Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Support The Salahis

Barack Obama, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Tareq and Michaele Salahi, two reality TV “stars,’ crashed—or livened up—President Obama’s first White House state dinner. The two harmless interlopers, who dared to gaze upon their celestial leader,” are being subjected to an inquisition by the People’s posturing, sneering, fascistic “representatives.”

CNS: “Tareq and Michaele invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination Wednesday, refusing to answer a House committee’s questions about their uninvited appearance at a state dinner.”

Good for them. Apparently, the White House is open only to visits from inner-city kids.

“Crashing a Trashy House”: On the night of the offense, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “was packed with nasty, noisome parasites. An extra pair would have made no difference. Quite the contrary: There’s something apropos about a couple of reality-show exhibitionists, who themselves ‘have left an extensive paper trail in federal bankruptcy and state court filings,’ brazenly elbowing their way into a party of ponces.”

Updated: New Pictures In The Gallery

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com

There are new images in the Gallery. (Click to the right.) Both were snapped in Santa Barbara, in December of 2009. In the one, I’m watching the news. In the other—and to offset the daily, news-watching aggro—I’m preparing to run on the Santa-Barbara beach.

Update (Jan. 21): Middle-aged men and women: What do you think I am? A toast to middle age. I like to say that I’m as old as Ann Coulter. And she too lies about her age.

Update II: A Poem

English, Ilana Mercer, Literature, Pop-Culture

BEAK

By Kit Wright

To the clicking of knitting needles, I fell asleep on the train
And I dreamed of knitting, is this what they call woolgathering,
Dreamed of my mother purling and plaining to patterns
In Woman’s Own Woman. I woke to a woman
Whose long mauve thumbnail was sharpened into a spike
And she texed, texed, texed with that pecking beak.

Update I (Jan. 18): Amazing. That readers of this blog would imagine I’d post a postmodern poem. The last bit of poetry I posted was that of the superlative Louis MacNeice. See “The Magic Of MacNeice.”

I skimmed “BEAK” in the Times Literary Supplement and liked it because it was so “plain” spoken and hit home hard in a few short sentences.

The guy dozes off on the train to the sounds of tapping, which triggers dreams of his mother’s pacifying knitting activity. He awakens to see beside him one of the millions of modern automatons texting feverishly with a beak-like implement. Haven’t you seen this specter all around you?

To me, “BEAK” is about a yen for a more comforting time in our collective past. It seems simple and un-intellectual (although not easy to write). It’s not written in post-modern parlance either. Any half-decent writer will admire “purling and plaining to patterns…” Neat.

My intention was not to perplex, but to please.

Update II (Jan. 19): The modern woman scares this man with her sharp edges. That’s another sensibility that jumped out at me.

And since BG brought up imagery, I was reminded of the wool shop situated in the central bus station of the Netanya of my youth. I had decided to master the art of knitting for a boyfriend of 4 years. (I wrote about the “the (unrequited) love of my life” in “About A Boy.”) Before being drafted, he was to get a pullover with intricate ropes down its considerable lengths, as he was “a powerfully built six-foot-three.”

It was a once-off affair: I mean the knitting, not the boy. The shop keeper provided all the instruction, patiently. The project was ongoing, and I’d pop in twice weekly on my way to school, for her to untangle knots and help when a new obstacle in the pattern presented itself. There was something so quaint and comforting about the deft wool lady and her knitting needles.

Does this poem evoke a sense of loss—perhaps becasue women no longer engage in homey activities we once associated with the comfort of mom, kindly shop lady, etc? When I read this little (never great, just neat) poem, I knew the poet was an older gentleman.

Homework: Check my instincts. Google his name to see if I am right.