8/18/24

 Sunday, August 18, 2024

1963 James Meredith became the 1st Black graduate from the University of Mississippi

In bed at 9, awake at 3:15 from a dream of golfing with DPL and DEG, replacing my Allen Edmonds shoes with DPL's golf shoes, also ruminating on how long Geri and I can stay in this house, brought on by our bad knees, up at 3:45.  I let Lilly out at 3:50.  She stood on the sidewalk alternating looking north and then back at me in the vestibule, then looking south then back at me, and finally turned around and came back in without venturing onto the lawn to relieve herself.  She is 7 weeks shy of her 15th birthday on October 8, very old for her size and breed.  She has always been nervous and cautious.  Her looking back to make sure that I'm still there at the doorway is very much like her behavior in the years when we would take her to the Mequon dog park and let her run free.  She would get rather far from us but always made a point of looking back to ensure that we were still there behind her.  We don't think she sees very well anymore and she may be stone deaf.  We know she can't persevere much longer;. We dread losing her and treat her as venerable.  I let her out again at 6 a.m., with some cloud-shrouded daylight available to assist her vision, and this time she relieved herself.  I  Iet her out again at 8 a.m. when she declined Geri's opening the door for her, and insisted that I perform my doorman duty for her.  She's fussy that way.😊

Prednisone, day 98, 10 mg., day 5/28,  I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol at 4:20 a.m.   I took my 10 mg. of prednisone at 5:25 with two slices of buttered Dave's Bread.  I took the morning meds at 6:45.

What effect has the cortisone (or whatever) injection in my right hip had?  I still have pain, often pretty nasty pain in the hip, but I'm able to stand and get around (usually with the help of my rollator) much better than I was before the injection.  I can get out of the house and 'run' (in a manner of speaking, errands, but I still have almost preclusive difficulties with steps/stairs, especially if there is nothing to hold onto for support, as is the case with the front stoop with no railing or door.  I have more than a month's worth of printed daily journal entries sitting on top of the printer because I am afraid to take them down to my desk in the basement to add to the pile of 2 year's worth of other entries because I am afraid that I would not be able to climb the stairs up from the basement.  I need a powered stairway chair.  

The apotheosis of Joe Biden, cont'd.  There is a very long piece in today's New York Times Magazine titled Joe Biden’s Interrupted Presidency: He sought the office nearly all his life. When he finally got there, it brought out his best — and eventually his worst.  One notable excerpt:

He presided over the hearings for Clarence Thomas’sembattled nomination to the Supreme Court, when Anita Hill accused the judge of sexual harassment. Biden’s willingness to indulge Republicans on the committee who sought to turn the hearing into a referendum of Hill’s character, and his decision not to call as witnesses more women who were ready to testify with claims similar to Hill’s, were widely criticized. At the start of his 2020 presidential campaign, knowing this painful history would be exhumed, Biden called Hill to express regret. She then publicly declined to call his words an apology and said she remained unconvinced he had taken responsibility.

I've never trusted Biden after that 1991 hearing when he threw Anita Hill (and the country) under the bus rather than displease his Republican friends on the committee.  I remember especially Orrin Hatch and Arlen Spector savaging Hill while Biden left her utterly unassisted by available corroborating witnesses waiting at a nearby hotel with Shirley Wiegand, who would later become our friend and faculty colleague at MULS.  Through her, we later met Anita Hill personally.

Are Zionism and the State of Israel causes of antisemitism?  Peter Beinart has an opinion piece in this morning's NYTimes, Harris Can Change Biden’s Policy on Israel Just by Upholding the Law, in which he points out what should be clear to everyone, i.e., that the U.S. government applies the Leahy Law to every nation except perhaps the worst offender of it, the State of Israel.  The Leahy Law prohibits the United States from assisting any unit of a foreign security force that commits “gross violations” of human rights. Aid can be reinstated if the foreign country adequately punishes the perpetrators.  The law has been enforced hundreds of times against many nations but never against the State of Israel which has been credibly accused of gross human rights violations, war crimes, and even genocide.  One can hardly read a national newspaper or other journal in recent years, but especially since October 7, 2023, without reading of outrages committed by IDF and other instrumentalities of the Israeli government, i.e., Jewish settlers, against Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank.**  In the Biden administration, the person who ensures that no sanction is applied to Israel is Tony Blinken, Biden's Secretary of State, who personally takes responsibility for Leahy Law decisions concerning Israel.  Blinken is Jewish.  Does he decide Leahy issues with Israel because of his Jewish identity?  Is that an antisemitic question to ask?  He has made his support of the State of Israel abundantly clear on his trips to Israel after October 7.  To what extent is that support tied to his Jewish identity?  The question arises because of the widespread confusion between the State of Israel as a self-defined "Jewish state" and world Jewry.  Many Jews, perhaps even most, are Zionists, but not all are.  Even among Zionist Jews, not all support the Likud Party in Israel, or the extreme racist, right-wing coalition government of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich.  To the extent that we identify Israel with the Jewish people, to that extent we make possible the smearing of all Jews with the crimes of the Israeli rightwingers.  To the extent that Jews in Israel and in the diaspora decline to condemn the crimes of Israel's government and military, to that extent, they invite antisemitism and questions like, Does Blinken refuse to apply the Leahy Law to Israel because he is a Jew?  The U.S. does not have a mutual defense treaty with Israel as we do, for example, with other NATO nations, yet we have two aircraft carriers and other forces in the Mediterranean and Red Seas and elsewhere, standing by to engage in deadly warfare with Iran, Hezbollah, and other hostile forces who are primed to attack Israel because of Israel's assassinations in Beirut and Teheran.

** Elsewhere in this morning's Times, there is a story headlined "A Family Flees and a Mother Mourns After Israeli Settlers Attack a Palestinian Village."  A Palestinian man was killed and 4 houses and 6 vehicles were burned, as confirmed by the IDF.  

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians across the West Bank have become common. There have been about 1,250 such attacks in this time, according to the United Nations — 25 in the past week alone.

More than 589 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or Jewish settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, according to Palestinian health officials. Eighteen Israelis have been killed in the territory in the same time period, according to the United Nations.

Multiple residents said the Israeli army was preventing ambulances and fire trucks from entering the village. The Israeli military denied the accusations.

I no longer believe much of anything said by the IDF or the Israeli government concerning outrages and predation on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.  The troops are there to protect the Jewish settlers, not the Palestinians, consistent with what Israel has become: a racist, apartheid state.

Anniversary thought: James Meredith, Ole Miss, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. and then the 13th and 14th Amendments.  We Americans call this "progress."