#mikos theodorakis

[mannyblacque]

Current mood:

[dharmapizzatopping]

[auskultu]

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1967

President Johnson conferred with Pope Paul VI about the war in Vietnam in Rome yesterday at the climax of a hectic round-the-world Presidential journey. The meeting with the Pontiff ended the longest of the five days during which Mr. Johnson traveled 27,600 miles to attend a memorial service for Prime Minister Holt of Australia, to confer with a dozen chiefs of state and government and to visit two American military installations in the Vietnam war zone.

The Pope, meanwhile, had made his third appeal for peace in a week—a pastoral call for inner peace through religion as the essential foundation for world peace—in his annual Christmas message broadcast lo the world. Proclaiming again the nearly 2,000-year-old message of Christ, the Pontiff declared that His gift of peace was offered to all who suffered, who hungered, who meditated and studied, and “to you who bear the anxious burden of the right government of the world." 

A Christmas truce in the Vietnam war began as American troops prepared for a battle lull that is expected to last until the new year. The Vietcong truce started at 1 A.M. Sunday, Saigon time (noon Saturday, New York time), and is expected to last until 1 A.M. Wednesday. The South Vietnamese Government and Allied troops will observe a 24-hour truce starting at 6 P.M. Sunday (5 A.M. New York time), and ending at the same hour on Christmas Day.

It was also reported in Saigon that United States officials were studying a broadcast by a North Vietnamese military leader that details methods to combat American troops by using surprise and by gaining the initiative and mounting “annihilating attacks.” The broadcast was described by one Army official as “blunt and quite objective,” It was made on Nov. 29 and a transcript of it is being studied for clues to the military tactics of North Vietnam.

The Greek junta declared a Christmas amnesty for virtually all of its political enemies. The pardon, it was announced in Athens, will apply to most of the 2,500 political prisoners now being held in jails there and on three small islands in the Aegean. It specificially includes Andreas Papandreou, son of the former Premier George Papandreou, and Mikos Theodorakis, the left-wing composer. 

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower is quoted as saying in effect that the big question of war or peace in the world as well as political stability of Southeast Asia may depend on the willingness of Americans to see the Vietnam war through to military victory or a negotiated honorable settlement.

The Urban League of Greater Boston has served notice that public officials should be prepared to listen to "often disruptive and grating" communications from Negro communities that demand a voice in social programs. The warning was outlined in a recent “open letter” to Robert C. Weaver, Secretary, of Housing and Urban Development, who was heckled in Boston on Dec. 4 by a staff member of the league. 

[socialchats]

Difficult Questions and Contested Answers on Antisemitism

JNS.org – In his magnum opus A Lethal Obsession, the late Robert Wistrich, one of Israel’s finest scholars of Jew-hatred, elegantly summarized the character of antisemitism at the turn of this century.

“The old-new anti-Semitism can itself be as inventive as it is repetitive,” Wistrich wrote. “It often appears to imply that Jews are never victims but always victimizers, which may sound original to some but is clearly false. It generally avoids positions that smack of deliberate political or economic exclusion of Jews qua Jews from the national community or that echo the discourse of a discredited biological racism. On the other hand, depicting Zionism and the Jewish lobby as a world power is not considered racist or defamatory. There is no law against suggesting that Zionists deliberately provoke wars and revolutions, even though this is a classic anti-Semitic fabrication that has been widely propagated by Nazis, Communists and Islamists.”

From this short paragraph, we can deduce some general observations. Antisemitism adjusts itself to the sensibilities of the surrounding society. It develops themes that invariably portray Jews, as a collective, in the worst possible moral light. It is fixated with the distinct character of Jewish power–“this small people,” in the words of the Greek composer Mikos Theodorakis, a communist. And it is politically and theologically promiscuous, penetrating the salons of the nationalist right and the progressive left — creeping into Presbyterian churches, and leading the thundering discourse of political Islam.