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THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ANNOUNCES THE FIRST ANNUAL WALK AGAINST HATE SET FOR APRIL 30 – Nevada Business Magazine

Posted By on April 20, 2017

THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ANNOUNCES THE FIRST ANNUAL WALK AGAINST HATE SET FOR APRIL 30

(LAS VEGAS) -The Anti-Defamation League today announced its inaugural WALK Against Hate, an event designed to promote diversity and inclusion in the Las Vegas Valley. The event will take place from 9 to 11 a.m. Sunday, April 30 at Springs Preserve, 333 S. Valley View Blvd.

The family-oriented, multi-cultural event, co-chaired by Melina Gluck and Adam Petrasich, will feature appearances by local officials, including Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman; the drumline from Desert Oasis High School; performances by Social CirKISH, Culture Shock and Jassen Allen; and Channel 13 anchor Tricia Kean as MC.

The Walk Against Hate promises to be a fun and meaningful way for people from various backgrounds to come together and make strides towards embracing diversity in their own lives, said Jolie Brislin, Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League. As a society, weve come a long way, but there is more work ahead. This is an event designed to bond us as a community.

For more information on creating a team or sponsorship opportunities, visit http://www.WALKAgainstHateLV.com.

About The Anti-Defamation League The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in 1913 to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all. Now the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency, ADL fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all through information, education, legislation, and advocacy. The ADL has evolved into an international organization dedicated to standing up for the rights of all groups.

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THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE ANNOUNCES THE FIRST ANNUAL WALK AGAINST HATE SET FOR APRIL 30 - Nevada Business Magazine

The Anti-Defamation League Is Offering Sean Spicer Remedial Holocaust Lessons – Huffington Post

Posted By on April 20, 2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer kicked off the Jewish holiday of Passover with comments many have described as by-the-book Holocaust-denial. Now,the Anti-Defamation League is offering Spicer and his colleagues remedial lessons in Holocaust awareness to ensure it doesnt happen again.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, Spicercompared Syrian President Bashar Assad to German dictator Adolf Hitler, who, according to Spicer, didnt even sink to using chemical weapons.

Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of ADL, sent Spicer a letter on Thursday offering to conduct a training on Holocaust awareness for the press secretary and his staff.

When the first days of Passover ended and we turned on our phones and televisions yesterday evening, we learned about your comment that Hitler did not gas his own people, Greenblatt wrote in the letter, published on ADLs website. Your comparisons between Assad and Hitler were not only historically inaccurate but they also were inappropriate and offensive.

The Nazis, under Hitlers leadership, gassed millions of Jewish people in death camps. Spicerattempted several times to clarify his remarksand facedintense backlash from lawmakers and organizations like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, called for Spicers resignationin a statement on Twitter, saying the press secretary hadengaged in Holocaust denial, the most offensive form of fake news imaginable.

Later that day, Spicer offer an apologywhen he was interviewed by CNNs Wolf Blitzer.

I was obviously trying to make a point about the heinous acts that Assad had made against his own people last week using chemical weapons and gas, and frankly, I mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which, frankly, there is no comparison. And for that I apologize. It was a mistake to do that, Spicer said.

But for many critics, Spicers comments constituted more than a one-off mistake.

Spicers Tuesday comments are but the latest in a series of anti-Semitic dog whistles and Holocaust denials emanating from the president, his staff, and his family, wrote Voxs Jacob Gardenswartzon Wednesday.

Many pointed to the White Houses Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, which did not mention the Jewish people an erasure that is also a common tactic of Holocaust deniers.

While you have apologized, this weeks incident as well as others (notably, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement omitting Jews and your vociferous defense of it), have exposed a serious gap in your knowledge of the Holocaust, its impact, and the lessons we can learn from it, wrote Greenblatt.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read the full letter below:

Dear Mr. Spicer:

This week Jews around the world have spent time with their families celebrating Passover, the feast of freedom. In the Passover liturgy, we read that in each generation there will be those who rise up to harm the Jewish people, much like Pharaoh in ancient times and Hitler in modern times. Understanding and being keenly aware of our history to never forget is part of Passover and part of the Jewish experience.

Unfortunately, when the first days of Passover ended and we turned on our phones and televisions yesterday evening, we learned about your comment that Hitler did not gas his own people. Your comparisons between Assad and Hitler were not only historically inaccurate but they also were inappropriate and offensive.

While you have apologized, this weeks incident as well as others (notably, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement omitting Jews and your vociferous defense of it), have exposed a serious gap in your knowledge of the Holocaust, its impact, and the lessons we can learn from it.

For decades, ADL has been at the forefront of Holocaust education, providing trainings about the Nazi atrocities to a wide range of groups. We have conducted trainings for more than 130,000 law enforcement professionals and more than 35,447 educators, reaching more than 1,000,000 students. Our programs provide historical context for how the Holocaust was able to occur; teach the Holocaust as a human story; and create opportunities for critical thinking. Each of these educational programs focuses on the consequences of unchecked bigotry and hate.

ADL would be happy to conduct one of these trainings at your convenience for you, your staff, and anyone at the White House who may need to learn more about the Holocaust. We know you are very busy, but we believe a few hours learning this history will help you understand where you went wrong and prevent you from making these mistakes in the future.

Sincerely,

Jonathan A. Greenblatt

CEO

Anti-Defamation League

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The Anti-Defamation League Is Offering Sean Spicer Remedial Holocaust Lessons - Huffington Post

Zara Loses Its Skirt Over Pepe the Frog – New York Times

Posted By on April 20, 2017


New York Times
Zara Loses Its Skirt Over Pepe the Frog
New York Times
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Zara Loses Its Skirt Over Pepe the Frog - New York Times

The Promise of Zionism, From the Passover Seder to the Real World – TheTower.org

Posted By on April 17, 2017

At my familys Passover seder this year, we read, as we always do, from the traditional Sephardic haggadah, in keeping with the customs of the Jewish communities from Spain and Portugal.

But doing so means our guests need to listen to lots of Hebrew, and the occasional prayer or song in Ladino, before we can start eating dinner. And as its 2017, I have to be far more attentive to the problem of getting bored on an empty stomach than my elders ever were with me.

That perennial challengehow to make Passover relevantis something I wrestle with keenly, especially as our kids get older and understandably demand more exacting answers as to why we read this same text aloud year after year.

It is tempting, particularly with kids growing up in America, to explain everything connected to the seder in universalist terms. Passover, after all, is rich with the symbolism of freedom and liberation. We Jews were slaves before we tasted the fruits of emancipation, the Haggadah tells us, thereby compelling us to reflect on more recent experienceswhether its the past bondage of Africans transported to America, or the present one chaining the thousands of migrant workers laboring in Qatar and other Arab Gulf countries.

Still, I didnt think this angle was enough by itself. Its too easy to reduce the Passover narrative into a one-size-fits-all story that can be repurposed by using the exodus from Egypt as an analogy. But first, that doesnt explain the specifically Jewish aspects of the festival. Second, the universalist focus inadvertently suggests we should concern ourselves with contemporary slaveryaround 45 million people, according to the Global Slavery Indexonly when its Passover, when its really something we should be thinking about and acting upon on any day of the year.

I told my kids as much, before offering the best explanation I am capable of (not being a theologian) about the Passover storys enduring message. Assembled more than a century after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the haggadah, in my mind, tells a transcendental storybut in a manner befitting the historical period in which it emerged.

With its concentration on the order of the service, and its elaboration of the rituals and routines we follow during Passover, the haggadah assisted with the development of Jewish life during an era when rabbis became the authorities on Jewish law and practice. This doesnt mean the haggadah is agnostic on the question of Jewish sovereignty; to the contrary, its repeated invocations of Zion cause more than a few problems for those Jews who insist Zionism is one thing, Judaism something else entirely. But equally, the haggadah is not a political or national manifesto. Its greater interest is in the question the first generations of rabbis debated: how Jewish life is preserved and sustained under the rule of foreigners, often hostile foreigners.

In that sense, while the haggadah does involve a great deal of reading, the text actually condenses the Jewish historical journey so that participants can appreciate the covenant between God and the Jewish people as expressed through the end of slavery in Egypt and the promise of the land of Israel. This is what I stressed to both of my sons in advance of sitting down for this years first seder April 10.

Within a couple of days, however, I was swiftly disabused of the notion that one can talk about Passover in largely religious terms and avoid the political resonance flowing from the haggadah. The catalyst was a report from Palestinian Media Watch, the Israel-based monitoring organization, highlighting an item on Awdah (Return) TV during which an interviewee opined, We always put our hopes in Allah. This is the promised land. The Jews think it is promised to them, but what was promised was to gather them in order to exterminate them by a divine decree.

You wont find anything remotely like that in the haggadah, of course. Still, the interview shows a level of hatred far beyond the objections to political Zionism that Palestinian leaders disingenuously claim lies at the root of their conflict with Israel. What we are dealing with is foremost an assault upon Judaism, in which Gods promise to liberate the Jews in a land of their own is turned on its head. Put simply, the haggadah, alongside all the other Jewish texts, is held to be consciously promoting a contrived linkage between the Jews and the land we now call the state of Israel. These Jews are not natives, but interlopers, obliged to tell lies through their sacred books in order to justify their control over someone elses land.

The bizarre, disturbing idea that the Holy Land is really a cradle for the extermination of the Jews rather than self-determination is, sadly, quite common in the Islamic world. Its clearest articulation came from the lips of Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Shia terrorist organization Hezbollah, back in 2002: If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.

A similar sentiment was expressed by then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Holocaust denial conference he hosted in Tehran in 2006. Thanks to peoples wishes and Gods will, Ahmadinejad said, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is [headed] downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want.

Now that Ahmadinejad has returned to politics in Iran, registering his name for the Islamic Republics forthcoming presidential election, we will be hearing a lot more of this rhetoric. And if for some reason Ahmadinejads candidacy is rejected by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneialways the final arbiter in such mattersrest assured that there are several other Iranian candidates who can be relied on to say the same thing.

When it comes to confronting these hateful beliefs and regimes, we have little choice about doing so; they have already chosen us as their principal target. Let us not, though, allow them to poison our festivals with their propaganda. During Passover, one short line suffices as a response: Next year in Jerusalem.

Ben Cohen is a SeniorEditor at The Tower Magazine and the Director of Coalitions at The Israel Project.Publications he has written for include Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Haaretz and Tablet. He writes a weekly column for JNS.org, a news agency serving the Jewish media. Follow him on Twitter @BenCohenOpinion.

[Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90]

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America’s Most Political Food – The New Yorker

Posted By on April 17, 2017

Kathleen Purvis, a food editor, wrote, When I learned about Bessingers history, I stopped buying his products.CreditIllustration by David Sandlin

In February of 2015, Kathleen Purvis, the food editor of the Charlotte Observer, drove to Birmingham, Alabama, to attend Food Media South, an annual symposium. The keynote session, Hey, You, Pitch Me Something, was meant to be a friendly wind-down to a weekend of talks. Participants were invited to get up in front of the editor of the Web magazine the Bitter Southerner and, well, pitch him something.

There were several hundred people in the room. Purvis knew that in the name of politeness she should probably stay quiet, but she couldnt resist the opportunity to toss a good word grenade, she recalled later, into a clubby crowd that she felt tended to overlook, along with chiffon cakes and canning, some of the most complicated questions about Southern cuisine. She raised her hand, and the editor nodded her way.

Men are the new carpetbaggers of Southern food writing, she said.

He replied, Sold.

The resulting essay argues that the Southern food-writing world has been unduly influenced, usurped, yes, even invaded, by a barbecue-entranced, bourbon-preoccupied and pork belly-obsessed horde of mostly testosterone-fueled scribes, who dwell on hackneyed tales of Southern eccentricity without developing the clear-eyed vision to see them in a contemporary light. The piece generated controversy, though not as much as Purviss investigation into the racial dimensions of the practice of putting sugar in corn bread. Honest to God, I really hate that hokey-jokey Hey-us-Southerners-arent-we-cute stuff, she told me. Ive always said that my beat is food and the meaning of life.

Gamely, the organizers invited her to the conference the next year as a speaker. I was getting ready to get up and talk, Purvis said. I was sitting there very quietly in a corner, and a woman came up to me and said, So, is it O.K. to go back to the Piggie Park?

The woman was referring to Maurices Piggie Park, a small chain of barbecue restaurants, established in West Columbia, South Carolina, in 1953. The original restaurant occupies a barnlike building on a busy intersection and is presided over by a regionally famous electric marquee that features the boast WORLDS BEST BAR-B-Q, along with a grinning piglet named Little Joe. The Piggie Park is important in the history of barbecue, which is more or less the history of America. One reason is that its founder, Maurice Bessinger, popularized the yellow, mustard-based sauce that typifies the barbecue of South Carolinas Midlands area. Another is that Bessinger was a white supremacist who, in 1968, went to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful fight against desegregation, and, in 1974, ran a losing gubernatorial campaign, wearing a white suit and riding a white horse.

In 2000, when the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse dome, Bessinger raised Confederate flags over all his restaurants. (By then, there were nine.) A king-sheet-size version went up over the West Columbia location, where he had long distributed tracts alleging, for example, that African slaves blessed the Lord for allowing them to be enslaved and sent to America. He was a figure whose hate spawned contempt, leading a writer from the Charleston City Paper to fantasize about how Satan and his minions would slather his body in mustard-based BBQ sauce before they dined.

In 2007, Bessinger, who suffered from Alzheimers at the end of his life, handed the business over to his two sons, Paul and Lloyd, and a daughter, Debbie. In the months before his death, in 2014, they took down the flags and got rid of the slavery pamphlets. Dad liked politics, Lloyd, who serves as the public face of the operation, told a reporter. Thats not something were interested in doing. We want to serve great barbecue.

By the time the news reached Kathleen Purvis, she hadnt eaten Bessingers barbecue in nearly three decades. She grew up in Wilson, North Carolina, where her father was an R.C. Cola salesman and barbecue sauce is made with vinegar. Early in her career, shed become a fan of the Bessinger familys line of packaged foodshandy for a quick dinner when I was working nightsbut, she wrote, in an article in the Observer in December, When I learned about Bessingers history, I stopped buying his products. I followed a simple policy on the Piggie Park: I didnt go there. Ever. During the flag scandal, thousands of South Carolinians made the same call, going cold turkey. I first made Maurices acquaintance when I was a child, the barbecue expert William McKinney wrote, on the Web site of the Southern Foodways Alliance. His barbecue was sold in the freezer aisle of the grocery store. It would bubble up in our familys oven, its orange sauce as vivid as a river of lava. My mother would pack his barbecue in my lunch bag routinely, and I ate those sandwiches all the way through high school, wrapped up in aluminum foil and still a touch warm once lunch time came around. It was as though Jif peanut butter or Katzs Deli had become irredeemably tainted.

The Piggie Park had bad vibes, but it retained a pull on the community. For barbecue obsessives, it held a special fascination as one of the few restaurants in the country to still cook entirely over hickory wood, using no electricity or gas. One prominent Columbia resident, a black man, told me that he was addicted to Bessingers sauce, but that he would never admit it in public. The regime shift, then, represented a touchy moment. Some people wanted to go only if things had changed (but, if they were going to go, they wanted to get there before things had changed too much). For others, no amount of change was ever going to mitigate the legacy of a man who had caused so much hurt. Even asking if it was O.K. to return was a form of blindness to that pain. They could change the last name, redo the building, then dig the old man up... it still wouldnt matter to those who continue to carry the chip on the shoulder mentality, a man named James Last, of Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote in response to Purviss article, prompting Durward White, of Katy, Texas, to reply, Are you saying no matter how vile and disrespectful his actions were we should move on? People still cant move on from Tom Brady and deflate gate and that was 3 years ago.

Barbecue might be Americas most political food. The first significant reference to it that the barbecue scholar Robert F. Moss has been able to find is in The Barbacue Feast: or, the three pigs of Peckham, broiled under an apple-tree, an account of a 1706 banquet in Jamaica. The revellers were English colonists, but the pigs were nicely cookd after the West Indian manner: whole, over coals, on long wooden spits on which they turned as a cook basted them in a spicy sauce (green Virginia pepper and Madeira wine), using a foxtail tied to a stick. Native Americans on the East Coast of North America used similar cooking techniques. But the main thing about barbecues is that they were social affairs, a days entertainment for the community. Between 1769 and 1774, George Washington attended at least six of them, he wrote in his diary, including a Barbicue of my own giving at Accotinck.

A whole hog can feed as many as a hundred people. Barbecues, often held on the Fourth of July, became overtly political in the nineteenth century. As Moss writes in Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, they were the quintessential form of democratic public celebration, bringing together citizens from all stations to express and reaffirm their shared civic values. They adhered to a ritualized format: parade, prayer, reading of the Declaration of Independence, oration, and dinner in a shady grove near a drinking spring, after which dignitaries gave a series of regular toasts (thirteen of them, on patriotic subjects), followed by voluntary toasts from the masses (thirty or forty, on issues ranging from local elections to the free navigation of the Mississippi, or whatever else happened to be the days concerns). Often, the festivities turned rowdy. If an antebellum politician had wanted to rile folks up about building a wall, he would have done it at a barbecue.

Before the Civil War, enslaved men often cooked these civic meals. They prepared their own feasts, too, either sanctioned by their owners or organized on the quiet. Much of the planning for the rebellions organized by Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner took place at barbecues. After emancipation, black men continued to be some of the countrys leading pit masters, catering enormous spreads that featured everything from barbecued hogs, shoats, chickens, and lambs to stuffed potatoes, stewed corn, cheese relish, puddings, coffee, and cigars. In 1909, the Times noted the death of a man born around 1865, on a plantation in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Pickens Wells, one of the most famous barbecue cooks in the South, dropped dead today while preparing a barbecue, the item read. Pickens prepared the famous barbecue at which President Taft was the guest of honor last Winter. White men here are raising a fund to erect a monument to the negro as a tribute to his fidelity and character.

Barbecue restaurants, like lunch counters, played an outsized role in the desegregation battles of the nineteen-sixties. In Birmingham, in 1964, Ollie McClung, of Ollies Barbecue, challenged the legality of the Civil Rights Act, arguing that the restaurants practice of denying sit-down service to black customers was none of the federal governments business, since Ollies, a mom-and-pop operation, wasnt involved in interstate commerce. Pointing out that forty-six per cent of Ollies meat came from out of state, the Supreme Court upheld the acts constitutionality in a 9-0 ruling. It included a concurring opinion from Justice Hugo Black, an Alabamian who reportedly voted over the objection of his wife, a regular diner at Ollies.

In 1964, Maurice Bessinger was the president of the National Association for the Preservation of White People. On August 12th of that year, Anne Newman and a friend drove to the West Columbia Piggie Park. They stopped outside the lot for curbside service. A waitress emerged and, seeing that they were black, returned to the building without speaking to them. Then a man with a pad approached the car but refused to take their order, even though white customers were being served. In Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., the district court asserted that the fact that Piggie Park at all six of its eating places denies full and equal service to Negroes because of their race is uncontested and completely established by evidence, but it concluded that the restaurants, because they were principally drive-ins, werent subject to the public-accommodation provision of the Civil Rights Act. When a higher court reversed the ruling, Bessinger appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that being forced to serve black people violated his religious principles. He lost, in a unanimous decision. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently cited the case in her Hobby Lobby dissent.) In Defending My Heritage, Bessingers 2001 autobiography, he claims that he and his family always treated black people well, citing his fathers practice, at a restaurant he owned, of giving a black employee discarded food and old grease. (Then he says that they fired her for stealing half a ham.) He writes, I have concluded that the civil rights movement is a Satanic attempt to make it easier for a global elite, a group of extremely wealthy men with no Constitutional or national or cultural loyalties, working at an international level to eventually seize power in this country.

Bessinger launched his run for governor from his cattle range, which he called Tara, after the OHara plantation in Gone with the Wind. One of his opponents remembered the primary race as something between a comic opera and depressing satire. Out of seven candidates, including a competing barbecue baron, Bessinger came in fifth, garnering 2.5 per cent of the vote. Business suffered, whether from his notoriety or his distraction. He decided to focus on rebuilding his restaurant empire, betting that peoplewhite people, at leastwould eventually forget about his period of activism. Many of them did. The corollary to white innocence is white passivity, the feeling that what ones ancestors did was so messed up that it couldnt possibly make a difference where one eats a barbecue sandwich.

According to his birth certificate, Maurice Bessinger was born on July 14, 1930, on a farm near Cope, South Carolina. It occupied land that had been willed to his mother, Genora, by her grandfather, a veteran of the Civil War. Maurice thought that his real birth date was probably closer to July 4th, as his father, Joseph, went to the county courthouse, where births were recorded, only a couple of times a month. Maurice was the eighth of eleven children. In his autobiography, he says that he helped pick cotton from the age of four, using a small, ten-pound little cloth sugar bag, and graduating, at six, to a full, 100-pound bag like the grown-ups used. The family ate clabber, corn bread, grits, and vegetables that they grew in their garden. Meat was scarce; eggs, occasional. Maurices grandmother told him that, anticipating the arrival of Shermans troops, she and her neighbors had buried smoked pork shoulders, hams, bacon, and sausage, covering them with desiccated leaves to disguise fresh digging.

When Maurice was nine, his father gave up farming, selling the familys cow to buy a roadside caf from a widow in Holly Hill, about halfway between Columbia and Charleston. Maurice started to work that year at the Holly Hill Caf, swatting flies and bussing tables. By the time he was twelve, he was living in a small room in the back of the caf, getting up at 5 A.M. to run the breakfast shift, spending a few hours at school, and then returning to the restaurant to work. Tired and skinny, he failed fifth and sixth grades. Two Saturday nights in a row, the local policeman shot a black man dead. Maurice wrote, in 2001, of one incident, The perpetrator ran, and Mr. Workman dropped him with one shot at about 150 paces!

By 1946, Joseph had sold the Holly Hill Caf and opened Joes Grill, where he perfected the secret recipeits mustard kick supposedly inspired by his German rootsfor which the family was coming to be known. In 1949, in Maurices senior year of high school, Joseph died of a heart attack. Despite Maurices insistence that his father had told him that the business would be his, the restaurant went to one of his brothers, who was seven years older and had come back from the war with three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. Furious, Maurice joined the Army and shipped out to Korea.

In the aftermath of the fight over Joes Grill, many of the eleven siblings struck out across the state to set up their own enterprises. The Bessinger name now dominates South Carolina barbecue, presiding over a complex diaspora of interrelated but not always amicable interests. I grew up being told that yellow sauce was my heritage, the journalist Jack Hitt, who was raised in Charleston, wrote in the Times Magazine in 2001. But its clear that without the siblings anxieties and their nomadic habits, Joe Sr.s recipe would have died out after Joes Grill closed. South Carolina would have remained just another outpost in the national camp of red barbecue sauce.

By 2000, Maurice was easily the most successful of his generation of Bessingers. In addition to the nine restaurants around Lexington County, he had the frozen dinners, a mail-order business, and a bottling plant that distributed his Southern Gold sauce (with a Confederate flag on the label) to three thousand grocery stores along the East Coast, making him the largest barbecue wholesaler in the country. People called the Piggie Park the best all-in-one barbecue restaurant in America. Pat Buchanan, running for President on the Reform Party ticket, held fund-raisers at the main restaurant, whose pits burned non-stop. When an economic boycott of South Carolina, led by the states N.A.A.C.P. chapter, resulted in the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse dome, Maurice acted quickly. I surrounded the city of Columbia with Confederate flags, he later said. I didnt even tell my wife. I had it all planned.

Acting on a tip, John Monk, of the State newspaper, went to the Piggie Park and discovered Bessingers stock of revisionist literature. The N.A.A.C.P. decided to challenge him next. We didnt have any idea that we would change his mind, Lonnie Randolph, Jr., the chapters longtime president, told me. The goal was to make South Carolina, if theres such a thing, whole againto let folks know that this isnt the way life should be.

Under pressure from the association, Sams Club, Walmart, Winn-Dixie, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Bi-Lo, Kroger, and Publix stopped carrying Southern Gold. Piggly Wiggly, the lone holdout, said that it would continue to stock the sauce, owing to customer demand. Bessinger was defiant. He likened his treatment to that of Jewish merchants during Kristallnacht, and told a newspaper, Winn-Dixie is going to have to take that name off and call it Winn-Yankee. Eventually, Piggly Wiggly dropped his products, too. Only months earlier, John McCains Presidential campaign had been ruined by a series of robocalls that asked voters, Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain... if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child? Still, the views that a person could get away with espousing, at least in public, had changed since the nineteen-sixties. Joe McCulloch, a Columbia attorney, recalled, After that, Maurice became radioactive, as did his barbecue.

Bessinger claimed that his business shrank by ninety-eight per cent, amounting to a twenty-million-dollar loss. Eventually, he closed several restaurants and shut down the bottling plant. Nonetheless, he held his ground, portraying himself as a champion of free speech and state sovereignty, and vowing, like proud Southerners after Shermans march, to root hog or die.

In the wake of the controversy, the Bessingers were able to cultivate an alternative clientele. If some diners continued to patronize the restaurants in spite of Maurices views (Elton Johns gay, but I still listen to his music, one customer told the Baltimore Sun in 2002), others showed up explicitly to support his cause (The mans got the guts to stand up for his beliefs, another said). Glen McConnell, then a state senator, began stocking Bessingers sauce at CSA Galleries, a Confederate-memorabilia store that he ran with his brother. (I Googled McConnell, and was shocked to learn that he is now the president of the College of Charleston.)

Even today, a rump of supporters regard Bessinger as the heroic victim of a liberal conspiracy. In 2014, a reader wrote to a local paper that after Bessinger publicly supported keeping the Confederate Battle Flag on the S.C. Statehouse, his business was sabotaged by anti-Southern activists who would go into grocery stores and surreptitiously open a bottle of Maurices barbecue sauce and lay it on the top shelf, ruining a section of merchandise and creating a mess for the store to clean up.

In January, I called Lloyd Bessinger, Maurices elder son. Our conversation began smoothly, but, after a few minutes, he asked me if there would be any political angle to the article I wanted to write, and, when I said yes, things got uncomfortable. He sounded anguished as he said that, while he was no racist, he did not want to dishonor his father, whom he had known as a good and loving man. When we hung up, I was left uncertain whether the changes that Lloyd and his siblings had made at the Piggie Park were business decisions or evidence of a genuine transformation. Even if he had taken down the flags, Lloyd had never really explained why he made the move: out of principle, or pragmatism, or even, as a local news channel had reported, because of the rising cost of dry cleaning. (I think we should all be united by one country and one flag, the American Flag, he said later.) I wrote to him, asking if I could come to see him in Columbia. It was nice talking to you today, he replied, declining. Hopefully time will heal the past.

One of the reasons Id become interested in the Bessinger story is that it struck me as a small, imperfect test case for how to act in our political moment. Of the many moral issues that have beset Americans since November, one of the most nagging is that of the once beloved relative who appears at the Thanksgiving table spouting contemptible ideas. When something or someone you love troubles your consciencewhen your everyday relationships are political actsdo you try to be a moderating force, or are you obligated to make a break entirely?

I decided to visit some less fraught outposts of the Bessinger barbecue empire, hoping to get a sense of what makes yellow-sauce barbecuea seemingly minor comfortsomething that, like Amazon or Uber, even some people who consider themselves hugely opposed to the ethics of its purveyors find difficult to renounce. I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, eating barbecue at Flips Barbecue House. It occupied a cinder-block building with an orange sheet-metal roof, and its hulking stuffed bear, reportedly shot by Flip himself, was once named one of the seven wonders of the Cape Fear region. Because barbecue is an intensely regional food, its also an intensely emotional one, the sort of thing you wake up in the middle of the night fiending for when, say, youre pregnant and living three thousand miles from home. I got that. Still, Id always got over it, even when Flips closed, in 2013. (If Eastern North Carolina-style barbecue is your thing, and you cant have it, dump a pork shoulder and all the vinegar youve got into a Dutch oven and let it cook, low, on the stovetop for as long as you can stand to.)

My first stop was Bessingers Barbecue, which two of Maurices brothers opened in 1960. I ordered a large barbecue plate. I also got a banana pudding. The restaurants Web site features testimonials from customers, including Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Beazley, of Evans, Georgia (We flew in our private plane to shop for rugs. You were near and looked interesting. BEST BBQ EVER!) and the television personality Andrew Zimmern (The best spicy sauce Ive ever tasted!). I found a seat, tore a paper towel from a roll that sat on the table, and started eating. The barbecue was satisfying, full of browned bits and ends, but ever so slightly dry. I kept daubing on more sauceits bright color suggested a starring role in a stain-removal infomercialwhich may have been exactly the point.

After the meal, I asked at the counter if any Bessingers were around. Michael Bessinger, a third-generation barbecue man, appeared, with an apron tied around his waist, and led me to an upstairs office. Near the cash register, amid pictures commemorating visits from Elizabeth Dole and Mitt Romney, Id seen a framed newspaper article in which a relative had spoken frankly of the Bessinger schism (Everybody wanted to be a chief and not Indians). Michael told me that his branch of the family wasnt close to Mauricesthey never got together for the holidays, for examplebut he seemed to regard his uncle with a sort of detached amusement. Maurice always liked the spotlight, positive or negative, he said. He said that he, too, was trying to move forward without disrespecting the past. He was thinking about introducing alcohol and had recently added brisket to the menua concession to modern customers expectations of barbecue, however regionally dubious.

Across town at Melvins Barbecue, I ordered another barbecue plate, this time with a side of butter beans. It arrived on a stylish brushed-metal tray, instead of a plastic plate. A list of the Ten Commandments printed on the side of my cup momentarily counteracted the progressive atmosphere, but then I walked over to the condiments bar, and, scanning vats of pickled peppers, noticed a bullet-shaped bottle with a green nozzle. Sriracha! I wondered if Melvin David Bessinger, who in 2004 inherited the business from his father, Melvin, might be the familys great unabashed modernizer, the King Abdullah of yellow-sauce barbecue.

Melvin, who died in 2012, was the fifth child of the eleven Bessinger siblingsthe older brother who, after their fathers sudden death, Maurice wrote, was conspiring against me to move me out of the business and take it for himself. (Melvin was equally confident of his status as rightful heir, claiming that, when he was ten years old, his father had entrusted him with the secret recipe, promising, Son, this sauce is gonna make you a million dollars some day.) In 2000, when the N.A.A.C.P. initiated the boycott, Melvin swept in, picking up much of Maurices forfeited business. Melvins sauce was called Golden Secret, instead of Southern Gold. To dispel the suspicion that the business might be a front for Mauricessame sauce, Confederate-flag-less bottlesMelvin David issued a press release: Melvin and his brother do not share political or social views. Despite their being brothers, they do not speak to each other. Melvins views on the Confederate flag, slavery and race relations are not those of his brother. Maurice angrily told reporters, I taught Melvin everything he knows about barbecue saucebut I didnt teach him everything I know.

Melvin David was out of town the day I visited the restaurant, but I reached him on the phone later. When you come from a large family, not everybodys going to agree, he told me. Some people cant even get along with a brother and sisterhow about if you have eleven and you all went into the same business? Whatever the extent of the brothers animosity, he said, Melvin and Maurice had reconciled before Melvin died. Im ashamed to use my last name, Melvin David had said, in a 2001 interview, a statement he now regretted. I was being accused of a lot of things, a lot of negative things were coming my way, and it just kind of got to me, he told me. No doubt this was a great name that we were given when we were born.

Lexington County, which encompasses all but one of the dozen Piggie Park restaurants now in operation, remains a bedrock of hard-right politics. It is the home of Donnie Myers, the prosecutor known during his decades-long tenure as Dr. Death, for his zealousness in pursuing capital punishment; and Joe Wilson, the congressman who heckled President Obama during a speech to a joint session of Congress, shouting, You lie! In the 2016 Presidential election, 65.6 per cent of the countys residents voted for Donald Trump.

Lake E. High, Jr., the president of the South Carolina Barbecue Association, agreed to meet me at the original Piggie Park, in Columbia, one day in January. That morning, while renting a car in Charleston, I struck up a conversation with a late-middle-aged white man behind the counter. When I told him I was writing about Maurices Piggie Park, he reminisced, Youd get a few cocktails in you, drive up, get that big-ass fried tempura onion ring, and yum, yum, yum. He continued, All that stuff you see on CNN, the liberal sidethat division, that prejudice, thats not who we are.

I took the keys and headed up to Columbia. When I reached the Piggie Park, I pulled the car in under the same formerly futuristic drive-in canopy where, fifty-three years earlier, Anne Newman had been refused service. I walked into the restaurant, where Higha big man in a sweater vest, with a mottled complexion and an omniscient smirkwas sitting at a round table. He explained that hed got into barbecue as a challenge. Somebody said, We got the best damn barbecue in the nation, and the worst judges, and I said, Well, I tell you what, I think we could fix that, and we started the South Carolina Barbecue Association in 2004. When Anthony Bourdain visited South Carolina for an episode of No Reservations, he asked High to show him around. (As for his name, which he shares with his father, when his great-grandmothers were squabbling over what to call the coming child, Highs grandfather banged a fist on the table, pointed to a map that was hanging on the wall, and said, Whats behind me? Lake Erie, one of the great-grandmothers answered. Well, thats his name.)

In Highs estimation, the Piggie Park was hundred-mile barbecueworth driving a hundred miles for. Its the iconic South Carolina sauce is what it boils down to, he said, surveying the restaurant, with its lazy Susans, ceiling fans, and brown linoleum floor. Country music was playing on the radio; a muted television showed Fox News. The crowd was white, mostly older. In the guest book, I found comments that read, Wheres the flag??! and Thanks for Taking It Down! God Bless!! Near the entrance, a portrait of Maurice presided over a shrine of sauces. I ordered some barbecue. The chop was delicate, and the sauce was nearly fluorescent. It tastes like mustard thats got some mouthfeel to it, High continued. Id say its somewhere in the middle of the light-to-sharp spectrum.

High spoke favorably of the Piggie Parks new managementPaul and Lloyd, and hes got a daughter whose name I forget, cute girl. Theyre real dedicated. He had also thought highly of Maurice, who, he said, was always friendly and insisted on top-of-the-line ingredients. He and Strom Thurmond were talking about all-natural thirty years ago, he said, which seemed a bit like remembering Oswald Mosley for his advocacy of brown bread. I asked whether he thought Maurices political legacy posed a problem. It wasnt nearly as bitter as modern day makes it seem, he said. He went on to talk about the trouble with racially interbred societies, the genetic basis of criminality, and his belief that the South should secede. After a disquisition that touched on everything from slavery (Its been around since Day One, and they talk about it in the Bible) to Trump (I happened to see him speaking to a crowd before he declared, and I came into the kitchen and I said, Lovebug, that mans gonna be President), he returned to the Piggie Park. This is the most taken-for-granted barbecue house in America, he said.

Lonnie Randolph, the N.A.A.C.P. state president who had led the boycott of Piggie Park, told me that Maurice Bessinger was part of an ideological and economic lineage that stretched back to before the Civil War. He represented a hate that was so deeply rooted, Randolph said. I knew it was dangerous. He didnt think that it was possible to let the past be the past. It doesnt affect mewhite people can say that, because it didnt affect them. But, when I think of the damage that has been done, it cannot be undone, he said. Things might be different, he conceded, if the new generation of Bessingers were taking some sort of active steps toward reparation. But Im not familiar with them supporting any issues that support the lives of the people he abused for so many years.

Representative Joe Neal, a longtime member of the state legislature and the chairman of the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus during the flag battles of the early aughts, placed a similar emphasis on the younger Bessingers actions, or lack thereof, when I got him on the phone in January. (Neal died the next month.) I dont think they have to apologize, he said. I think what people are waiting for is to find out who they are.

After talking to Randolph and Neal, I couldnt stop thinking about Nat Fullers Feast. Nat Fuller, born in 1812, was a slave who became a celebrated restaurateur, opening the Bachelors Retreat, a Charleston catering hall famed for its pastries, game, and turtle soup. In April of 1865, two months after Charleston surrendered to Union forces, Fuller orchestrated a grand mealhistorians have remembered it as a reconciliation banquetto which he invited dozens of the citys prominent citizens. A society doyenne wrote in her diary of the miscegenat dinner, at which blacks and whites sat on an equality and gave toasts and sang songs for Lincoln and Freedom.

The evenings menu has been lost to time, but, in 2015, a group of chefs and scholars tried to re-create the meal, using dishes that Fuller had served at other events. On a drizzly April night, forty Charlestonians gathered for the feast. This is the beginning for all of us, B.J. Dennis, a black chef, said, making a toast. Fifteen days earlier, Walter Scott, an unarmed black man with a broken brake light, had been shot in the back by a white North Charleston police officer. Two months later, the white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and killed nine people, including Clementa C. Pinckney, Mother Emanuels pastor. Pinckney was at the dinner that night, trying to acknowledge and refute history over watermelon brandy, chowchow, shrimp pie, chapon chasseur, and truffled squab served with silver ewers of walnut ketchup.

Before I left West Columbia, I decided to try Lloyd Bessinger one last time. In the wood-panelled office at the main Piggie Park, a secretary invited me to have a seat. Lloyd walked out: trim, mostly bald, wearing navy chinos and a red Piggie Park polo.

Lloyd was as unassuming as his father had been outlandish. His ambition, it seemed, was to be left alone. When I asked about the 2000 boycott, he said, I try not to think about it that much anymore.

Do you support white supremacy? I asked.

No! Of course not, Lloyd said. White supremacy is totally wrongand my father was not like that. He was a Southerner and a South Carolinian. He enjoyed reading about the history and the heritage of America. Lloyd had recently been to a friends funeral at a black church, and two hundred people were there, andhe chuckledninety per cent of them were black, and that was fine.

I told Lloyd what Lonnie Randolph and Joe Neal had said, that people needed a tangible sign that the Bessinger family understood the pain they had caused, and that until they gave one it would persist.

Mmmkay, he said. Well, I dont know how I can do that. Im not objecting to doing that. I just need to know what that is.

That Lloyd could afford not to have much of an opinionthat he simply didnt have to think about race while making choices big and smallwas a privilege he had never considered. He seemed caught between the worlds of his parents and his children, the values with which he had grown up and those he now perceived to be ascendant. I recalled what Kathleen Purvis had said to me about Lloyd: I felt very sympathetic to him. My familys from GeorgiaI have family members who had beliefs, used language that was awful. My grandmother, the last thing she remembered about me when she was disappearing into dementia was Oh, yeah, thats the girl that loves black people so much. That was a very painful thing, and to ask me to denounce my grandmother for thatyou cant. So being Southern always involves that complicated dance.

I cant change anything, Lloyd said, before I left. All I can do is speak for myself today. I dont look at race. I look at people. Were all equal, O.K.?

In 2009, the Daras family, of Fort Washington, Maryland, moved to Orangeburg, South Carolina. Tommy Daras had just retired from running gas stations. Id come down here fishing, and I liked it, he said recently. I always thought the people were nice, and Florida was too hot.

For a while, he and his wife, Deborah, enjoyed the weather and their newfound freedom. Then, in 2015, they spotted a cute brick bungalow on John C. Calhoun Drive, an out-of-business Piggie Park. We were at home, bored, and decided to clean it up, fix it up, and make some money on it, Daras said. They added teal-and-white awnings and named the place Edisto River Creamery & Kitchen. Daras recalled, An ice cream shop near a park, how hard could that be? They hosted such events as Bible studies and a Pokmon Go tournament. Their outdoor sign welcomed hunters and advertised a bacon palmetto burger. Daras said, I did notice that there were no black customersthe population of Orangeburg is eighty per cent African-Americanand I was trying to figure that out. Man, why am I not getting their business?

The Darases bought the property from Maurice Bessingers children, knowing that a Confederate flag flew on a small bit of land in a corner of the lot. From what Daras understood, the parcel, through some quirk of local real-estate history, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having been donated to them by Maurice Bessinger in 2005. Daras wasnt a fan of the flag, but it didnt really bother him. It became impossible to ignore, however, when, shortly after the massacre at Mother Emanuel, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans showed up, took down the flag, and replaced it with a new one that was three times as big. Before, Id just sucked it up, but then it was, like, Man, Ive got to try to do something here, Daras said, explaining that he could no longer abide this huge flag sticking up in the air telling everyone to screw themselves.

Daras rexamined his deed. With the help of a lawyer, Justin Bamberg, he is filing a lawsuit arguing that the corner parcel belongs to him. (The Sons of Confederate Veterans maintain their ownership.) Bamberg, who is thirty, grew up near Orangeburg and now serves as a Democratic member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. I called him to discuss the details of the lawsuit, but, as our conversation went on, he started talking about what the Piggie Park had meant to him as a young African-American man. It was one of those places I remember as a kid, always riding by there, feeling like in some peoples eyes I was less a person. I did not go into Maurices until I was in college, he said, recalling one afternoon when he had felt compelled to just walk into the restaurant, leaving without ordering anything. It was a personal thingfor so long, this place always had control over some part of how I felt. For me, it was like, Its gonna end today. It will be up to a court to conclude the story of Maurice Bessingers flags, the last of which is, for the moment, still flying, his final provocation.

More here:
America's Most Political Food - The New Yorker

Weekend calendar – Quad City Times

Posted By on April 17, 2017

April 20 Songs of the Civil Rights Movement

1:30-2:30 p.m. Bettendorf Public Library, 2950 Learning Campus Drive. Illinois musician Chris Vallillo will perform songs of the era that spoke of the yearning for equal rights and the struggle and determination to win freedom. Refreshments will be served after the program. Free.

5:30 p.m. Davenport Country Club, 25500 Valley Drive, Bettendorf. Temple Emanuel will host this art auction featuring a wide variety and price range of framed art and sports and music memorabilia as well as original art. Hor's d'oeuvres and desserts will be served. for more information or to purchase tickets, call 563-326-4419 or email office@qctemple.org. $30 at the door, $25 by April 15.

6:35 p.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. $5 to $14.

7 p.m. Central DeWitt Performing Arts Center, 519 E. 11th St., DeWitt. $25 adults, $5 students (K-12).

7:30-8:30 p.m. Bettendorf Public Library, 2950 Learning Campus Drive. Bret Dale, Director of Programming and Education at the RME, will present this installment of Trax from the Stax. Free.

7:30 p.m. Redstone Room, 129 Main St., Davenport. $12 day of show, $10 in advance.

8-11 p.m. Harrington's Pub, 2321 Cumberland Square Drive, Bettendorf. This will be an outdoor show, weather permitting. Free.

1-8:30 p.m. Putnam Museum, 1717 W. 12th St., Davenport. Featuring displays, demonstrations, indoor planetarium shows, solar/night sky observing (weather permitting), Moon Rock on loan from NASA, meteorites, crafts and more. There also will be a special program, "How and Where To View The Great American Total Solar Eclipse," by Dr. Paul Sipiera at 7 p.m. Free.

5-8:30 p.m. Putnam Museum, 1717 W. 12th St., Davenport. This edition of Family Fun Night will feature the fully immersive Discovery Dome planetarium open with free showings throughout the night, Dr. Paul Sipiera will give a presentation, "How and Where to View The Great American Total Solar Eclipse," at 7 p.m., there will be telescopes for solar/night sky observing (weather permitting) and more. Free for fun night activites with museum admission required to visit the Museum and Science Center.

5:30 p.m. Camden Centre, 2701 1st St. E, Milan. The Arc of the Quad-Cities Area will celebrate spring with this busines casual event featuring an assortment of hors d'oeuvres, a cash bar, deejay entertainment from Master Blaster and live and silent auctions. For more information or to register, call 309-786-6474 or visit arcqca.org. $280 per table, $70 per couple, $40 per person.

6-11 p.m. Waterfront Convention Center, 2021 State St., Bettendorf. Featuring dinner, a program including the success story of a youth who went through the program as well as silent and live auctions. Proceeds benefit Family Resources. $85.

6:15 p.m. Davenport Speedway, Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds. $12 adults, $10 students/senior citizens, $5 youth 7-12 years.

6:30-7:30 p.m. Colona Public Library, 911 1st St., Colona. Paper-cutting artist Keith Bonnstetter will help participants make a spring "snowflake" design. Class size is limited. Attendees should bring scissors. For more information or to register, call 309-792-0548. Free.

6:35 p.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. Promotion: Post-game Fireworks. $5 to $14.

7-11 p.m. Silver Spur Dance Hall, 1230 15th Ave., East Moline. Featuring deejay music for dancing. $7.

7-10:30 p.m. CASI, 1035 W. Kimberly Road, Davenport. Deejay Don will play music for dancing to couples, line and free style steps. $7.

7 p.m. RME Community Stage, 129 Main St., Davenport. Free.

7-10 p.m. the Coliseum, 116 Bryant St., Walcott. $10.

7-9:30 p.m. Square and Round Dance Hall, 323 1/2 17th St., Bettendorf. Featuring mainstream and plus square dancing with caller Tommy Russell and Charlie Swanson cueing. $6, free for spectators.

8 p.m. Kavanaugh's Hilltop Tap, 1228 30th St., Rock Island. Presented by the Mississippi Valley Blues Society. $15, $12 MVBS members.

9 p.m. Redstone Room, 129 Main St., Davenport. $12 day of show, $10 in advance.

9 p.m. Rock Island Brewing Company, 1815 2nd Ave. Cover charge.

8:30-11:30 a.m. Nahant Marsh, 4220 Wapello Ave., Davenport. Volunteers can work on a variety of projects including pulling garlic mustard, hauling brush and picking up debris along the roadway and river bank. Gloves, tongs and safety gear will be provided. Participants should wear comfortable, durable clothes and shoes that can get dirty. There may be wet areas so rubber boots or water-resistant shoes are recommended. Free.

9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Buffalo Community Center, 426 Clark St. Featuring garage sale items and vendors. The kitchen also will be open. Free.

9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Quad-City Food Forest, 1599 Garden Ave., Davenport. During this work day participants can help redo fencing, sheet mulch an expansion area, plant veggies, build new raised beds and build a new compost bin. There also will be a variety of kids activities including make-n-take fairy gardens. Food will be available from a food truck from noon to 2 p.m. with a portion of the proceeds to go to the Food Forest. Free.

9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dr. Sanders Chiropractic Office, 609 15th Ave., East Moline. Featuring an operating 2,000 square foot model railroad layout with 85 percent of the scenery completed. There also will be a Treasure Hunt for cildren and adults. Free with donations accepted.

9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ragged Records, 418 E. 2nd St., Davenport. This international event will feature one-day only limited-edition titles. There also will be live performances including Speaking of Secrets, Dead Forms, The Right Now, Bill MacKay, Dog Hairs and more. Free.

10-11:30 a.m. Davenport Public Library, 6000 Eastern Ave. Hosted by Science Of Spirituality. Free.

10 a.m. to noon Veterans Memorial Park, 1645 23rd St., Bettendorf. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. with the walk at 10 a.m. Free with donations accepted.

11 a.m. to 2 p.m. downtown Geneseo. Participants can view professional and amateur visual artists and musicians as they demonstrate their special talents throughout downtown. Free.

11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Quad-City Veterans Outreach Center, 250 W. 35th St., Davenport. The Quad-City Veterans Outreach Center will host this event for soldiers and veterans to choose a dress suit choices. There also will be a free lunch for family members and drivers and the Book Exchange will be open. Soldiers and veterans must have a military ID or papers. For more information, call 563-529-4782. Free.

1:15 p.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. Promotion: Irish Heritage Day/Logo Sunglasses Giveaway. $5 to $14.

1:30-2:30 p.m. Dairy Building, 410 N. Erickson St., Bishop Hill. Dr. Bill Hampes will present this scholarly program about the humor of President Abraham Lincoln. The 40 minute presentation will discuss the ways that President Abraham Lincoln used humor and also will utilize what psychologists and others have learned about humor to show how it reflected Lincoln's complex personality. For more information, call 309 927-3899 or email bhha@mymctc.net or visit bishophillheritage.org. Free.

2-3 p.m. Davenport Public Library, 3000 N. Fairmount St. Featuring crafts, activities and a chance to design and decorate a clay pot complete with a seed planted and ready to grow. For more information or to register (required), call 563-326-7832 or visit davenportlibrary.com. Free.

3-6 p.m. SouthPark Mall, 4500 16th St., Moline. $3 donation for cars, free for spectators.

4-6:30 p.m. LeClaire Civic Club, 127 S. Cody Road. $10 at door, $9 in advance, $6 for children 10 years and younger.

6-7 p.m. Metropolitan Community Church of the Quad-Cities, 2930 W. Locust St., Davenport. Worship will include music, inspirational readings and an open table for Holy Communion. Special guests from the Sage Sisters of Solidarity will perform. Following the service there will be board games and a potluck with participants encouraged to bring a dish to share. There will be complimentary coffee and tea provided and soft drinks available for purchase. For more information, call 563-324-8281. Free.

7 p.m. to midnight Bierstube, 415 15th St., Moline. This will be an all-ages show until 11 p.m. $5.

7 p.m. Rogalski Center, St. Ambrose University, Davenport. Featuring mulligans and doublers. Participants may bring snacks with drinks available for purchase. Childcare will be available with a donation at the Children's Campus. Reservations required for childcare. Proceeds benefit the Alumni Association and the St. Ambrose Children's Campus. For more information or to register a table, call 563-333-6290 or email alumni@sau.edu. $80 per table, $64 per table by April 19.

7 p.m. Arrowhead Youth and Family Services, 12200 104th St., Coal Valley. This trivia night with tables of eight players also will feature raffles for a children's John Deere Gator and youth made wooden items. Participants can bring snacks and beverages or purchase them at the event. No alcohol. To register a table, visit arrowheadyouth.org. Proceeds will support the programming for at risk youth at Arrowhead. $80 table, $10 per player.

7:30 p.m. First Lutheran Church, 364 E. Water St., Galesburg. Featuring the Nova Singers. $18 adults, $15 senior citizens (62 years and older), free for students.

7:30 p.m. Unitarian Church, 3707 Eastern Ave., Davenport. Chamber Music Quad-Cities will present this evening of chamber music with David Bowlin, violin, and Tony Cho, piano. For more information, call 309-797-0516 or visit chambermusicqc.com. $15 adults, $5 students.

8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Jim's Knoxville Tap, 8716 Knoxville Road, Milan. Free.

9 p.m. My Place The Pub, 4405 State St., Riverdale. Free.

9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Van's Pizza Pub and Grill, 425 15th St., Moline. Cover charge.

9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Hawkeye Sports Bar and Grill, 4646 Cheyenne Ave., Davenport. Free.

9 p.m. Rock Island Brewing Company, 1815 2nd Ave. Cover charge.

11 a.m.-5 p.m. Logger House, 256 S. State Ave., Hampton. Blackhawk Chapter ABATE of Illinois will host the first ride of the season with sign in beginning at 11 a.m. The ride will end at Crabby's in Coal Valley. The route and length will be determined by the weather. $5.

Noon to 4 p.m. Golden Leaf Banquet and Convention Center, 2902 E. Kimberly Road, Davenport. Featuring new and used tanks, equipment, decor, plants and live fish including Angel Fish, Discus, African Cichlids, Goldfish, over 100 bettas and more. Free.

1-4 p.m. Hanson Hall of Science, 726 35th St., Rock Island. Chemistry professors and students will be performing and explaining science demonstrations including color changes, explosions and more. there also will be a hands-on kids room and some of the labs will be open for viewing. Free.

1 p.m. Whitey's Ice Cream, 3515 Middle Road, Bettendorf. This short family-oriented relaxed walk, run or ride on the trails in Bettendorf will start and finish at Whitey's. Free ice cream certificates will be distributed to the first 50 youth participants. The City will provide light refreshments at the end of the event. Free.

1:15 p.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. Promotion: Family Funday/Bark In the Park/Post-game Run the Bases. $5 to $14.

4 p.m. St. Paul Lutheran Church, 2136 Brady St., Davenport. Featuring the Nova Singers. $18 adults, $15 senior citizens (62 years and older), free for students.

7 p.m. Temple Emanuel, 1115 Mississippi Ave., Davenport. Featuring keynote speaker Doris Fogel. For information, call 309-793-1300. Free.

8 p.m. Augustana College, 639 38th St., Rock Island. This event will begin in the Quad and will include a walk and information and activities designed to promote safe relationships. There will be representatives from RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) and SafePath, slam poetry and light refreshments. Free.

6:30-8 p.m. Moline Public Library, 3210 41st St. Featuring a screening of this new documentary by filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle that tells the story of barns in the Midwest by examining them through the lens of architecture. The film explores what building methods, barn styles and materials tell about the people who built them, the life they lived and the role these "country cathedrals" played in the settling and building of the Nation. There will be a Q&A with the filmmakers and other film participants following the screening. Free.

6:35 p.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. $5 to $14.

7 p.m. Wallenberg Hall, 3520 7th Ave., Rock Island. Doris Fogel will present this annual talk by a Holocaust survivor, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Judaism and Jewish Culture. Fogel will discuss her life story and the importance of never forgetting the stories of those who lived through the Holocaust. Free.

7:30 p.m. Assumption High School, 1020 W. Central Park Ave., Davenport. Featuring Cody Birely, Davenport, on percussion and Mallory Weaver, Bettendorf, on clarinet. Free-will donation.

9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Vista Grande, 2141 16th St. NW, Clinton. In conjunction with Older Americans Month, this fair will bring businesses and organizations together in one location to provide information, demonstrations, door prizes and fun for the 50-plus population. There will be over 40 different businesses and services on hand including financial services, retirement residences, realtors and more as well as special health screening opportunities by Mercy Medical Center. For accurate results, participants should fast for 8-10 hours. For screening instructions, cost and general information, call Mercy Medical Center at 563-244-3539. Free.

11 a.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. Promotion: Baseball In Education Day. $5 to $14.

7:30 p.m. Adler Theater, 136 E. 3rd St., Davenport. $38, $48 and $58.

6:35 p.m. Modern Woodmen Park, 209 S. Gaines St., Davenport. Promotion: Winning Wednesday with each person attending entered to win a Mega Blu-Ray Player. $5 to $14.

7 p.m.-1 a.m. Gunchie's, 2905 Telegraph Road, Davenport. Free.

7:30 p.m. Redstone Room, 129 Main St., Davenport. $25 day of show, $20 in advance.

11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Isabel Bloom, 736 Federal St., Davenport. Featuring an informative lunch about Rick's House of Hope, a Vera French program that focuses on children experiencing grief, trauma or loss. Speakers will include Rick's House of Hope staff, interns and community members. Lunch will be provided and a tour of the Isabel Bloom facility will be available after the program. For more ionformation or to reserve a spot (required by Thursday, April 20), email courvillea@verafrenchmhc.org. Free.

1 and 6 p.m. Scott County Extension Office, 875 Tanglefoot Lane, Bettendorf. Featuring an introduction to the butterflies of the Midwest, hummingbirds and other pollinators as well as the annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees the butterflies and hummingbirds enjoy in Midwest gardens. Participants can learn about the life cycle of butterflies and the role of gardens in promoting these fascinating and important pollinators. For more information or to register for classes, 563-359-7577 or visit extension.iastate.edu/scott/. $5.

5:30-8:30 p.m. Holiday Inn, 226 17th St., Rock Island. St. Joseph the Worker House will present this charity event to support homeless women and children in the Quad-Cities. The evening will feature beer, beverages, wings and more as well as emcee Tracy White and entertainment by Coleman Harris. $45.

7 p.m. Bettendorf High School Performing Arts Center, 333 18th St. This twenty voice official chorus for the United States Navy from Washington, D.C, will be accompanied by a three-piece rhythm section and will perform a variety of styles ranging from patriotic selections to Broadway showstoppers as well as everything in between. Tickets are required. To request tickets, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Navy Band Sea Chanters Concert, 3333 18th St., Bettendorf, IA 52722. For more information, call 563-332-7001. Free.

7:30 p.m. Redstone Room, 129 Main St., Davenport. $18 day of show, $15 in advance.

10 a.m. to noon Genesis Medical Center-Silvis, Larson Center, 855 Illini Drive, Silvis. Featuring keynote speaker Dr. Param Puneet Singh. There will be wellness and informational booths, including free screenings for body fat analysis, blood pressure, balance assessment, pulmonary screening and more. There also will be door prizes and snacks. For more information, call 309-281-4290. Free.

Noon to 12:45 p.m. Bettendorf Public Library, 2950 Learning Campus Drive. Featuring local musician Brundle's high energy, Big Acoustic Show. Attendees are encouraged to bring a sack lunch. Free.

6-9 p.m. Hy-Vee Market Grille, 2930 18th Ave., Rock Island. Free.

6-9 p.m. Cool Beanz Coffeehouse, 1325 30th St., Rock Island. Free.

6-9 p.m. Buffalo Community Center, 426 Clark St. Featuring four Lula Rue consultants. The kitchen will be serving Hispanic cuisine with margaritas available from the bar. All proceeds will help the Buffalo Community Group send kids to Camp Abe Lincoln this summer. Free.

6:15 p.m. Davenport Speedway, Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds. $12 adults, $10 students/senior citizens, $5 youth 7-12 years.

6:30-11 p.m. Assumption High School, 1020 W. Central Park Ave., Davenport. This fundraiser will feature live and silent auctions, Cubano food stations, an open bar with rum drink specials and salsa music. Proceeds benefits all students in the areas of tuition, academics, athletics, fine arts programs and technology. $55 per person.

7-11 p.m. Silver Spur Dance Hall, 1230 15th Ave., East Moline. Featuring deejay music for dancing. $7.

8 p.m. Daytrotter, 324 Brady St., Davenport. $12 at the door, $8 in advance.

8 p.m. Redstone Room, 129 Main St., Davenport. $10 day of show, $8 in advance.

9 p.m. Rock Island Brewing Company, 1815 2nd Ave. Cover charge.

7 a.m. to noon Black Hawk State Historic Site, 1510 46th Ave., Rock Island. Participants can meet by the Black Hawk statue by Watch Tower Lodge and expert leaders will help to locate both resident and migratory birds. At 9 a.m. the event will move into the Lodge for refreshments, including wild violet jelly, and a short program at 9:30 a.m. Then at 10 a.m. small groups will observe and identify wildflowers. This is an all-ages event. Participants can come for any or all events and can bring binoculars or use the binoculars provided. For more information, call 309-788-9536 or visit blackhawkpark.org. Free.

8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Longview Park, 17th Street and 18th Avenue, Rock Island. Over 6,500 square feet of shopping for toys, trinkets, furniture, home decor, books, clothes, antiques, and more. Rain date for this event will be Sunday, April 30. Free.

9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Grand Hannover Farm, 10700 160th St., Davenport. This non-profit horse club will sponsor a day of shopping, browsing and selling horse related items, tack and equipment, as well as baked goods, clothing feeders, buckets and more. Free.

9 a.m.-1 p.m. Quad-City Veterans Outreach Center, 250 W. 35th St., Davenport. The Quad-City Veterans Outreach Center will host this craft and gift show with all proceeds going to stock the Food Pantry. A variety of crafts, gifts and food will be available. Free.

9 a.m.-2 p.m. Faith Lutheran Church, 1611 41st St., Moline. Featuring over 40 vendors and homemade craft tables. There also will be lunch availabl;e for purchase and a bake sale. Non-perishable food donations for a neighborhood food pantry will be accepted. All proceeds will benefit activities for the elementary youth program. Free.

9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Eagle Point Park Lodge, , Clinton. Featuring a day of presentations, discussions and a film-screening exploring some of the forgotten figures, untold stories and other arcane aspects of area history. For more information or to RSVP (encouraged), email bradleywiles1@gmail.com or visit thesawmillmuseum.org/history-conference.html. Free.

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. RiverCenter, 136 E. 3rd St., Davenport , IA. Presented by the Quad-City Symphony Orchestra this day will feature music and arts for the whole family including local performances, an open stage hour, a musical instrument petting zoo, Scholastic Book Fair, musical plants and more. There also will be a Dr. Seuss Children's Book Reading Marathon where all 49 children's books written by Dr. Seuss will be read. Free.

11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Lincoln Park, 1115 11th St., DeWitt. St. Baldrick's Clinton County will host this event where participants shave heads to symbolize a walk in solidarity with kids who lose hair going through treatment and to raise funds for childhood cancer research. There also will be food vendors, music, kids' activities, a bake sale and silent auction. Attendees are encouraged to bring a lawn chair and tailgate. Free with donations accepted.

2:30 p.m. French Bluff State Natural Area, , Thomson. French Bluff will feature steep hills, ridge tops and terraced benches. The trail will begin with a long gradual climb up to the top and then winds around on the ridge top. Carpooling is encouraged as parking is limited. For more information, visit blackhawkhikingclub.org. Free.

2:30 p.m. Adler Theatre, 136 E. 3rd St., Davenport. Presented by the Quad-City Symphony Orchestra the Dr. Seuss classics, "Green Eggs and Ham" and "The Sneetches," will be set to the full symphonic sounds and animated by on stage actors, video and narration. $3 to $20.

5:30 p.m. Lulac Club, 4224 Ricker Hill Road, Davenport. Featuring teams of eight players. Participants may bring snacks with drinks available for purchase. There also will be mulligans, bonus doublers, raffle items and more. $80 per table, $10 per person.

6-10 p.m. American Legion Hall, 702 W. 35th St., Davenport. Featuring dancing, drawings, raffles and trivia throughout the night. There also will be 50's-style food available. 50's attire encouraged. Price includes a t-shirt. For more information or to register, call 563-650-1933 or email at bjrebarcak@gmail.com. All proceeds benefit childhood cancer. $20.

7 p.m. RME Community Stage, 129 Main St., Davenport. Free.

9 p.m. Rock Island Brewing Company, 1815 2nd Ave. Cover charge.

9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Rivertown Grille and Bar, 2606 W. Locust St., Davenport. Free.

9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Generations Bar and Grill, 4100 4th Ave., Moline. Free.

9 p.m. Redstone Room, 129 Main St., Davenport. $10.

9:30 a.m. Two Rivers United Methodist Church, 1820 5th Ave., Rock Island. The choirs of Two Rivers United Methodist Church and the Church of Peace in Rock Island will combine for this concert. There will be a second concert 10:30 a.m. Sunday, May 7 at Church of Peace. Free.

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Weekend calendar - Quad City Times

Anti-Defamation League Offers Spicer Holocaust Training After …

Posted By on April 17, 2017

Two days after White House press secretary Sean Spicer was accused of making a misleading statement about Hitler's use of chemical weapons, the Anti-Defamation League has offered to help educate him on the Holocaust.

During Tuesday's White House press briefing, Spicer compared Adolf Hitler to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after the latter was accused of attacking his own people with chemical weapons last week.

Spicer at first said Hitler never used chemical weapons on his own people, which he later clarified to mean Hitler never attacked his own people via chemical bombs dropped from airplanes which Assad was accused of doing.

The Anti-Defamation League responded by sending Spicer a letter that offered to teach him and other White House staffers about the atrocities of World War II.

"While you have apologized, this week's incident as well as others (notably, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement omitting Jews and your vociferous defense of it), have exposed a serious gap in your knowledge of the Holocaust, its impact, and the lessons we can learn from it," the letter from ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt reads.

"We have conducted trainings for more than 130,000 law enforcement professionals and more than 35,447 educators, reaching more than 1,000,000 students," Greenblatt wrote.

"ADL would be happy to conduct one of these trainings at your convenience for you, your staff, and anyone at the White House who may need to learn more about the Holocaust."

Millions of Jews died during the Holocaust, which included the use of gas chambers.

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Anti-Defamation League Offers Spicer Holocaust Training After ...

Anti-Defamation League offers Sean Spicer a Holocaust education class – Washington Examiner

Posted By on April 17, 2017

The Anti-Defamation League is offering a one-time class about the Holocaust to White House press secretary Sean Spicer following comments he made during a press briefing on how Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons against his own people.

"Unfortunately, when the first days of Passover ended and we turned to our phones and televisions yesterday evening, we learned about your comment that Hitler did not gas his own people. Your comparisons between [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad and Hitler were not only historically inaccurate but they also were inappropriate and offensive," ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt said in a letter to Spicer.

"ADL would be happy to conduct one of these trainings at your convenience for you, your staff, and anyone at the White House who may need to learn more about the Holocaust," Greenblatt said. "We know you are very busy, but we believe a few hours learning this history will help you understand where you went wrong and prevent you from making these mistakes in the future."

The training includes historical context for how the Holocaust was able to occur, a human-interest look at the event and creates opportunities for critical thinking on the issue.

ADL has trained more than 130,000 law enforcement professionals and 35,000 educators on the Holocaust. In light of Spicer's "lack of knowledge" on the topic, the group hopes the White House communications official will take it up on the offer.

Spicer on Tuesday compared Assad to Hitler, saying that Hitler "didn't even sink to using chemical weapons" during World War II.

After a reporter pointed out the Holocaust, Spicer replied: "He brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that," Spicer said. "But in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns and dropped them down to innocent in the middle of towns. I appreciate the clarification, that was not the intent."

Greenblatt also took a swipe at Spicer for a January incident in which the White House's International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement omitted Jews, calling Spicer's defense "vociferous."

ADL did not disclose the cost of the training or if it is complimentary.

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Anti-Defamation League offers Sean Spicer a Holocaust education class - Washington Examiner

Haaretz columnist stands by claim religious Zionists worse than Hezbollah – The Times of Israel

Posted By on April 16, 2017

Haaretz columnist Yossi Klein on Friday doubled down on opinions he set out in a piece published earlier this week that caused a storm, in which he claimed that the religious Zionist movement is more dangerous than Hezbollah.

In the opinion piece, published Wednesday and titled in Hebrew Our self-righteous elite, Klein wrote: The national religious are dangerous. More dangerous than Hezbollah, more than drivers in car-ramming attacks or girls with scissors (referring to a stabbing terror attack by a Palestinian teenage girl). The Arabs can be neutralized, but they cannot. He went on: What do they want? To rule the country and cleanse it of Arabs.

The article was condemned by President Reuven Rivlin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of his coalition partners, including members of the religious Zionist Jewish Home party. Prominent opposition lawmakers condemned the op-ed as well, and accused Klein of harming the Israeli left.

Defending his assertions in a TV interview, Klein said his comparison to Hezbollah was intended to highlight that religious Zionism has become a political body, and that combining politics with religion is dangerous no less than Hezbollah.

When his Channel 2 interviewer, Amnon Abramovich, told Klein that Hezbollah should not be in your arsenal when he writes, Klein said criticizing his piece because of that comparison was missing the issue.

The issue is us what happens among us and what is convenient for us to overlook, Klein said.

After being accused by Abramovich of committing the sin of generalization, and being confronted with a list of religious-Zionist thinkers who were moderate and promoted dialogue, Klein said any listing of the religious Zionist group should also include the Jewish underground, a Jewish terror group active in the 1980s, and Yigal Amir, who assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Every generalization by its nature, Klein said, misses the individuals. I refer to religious Zionism as a political body, he said, adding that naturally, when you examine individuals in the political camp, you will find a range of opinions.

If you want to influence people, retorted Abramovich, you must not use ear splitting expressions.

Klein claimed that the Israeli right-wing allows itself to act in ways that are forbidden to the left-wing. The justice minister (Ayelet Shaked of Jewish Home) said my piece was anti-Semitic, he said. She didnt even read it. She cant point to anything anti-Semitic about it. She just said it. You know, you taint something you dislike with an adjective like anti-Semitic, and thats it, you did your part. Or incitement. What is inciting in this piece?

Defending his choices of wording, Klein said: I use the language that is acceptable today. This language where the right-wing generalizes and the left-wing generalizes, this is apparently the language that has become acceptable here.

I am not the one who began with name-calling, Klein said. It is the current government that began with name-calling. It is the government that generalizes about the left and calls us traitors. It is he who whispered in the ear of Rabbi Kaduri that the left-wingers forgot what it means to be Jews.

Klein was referring to a comment made by Netanyahu in the late 1990s when he visited Kaduri, who was considered an influential voice among Israels religious electorate.

Abramovich said the articles opening lines, which featured the Hezbollah reference, are the heart of its problems, to which Klein answered: You know what? Take these first three lines, excise them and throw them away. Do you agree with the rest?

Klein added: I cannot ignore the fact that this op-ed presents me in a light that is not true. I see myself as patriotic. Ill tell you more: I see myself as more patriotic than them, because I genuinely believe the things that they are doing and everyone who criticizes them is labeled as anti-patriotic or even anti-Semitic these things hurt me, hurt this country, this country which is my homeland.

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Haaretz columnist stands by claim religious Zionists worse than Hezbollah - The Times of Israel

U.S. action against genocide: a brief guide – Heritage Florida Jewish … – Heritage Florida Jewish News

Posted By on April 16, 2017

President Donald Trumps missile strike against Syria inaugurates a new chapter in the long and controversial history of American responsesand sometimes nonresponsesto mass murder around the world.

Although the killing of Syrian civilians by President Bashar al-Assads regime does not technically constitute genocidewhich the United Nationsdefined in 1948as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as suchthere is no doubt Assad has committed heinous and large-scale war crimes.

Trumps decision to order missile strikes on Syria was primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns over Assads latest chemical attack on Syrian civilians, although Trump also cited the danger to U.S. interests posed by chemical weapons proliferation.

How does Trumps action compare to past U.S. responses to genocide? Here is a sampling:

Islamic State

Under congressional pressure in 2015, the Obama administration belatedly declared that the atrocities committed by the Islamic State terror group against Yazidis, Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in Syria and Iraq constitute genocide. The administrations decision did not, however, result in any change in the U.S. policy of limited air strikes against Islamic State.

Libya

In response to attacks on Libyan civilians by Muammar Gaddafi in early 2011, President Barack Obama authorized U.S. participation with its allies in air and naval strikes against the Libyan leader. Citing the weak international response to Bosnia, Obama said intervention in Libya was necessary to prevent a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. Gaddafi was killed and his regime was overthrown.

Darfur

President George W. Bush saw no compelling reason to intervene in the Sudanese governments mass murder of an estimated 500,000 non-Arab civilians in the Darfur region, which began in 2003. The Bush administration also initially resisted congressional calls to categorize the killing as genocide. President Obama continued the policy of non-intervention in Darfur. The International Criminal Court in 2009 indicted Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir on genocide charges, but the Obama administration declined to seek his arrest or to establish a no-fly zone over Sudan, despite ongoing atrocities.

Rwanda

The Clinton administration was aware, in real time, of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis by Hutu death squads in Rwanda in early 1994. Susan Rice, then director of African Affairs for the National Security Council, opposed U.S. intervention because of its possible effect on the November [congressional] elections. At the urging of then-U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright, the U.S. supported withdrawal of international peacekeepers in Rwanda who were thought to be in danger. Ironically, Albright later co-chaired the Genocide Prevention Task Force for the Obama administration.

Bosnia

Legal scholars adopted the term ethnic cleansing to characterize the widespread atrocities in the Balkans war of 1992-1995, which were carried out primarily by Serbs against Muslims. President Bill Clinton initially resisted U.S. intervention, but in response to a July 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, Clinton authorized U.S. participation in NATO airstrikes. The bombing campaign resulted in the warring parties negotiating an end to the conflict.

Cambodia

In the wake of the unpopular Vietnam War, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter declined to intervene when the newly victorious communist regime in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, carried out the mass murder of an estimated 2 million civilians (many of whom were targeted as ethnic and religious minorities) from 1975-1979.

The Holocaust

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration rejected requests to bomb the Auschwitz death camp or the railway lines leading to it, claiming such action would require diverting American planes from battle zones. In reality, U.S. planes in 1944 repeatedly bombed German synthetic oil fields adjacent to Auschwitz, some of them less than five miles from the gas chambers. The real reason the administration declined to take such military action was its fearas one senior State Department official put itof the danger that the German government might agree to turn over to the United States and to Great Britain a large number of Jewish refugees.

The U.S. bombing of Budapest in the summer of 1944, although unrelated to the mass killing of the Jews, did unintentionally affect the murder process. Hungarian officials intercepted messages from local Jews pleading for U.S. military intervention, and mistakenly concluded that the U.S. strikes on Budapest were in response to the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. As a result, Hungary belatedly halted its cooperation with the deportations, bringing them to a halt.

Armenia

The idea of U.S. intervention against atrocities abroad first arose during Turkeys World War I-era slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians. Then-former President Theodore Roosevelt urged declaring war on Turkey. The failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense, he warned in 1918.

Roosevelts plea attracted few supporters. To this day, successive presidents have declined to publicly acknowledge that the killings constituted genocide, over fear of upsetting U.S.-Turkey relations. The sensitivity of the issue was further illustrated by the Obama administrations refusal, for more than a year, to display a hand-woven rug sent by Armenian orphans to the White House in 1925 in appreciation for Americas postwar aid.

Looking ahead

This months commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah) will be the occasion for much discussion concerning the contrast between Americas traditionally meager response to genocide, and the dramatic U.S. action in Syria. Was the missile attack a one-time gesture, or does it represent a substantive change in American policy? Time will tell.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and author or editor of 16 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.

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U.S. action against genocide: a brief guide - Heritage Florida Jewish ... - Heritage Florida Jewish News


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