of the House should pay a friendly call on the dictator of Damascus who hosts, protects and arms these genocidal jihadis, but I do. I find it equally depressing that my fellow Jews who fund the Democratic Party (an estimated 80% of its donations no less), and my fellow Americans who are not Jews and vote Democratic but do not wish Jews like me dead, are not burning up the phone lines, and crashing the Internet with howls of protest over their Party’s collusion with our contemporary Hitlers. Because that is what they are. They are not “Hitlers” in the sense that Cindy Sheehan thinks George Bush is Hitler – as a metaphor of her hatred for her her country. They are Hitlers in the sense that they are Hitlers. They want Jews dead. They are preparing the next war to see that the Jews are dead. And they will not rest until they complete the final solution or until they are stopped.

Not making historical connections is a great American talent. As it happens, it's not an Iranian one.

He was slow in learning how to talk."My parents were so worried," he later recalled,"that they consulted a doctor." Even after he had begun using words, sometime after the age of 2, he developed a quirk that prompted the family maid to dub him"der Depperte," the dopey one. Whenever he had something to say, he would try it out on himself, whispering it softly until it sounded good enough to pronounce aloud."Every sentence he uttered," his worshipful younger sister recalled,"no matter how routine, he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips." It was all very worrying, she said."He had such difficulty with language that those around him feared he would never learn."

His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to declare that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted schoolkids everywhere. But they also helped make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.

The American public is invited to experience and participate in the thrill of history in Allentown, Pennsylvania with an authentic commemoration of President Abraham Lincoln's historic funeral, which will occur at 1:00 p.m. on April 15th, the 142nd anniversary of Lincoln's death in 1865.