December 27, 2011
Who would spit and curse at a second grader and call her a whore? Haredim, that’s who. The Haredim are considered the extreme of orthodox Jews, although they reject the label: to them they are just “Jews,” everybody else is not. In the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, some Haredim spat and cursed at second grader Naama Margolese (pictured here with her mother), and called her a whore for dressing immodestly. Since the assault Naama.is afraid to walk to her religious school, even when her mother is with her, holding her hand.
“When I walk to school in the morning I used to get a tummy ache because I was so scared … that they were going to stand and start yelling and spitting. They were scary. They don’t want us to go to the school.”
But that’s okay, “Moshe,” a Haredi explained to Israeli TV:
“To spit on a girl who does not act according to the law of the Torah is okay. Even at a seven year old. There are rabbis who empower us to know how to walk in the street and how a woman should act.”
To the Haredim women and little girls are unclean, not to be touched or seen, except when they are covered up. Burqas would be fine. Women soldiers are an abomination, not to be heard. And Arabs? Even lower than women Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Bar Ilan University, Beit Shemesh, ethics, Haredim, Menachem Friedman, Moshe, Naama Margolese, Netanyahu, Orthodox Jews, Shimon Peres
Posted in Ethics-general, International, Religion, Tolerance | 7 Comments »
December 26, 2011
It’s much more satisfying to point out somebody else’s sins than own up to our own. Thus a year ago the US House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a non-binding resolution calling on US policy and President Barack Obama to refer formally to the World War I mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a “genocide.” No need to bother about American treatment of native Americans or of enslaved black Africans. The bill never went further, as sensible heads prevailed.
But Russia, France, and a dozen other nations have labeled the mass killing of Armenians a genocide. It’s more comfortable to fling the label at Turkey than to consider, for example France’s war on Algerians or Russia’s slaughter of Jews, Ukrainians, Chechnians, and even Russian serfs. And it plays well with ethnic Armenian voters in the Armenian diaspora, who outnumber actual Armenians by three to one.
Now the lower house of the French parliament has voted to make it a crime, punishable by one-year imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros ($60,000), to deny the so-called “Armenian genocide.” The French Senate is likely to take up the bill next year.
Israel too is getting into the act, now that its relations with Turkey have chilled. The Israeli Parliament just today held its first public debate on whether to declare Turkey guilty of genocide. (Actually the killings were perpetrated under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, prior to the formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.) The Israeli National Security Council is trying to stop the Parliament from debating the issue in hopes that ties with Turkey can still be salvaged.
An ethicist who is also a Turkophile is conflicted. Was it genocide? Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Algerians, Armenian diaspora, Armenians, Brzezinski, cast the first stone, Chapter 8, Chechnians, ethics, France, French parliament, genocide, genocide denial, House Foreign Affairs Committee, Israeli Parliament, Jesus, Jews, John, native Americans, Ottoman Empire, Russian serfs, slavery, Turkish Republic, Turkophile, Ukrainians
Posted in Ethics-general, International, Religion | Leave a Comment »
December 23, 2011
So who says big time college football is all about winning and money, and not about heart and sportsmanship? Check out the USC Trojans.
Yesterday Trojan junior quarterback Matt Barkley chose to play another year for the Trojans rather than grabbing a $20+ million payoff for entering the NFL draft, where he was a sure bet to be a top ten, or even a top five pick.
Explained Barkley,
“It is my dream to play quarterback in the NFL, and I intend to make that dream a reality. But I know in my heart that I have not finished my journey as a Trojan football player. The 2012 USC football team has some serious unfinished business to attend to, and I intend on being a part of that.”
Trojan coach Lane Kiffin was overjoyed at Barkley’s decision. And why not? It could well lead to a national championship for the loaded Trojans, and coach-of-the-year honors for Kiffin. But lest you think that Kiffin has only a selfish interest, look at what he said last week when Barkley’s blind-side protector, All American tackle Matt Kalil, announced his decision to forego his senior year for the NFL:
“We fully support his decision and we told him so. He is ready for the NFL. He will be a very high draft pick and will have a long, successful career. We will miss him next year, but will cheer him on Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: blind-side, Brian Kelly, Chip Kelly, coach-of-the-year, ethics, Lane Kiffin, Les Miles, Mark Sanchez, Matt Barkley, Matt Kalil, national championship, NFL draft, personal fouls, Pete Carroll, Robert Woods, sportsmanship, taunting, unsportsmanlike conduct, USC Trojans
Posted in Ethics-general, Sports | 2 Comments »
December 21, 2011
Fiction
The Submission: A Novel by Amy Waldman. My favorite, about a design competition for the 9/11 memorial, won by a Muslim and leading to chaotic controversy.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Vintage) by Stieg Larsson. Much more than just a crime novel.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. An American searches for a colleague in the deepest Amazon
Non-Fiction
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow. A magisterial page-turner of a biography of the greatest American.
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Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. An Iranian-British reporter is seized and tortured by the Islamic Republic.
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Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking America by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais. Learn who will be running America in a few years.
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Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future by Stephen Kinzer. The former New York Times Istanbul chief proposes new relationships with Turkey and Iran.
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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson. The American Ambassador to newly Nazified Germany and his adventurous daughter
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Here If You Need Me: A True Story, by Kate Braestrup: A memoir by a middle-aged mother who was suddenly widowed11 years ago, then became a Unitarian-Universalist minister, and now works as chaplain to game wardens in Maine
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1861: The Civil War Awakening, by Adam Goodheart. The beginnings of the Civil War
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Tags: best books, Favorite books
Posted in Books, History, International, Tolerance | Leave a Comment »
December 18, 2011
It’s easy to pontificate about the tragedy of child abuse and rape at Penn State: Sandusky is a monster. Assistant coach Mike McQueary should have stopped the rape and called the police. Head coach Joe Paterno should have called the police. Athletic Director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary C. Schultz should have called the police, and all should have told the truth to law enforcement and to university officials.
Instead McQueary, upon seeing Sandusky—a bear of a man, big enough to have starred as a defensive end at Penn State—anally raping a 10-year old boy, went home and told his father what he had seen, and several days later told coaching legend Joe Paterno (he didn’t want to disturb Paterno on the weekend). Paterno passed something on to his athletic director. Nobody told the police, and Sandusky went on to brutalize young boys for several years. He’s now indicted on 40 counts of sexual abuse of children,
Everybody who knew about the incident was profoundly unethical, especially McQueary, whose responsibility was—at the very least—to stop the rape and to notify police. But after you condemn everybody involved in this horror, think about this: what would you have done in McQueary’s position?
You’re faced with a frightening and embarrassing sight. Your friend is committing Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: child abuse, ethics, Gary Schultz, Mike McQueary, Paterno, Penn State, Sandusky, sexual abuse of children, Tim Curley
Posted in Ethics-general, Sports | 1 Comment »
December 13, 2011
Sports rivalries are, well, competitive. The closer the rivals the more intense the competition. USC-UCLA, Duke-Carolina, Georgia Tech-Georgia, Alabama-Auburn. The winner is said to get “bragging rights.”
The basketball rivalry between two schools that are only four miles apart, the universities of Cincinnati and Xavier, is hot. Called “the Crosstown Shootout,” it has been played 79 times since it started in 1928 between the two city schools. But maybe no more.
Saturday’s game ended in an ugly brawl when Xavier point guard and All-America, Tu Holloway, taunted the Cincinnati bench with nine seconds left and Xavier blowing out Cincinnati, 76-53. Cincinnati’s Yancy Gates sucker-punched XU center Kenny Frease in the face, just below the left eye. Frease went down and Cincinnati center Cheikh Mbodj then kicked Frease in the head. Then everyone from both teams joined in.
Holloway revealed his thuggish character as he explained himself at a post-game press conference:
“That’s what you’re going to see from Xavier and Cincinnati. We got disrespected a little bit before the game, guys calling us out. We’re a tougher team. We’re grown men over here. We got a whole bunch of gangstas in the locker room, not thugs but tough guys on the court. We went out there and zipped ’em up Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: character, Cheikh Mbodj, Chip Kelly. Oregon Ducks, Chris Mack, Crosstown Shootout, disrespect, ethics, gangstas, Kenny Frease, Mick Cronin, Sports rivalries, sucker-punch, taunting, Tu Holloway, University of Cincinnati, Xavier, Yancy Gates
Posted in Ethics-general, Sports | 2 Comments »
December 11, 2011
The story of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford and eight other African-American teenagers still takes my breath away, even though I lived through it on live television. I relearned the story last week on a visit to Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School, the site in 1957 of ugly, beautiful and inspiring events that changed America.
Returning to Los Angeles I discovered that my friends of baby boomer and subsequent generations knew nothing about what happened outside Central High School on September 4, 1957. Like the story of the Israelites flight from Egypt and the story of the first Thanksgiving, the Central High School story merits retelling every year.
After the US Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools violated the Constitution, the Little Rock School Board developed a plan to gradually integrate city schools, starting by admitting nine African-American students to prestigious—and white only—Central High School. On the eve of the first day of school, September 3, 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus ordered troops of the Arkansas National Guard to Little Rock to prevent the nine children from entering the school.
Elizabeth Eckford was one of the nine. She took a bus that dropped her a block from the school, and from there walked with unimaginable grace and courage (Will Counts’s photo above) through a mob of screaming, spitting adults. She tried to enter the campus Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 101st Airborne Division, Arkansas National Guard, Central High School, Constitution, Eisenhower, Elizabeth Eckford, Encyclopedia of Arkansas History, ethics, integration, Little Rock Nine, Little Rock School Board, National Historic Site, Orval Faubus, segregated schools, US Supreme Court, Will Counts
Posted in Ethics-general, Government, military, Tolerance | 1 Comment »
December 8, 2011
The bowl season is shaping up well for fans of ethical football, as Les Miles’s LSU Tigers head for the BCS championship at the Sugar Bowl, and Chip Kelly’s Oregon Ducks go to the Rose Bowl. But my favorite is the Ethics Bowl, where the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs defeated the Cal State Chico Wildcats Saturday in the West Regionals to go to the National Finals in Cincinnati on March 1.
The Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is a team competition that tests the skill of undergrads in analyzing and describing ethical dilemmas. I was privileged to serve as a judge, and see the enthusiasm and determination that students from eight California colleges showed for dealing with ethics.
The students were all volunteers, motivated not by course credit but by their interest in the ethical life. They put in a huge effort to research the fourteen cases used in the competition, and backed up their conclusions with facts and theory.
At a time when so many adults are behaving unethically and so many college competitions are marred by cheating and unsportsmanlike conduct, it’s a joy to see so many millennials working so hard to rise to the challenge of ethics.
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Tags: Banana Slugs, BCS championship, Cal State Chico, cheating, Chip Kelly, ethical dilemmas, ethics, Ethics Bowl, Les Miles, LSU Tigers, millennials, Oregon Ducks, Rose Bowl, UC Santa Cruz, unsportsmanlike conduct
Posted in Education, Ethics-general, Sports | Leave a Comment »
December 4, 2011
This piece by Andy Borowitz was written several days ago. It was prescient and hilarious—at least to non-Gingrich voters or Cain fans.
As Cain Drops Out, Pro-Adultery Voters Shift to Gingrich
Biggest GOP Voting Bloc, Experts Say
CONCORD, NH (The Borowitz Report) – Herman Cain withdrew from the Republican presidential race today, a move that resulted in millions of pro-adultery voters shifting their support to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The shift in support is significant because pro-adultery voters represent the single largest voting bloc in the Republican Party, experts say.
Tracy Klugian, a prominent adulterer from Concord, New Hampshire, said he was sorry to see Mr. Cain leave the race “because he was very committed to the one issue I care about: namely, adultery.”
But he added that he had been in touch with many other adulterers in the state and that they were all switching to Mr. Gingrich.
“Even when we were supporting Cain, a lot of us were supporting Gingrich behind his back,” the adulterer said. “I guess that’s how we do.”
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Tags: adultery, Borowits, Cain, ethics, Gingrich
Posted in Ethics-general, hypocrisy, Politics | 4 Comments »
November 28, 2011
Sometimes intolerance can be so wildly nonsensical that you can only laugh. Thursday in the Australian parliament Luke Simpkins, Liberal MP from Western Australia, sounded a warning* about the sinister implications of unwittingly eating meat from animals that had been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law.
“Mohammed, the prophet of Islam—as reported in the Hadith, the traditions of Islam, the book second only to the Koran—talked of how Islam would be furthered to those parts of the world that had not yet embraced it. He reportedly said, ‘The non-believers will become Muslims when, amongst other things, they eat the meat that we have slaughtered.’ This is one of the key aspects to converting nonbelievers to Islam.”
“By having Australians unwittingly eating halal food we are all one step down the path towards the conversion, and that is a step we should only make with full knowledge and one that should not be imposed upon us without us knowing.”
If Mr. Simpkins is right, we probably should stay away from the Hebrew National hot dogs sold at Costco snack bars Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Australian parliament, conversion, Costco, ethics, Hadith, halal, Hebrew National, intolerance, Islam, Islamic Law, Islamophobia Today, Luke Simpkins, Mohammed, non-believers
Posted in Ethics-general, Religion, Tolerance | 2 Comments »
Who would spit and curse at a second grader and call her a whore? Haredim, that’s who. The Haredim are considered the extreme of orthodox Jews, although they reject the label: to them they are just “Jews,” everybody else is not. In the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, some Haredim spat and cursed at second grader Naama Margolese (pictured here with her mother), and called her a whore for dressing immodestly. Since the assault Naama.is afraid to walk to her religious school, even when her mother is with her, holding her hand.
Ethics Bob 