More Wackiness With Fund-A-Nazis!

Today's Birmingham News reports on Mr. Allen's efforts to protect the good citizens of Alabama:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.


A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen (R-Cottondale) would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.


Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.


"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.


A spokesman for the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center called the bill censorship.


"It sounds like Nazi book burning to me," said SPLC spokesman Mark Potok. …


If the bill became law, public school textbooks could not present homosexuality as a genetic trait and public libraries couldn't offer books with gay or bisexual characters.


When asked about Tennessee Williams' southern classic "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof," Allen said the play probably couldn't be performed by university theater groups.


Allen said no state funds should be used to pay for materials that foster homosexuality. He said that would include nonfiction books that suggest homosexuality is acceptable and fiction novels with gay characters. While that would ban books like "Heather has Two Mommies," it could also include classic and popular novels with gay characters such as "The Color Purple," "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "Brideshead Revisted."


The bill also would ban materials that recognize or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama. Allen said that meant books with heterosexual couples committing those acts likely would be banned, too.


His bill also would prohibit a teacher from handing out materials or bringing in a classroom speaker who suggested homosexuality was OK, he said.


Allen has sponsored legislation to make a gay marriage ban part of the Alabama Constitution, but it was not approved by the Legislature.


Ken Baker, a board member of Equality Alabama, a gay rights organization, said Allen was "attempting to become the George Wallace of homosexuality."

Invading On The Cheap

From This Modern World:

They basically told me that my Marine Corps time doesn't count as military service," Pistorius said. Faced with a threat of AWOL charges, and worried that a spotless military record was about to be stained, Pistorius headed last month to Camp McGrady in South Carolina.

"The first thing they did was thank us for showing up," Pistorius said. "They had 150 that were supposed to show up and about 75 did. Of those 75 maybe only 40 or 50 are medically fit."


...


Equally implausible were the men who turned up at Camp McGrady last month.


When I first spoke to Pistorius, by telephone from the camp, he said nobody had been given a physical. He told his Army commanders that he had a permanent back injury from a car crash. They were unimpressed by a letter from his chiropractor. His pre-deployment health assessment lists him in this word: "Deployable."Pistorius spoke with his captain.


"He said everybody here's going to Iraq," Pistorius said. "It's unbelievable some of the guys they're bringing down there."


One man arrived with a hospital identification band still on his wrist. He'd just had knee surgery. One 48-year-old from Alabama had a hip replacement and fused vertebrae in his back.


CCF: So, rather than the politically suicidal draft, they're sending everybody and anybody they can get their hands on to Iraq. First, they wanted to invade the place with a force that everyone but Rumsfeld knew -knew, dammit - was too small and now they want to try and control Iraq with a bunch of late middle-aged people with back injuries who have no business and desire to be there. Great plan.

Becoming The Hate

Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Monday November 29, 2004

The Guardian
Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man's head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".

"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote.

"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is "the most moral in the world" because it says it adheres to a code of "the purity of arms". There is rarely much public questioning of the army's routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been "caught in crossfire", or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.

But the public's confidence has been shaken by the revelations of the past week. The audio recording of the shooting of the 13-year-old, Iman al-Hams, prompted much soul searching, although the revulsion appears to be as much at the Israeli officer firing a stream of bullets into her lifeless body as the killing itself. Some soldiers told Israeli papers that their mothers had sought assurances that they did not do that kind of thing.

One Israeli peace group, the Arik Institute, took out large newspaper adverts to plead for "Jewish patriots" to "open your eyes and look around" at the suffering of Palestinians.

The incidents prompted the army to call in all commanders from the rank of lieutenant-colonel to emphasise the importance of maintaining the "purity of arms" code.

The army's critics say the real problem is not the behaviour of soldiers on the ground but the climate of impunity that emanates from the top.

While the officer responsible for killing Iman al-Hams has been charged with relatively minor offences, and the soldiers who forced the violinist to play were ticked off for being "insensitive", the only troops who were swiftly punished for violating regulations last week were some who posed naked in the snow for a photograph. They were dismissed from their unit.

Last week the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem criticised what it described as a "culture of impunity" within the army. The group says at least 1,656 Palestinian non-combatants have been killed during the intifada, including 529 children.

"To date, one soldier has been convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian," it said.

"The combination of rules of engagement that encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers together with the climate of impunity results in a clear and very troubling message about the value the Israeli military places on Palestinian life."

Back

Well, I worked into the rest of the blogopshere for the lat election but it's time to clear out the cobwebs from this place and get things bakc out there.

An Army of The Retired

When we're going after 43 single moms 13 years out of the army and 70 year olds that forgot to sign their retirement papers, can a draft be far beind? From Just A Bump In The Beltway:


In 1992, Tonya Stewart left the Army after serving 13 years in uniform, believing her service to her country was over.

Now, 12 years later, she's been recalled to active duty.


"I leave for an 18-month tour of duty in two weeks," the 43-year-old Hellam Township resident said. "And that's about all I really know."


Stewart, visiting her sister's family for Thanksgiving dinner along with her boyfriend and 9-year-old daughter, said she had received letters and phone calls from the military since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 warning her that she may be recalled.


"But to be honest, I never really thought they'd do it," Stewart, who works for Susquehanna Communications, said with a laugh. "I'm a little too old to be running around diving in the sand."


She was recalled from the Army's Individual Ready Reserve, composed of men and women who, even though they have completed their tours of duty, are still obligated to return to service if the government calls for them.


Some former active duty soldiers are required to serve in the ready reserve. For Stewart, when she left the service as part of the military's mid-90s downsizing, she was required to remain on the ready reserve list. She had a choice of accepting a lump sum or an annuity when she volunteered to leave the service. The annuity paid more but also had a greater commitment to the ready reserve.


"If I would have taken the lump sum, they wouldn't have called me," she said.


She's not the oldest former soldier among the 100 ready reservists in her unit recalled to active duty. Currently serving in her unit, the 844th Engineering Battalion, which works out of the Army's Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Ind., is one man in his 70s.


"He was an officer who apparently didn't sign his retirement paperwork when he left the Army," Stewart said. "So as far as the military is concerned, he never really retired."


Stewart said she could sense that the military was becoming more serious about recalling the ready reservists. Each letter she received from the Army, each call, sounded more serious and urgent.


With the military calling up single moms in their 40s and senior citizens, Stewart speculated that a draft can't be too far behind.


"I've been saying this for a while that a real draft is coming," she said.

When we're going after 43 single moms 13 years out of the army and 70 year olds that forgot to sign their retirement papers, can a draft be far beind? From Just A Bump In The Beltway:


In 1992, Tonya Stewart left the Army after serving 13 years in uniform, believing her service to her country was over.

Now, 12 years later, she's been recalled to active duty.


"I leave for an 18-month tour of duty in two weeks," the 43-year-old Hellam Township resident said. "And that's about all I really know."


Stewart, visiting her sister's family for Thanksgiving dinner along with her boyfriend and 9-year-old daughter, said she had received letters and phone calls from the military since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 warning her that she may be recalled.


"But to be honest, I never really thought they'd do it," Stewart, who works for Susquehanna Communications, said with a laugh. "I'm a little too old to be running around diving in the sand."


She was recalled from the Army's Individual Ready Reserve, composed of men and women who, even though they have completed their tours of duty, are still obligated to return to service if the government calls for them.


Some former active duty soldiers are required to serve in the ready reserve. For Stewart, when she left the service as part of the military's mid-90s downsizing, she was required to remain on the ready reserve list. She had a choice of accepting a lump sum or an annuity when she volunteered to leave the service. The annuity paid more but also had a greater commitment to the ready reserve.


"If I would have taken the lump sum, they wouldn't have called me," she said.


She's not the oldest former soldier among the 100 ready reservists in her unit recalled to active duty. Currently serving in her unit, the 844th Engineering Battalion, which works out of the Army's Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Ind., is one man in his 70s.


"He was an officer who apparently didn't sign his retirement paperwork when he left the Army," Stewart said. "So as far as the military is concerned, he never really retired."


Stewart said she could sense that the military was becoming more serious about recalling the ready reservists. Each letter she received from the Army, each call, sounded more serious and urgent.


With the military calling up single moms in their 40s and senior citizens, Stewart speculated that a draft can't be too far behind.


"I've been saying this for a while that a real draft is coming," she said.