Swedish socialist apologist Anders Svensson once told me in an email that he doesn’t possess a sense of humour. Everything is grim reality to him. I think he was lying. In an entry on his blog posted today, he delivers the best piece of comedy I have read in quite a while.

He writes that the group that took responsibility for the past week’s terror attacks in Södertälje, Sweden, does not exist. The police got it wrong because they dislike rioters, the journalists got wrong because they are crusaders, the group itself got it wrong because they aren’t real, and the expert on socialist terrorism quoted in several newspapers got it wrong because he is a liberal. Furthermore, Svensson writes that the non-existing group that burned four supermarkets on Thursday poses no threat to the Israeli tennis players who are about to visit Malmö for Davis Cup. The fact that flyers threatening violence can be seen in the streets of Malmö is dismissed. Like the people that made them, the flyers do not exist. If you see one, you are probably a liberal crusader with a bias against communist rioters, which disqualifies your observation.

It’s obvious to me that Svensson is nothing but a fantasist with an agenda. He has done this sort of thing before. According to him, none of my immigrant friends who have fled homophobic violence has ever been attacked. There are no honour crimes and gay organisations only make these things up to justify Western imperialism and Islamophobia.

No fallacy or insult is too corny for this socialist apologist.

Someone snapped this photo at a New York demonstration against government spending. I copied the picture from Glenn Reynolds’s blog.

Religious people hostile to homosexuality have tried to explain the phenomenon for at least two millennia. None of these explanations is scientific, many of them are not even compatible with the religion in question, and some are so bizarre it is hard to take them seriously. The Jewish philosopher Philo had an explanation that belongs to the latter category. In his On Abraham, he speculates about homosexuality being a result of excessive food production.

Christian theologian John Boswell writes of Philo:

For Platonist Jews like Philo, any use of human sexuality, potential or actual, which did not produce legitimate offspring violated “nature”: all moral issues were subordinate to the primary duty of males to procreate. Celibacy was as “unnatural” as homosexuality, failure to divorce a barren wife as “unnatural” as masturbation. (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: 148)

American academic Bruce L. Gerig is a fiercer critic. After intense scriptural reseach, he concludes that the description of the Sodomites as homosexuals was established by Philo and the Jewish philosopher Josephus, who based their thoughts on contemporary writings. In his essay Sodom: An Ancient Story Refashioned, Gerig writes:

In Concerning Abraham (26), he [Philo] envisioned the Sodomites giving themselves over to “deep drinking of strong liquor. … Not only in their mad lust for women did they violate the marriages of their neighbors, but also men mounted males … and so when they [later] tried to beget children they were discovered to be incapable of any but a sterile seed.” Philo must be given credit for recognizing that the men of Sodom were capable heterosexuals; however, his ideas of severe alcoholism, rampant heterosexual adultery, same-sex activity between citizens, and a resulting sterility in heterosexual coitus are all details that have no base in the Genesis 19 text.

It’s an academic bitch-slap.

For the serious learner I would recommend Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, but for the busy learner this video will do.

This video is truly disturbing. Unfortunately, it shows an important aspect of the Middle East conflict. The mythology makes people do things they would not do otherwise. One must understand this to get a clear picture of the conflict and what it is about.

(Via Fred i Mellanöstern.)

“After years of working within the rabbinate, I’m convinced that Orthodox Jews should support some form civil marriage in Israel,” Rabbi Seth Farber writes on his blog. “In fact, Orthodox Jews should probably be at the lead of such an initiative.”

I have followed this debate in Israel from a distance as it is linked to the question of marriage equality, and I must say I’m a bit stunned by Rabbi Farber’s progressive attitude in this matter. Hopefully, his willingness to accept those who cannot live up to demands set by “the Orthodox halacha” will in time include Israeli same-sex couples.

Since studies have confirmed that circumcision helps reduce the spread of HIV, more and more people consider this a workable method to lower the risk of transmission in regions badly hit by AIDS. This is why actor Roger Moore is part of a fund-raising campaign that will allow Israeli doctors to train Africans to perform circumcisions.

I guess this will upset some. Personally, however, I see only benefits from circumcision. I realise there are some ethical issues involved, but most of the opposition to circumcision is based on misperceptions. If a drive to circumcise more men will reduce the spread of HIV, I’m all for it.

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter runs an article today about the anti-Jewish activists who plan to stop the David Cup match between Sweden and Israel on Saturday. According to the activists, buses will transport protesters to Malmö from Stockholm, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, and a number of other towns and cities in Scandinavia. One of the interviewed, Omar Rihawi, says he expects about 2,000 people to travel by train from Stockholm and Uppsala. He also rules out any dialogue between Jews and Palestinians. Only humiliation of Israeli Jews will do.

The activists say they expect about 10,000 people to partake in this organised attack on a peaceful tennis tournament. If they are right, this will be the single largest expression of anti-Jewish sentiments in Swedish history. Meanwhile, many ordinarily moderate Swedes will see any rioting as a natural consequence of massive Muslim immigration.

The only thing certain is that the extremists will gain strength the minute the first rocks begin to fly in the air. The far right will use it in their Islamophobic and xenophobic propaganda; and the far left and the Islamists will use it to step up their campaign against Jews and the Jewish State.

Swedish communists have no sense of humour, that has been established. That doesn’t stop them from producing some of the best comedy. I found a new example of this just now. Thirty-five organisations—most of them tiny groups with a handful of members—have written a letter to the Swedish government complaining about Israelis killing civilians in Gaza. The pain and suffering they describe is not funny at all, but so is the fact that most of them are themselves eager advocates of killing innocent civilians in the name of class warfare. In fact, some of them frequently demand Swedish democracy be toppled and all members of the government be killed in an armed revolution.

It’s a bit like reading about the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials complaining about ill-treatment. Sad, but also very funny, in an ironic sort of way. Not that the people who signed the letter will ever understand.

An anonymous blogger has taken this photo of a poster protesting the political decision not to allow an audience at the Davis Cup match in Malmö on Saturday. Most posters in Malmö are radically different from this one. The city is littered with posters and fliers demanding a complete destruction of Israel.

Just a cool homage to Ayn Rand.

An asteroid with the potential force of a thousand atomic bombs whizzed close past Earth yesterday.

Newsweek has made an informative map.

Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet publishes an article by two Marxist activists and a former Green Party MEP. The entire article is an example of a popular fallacy. The three authors states that many Palestinians have died from weapons fired by the Israeli Defence Forces. This is a fact, no one is arguing with that. However, counting bodies in an armed conflict will not tell us which side is morally superior. The only thing we learn is how many lives have been lost on either side.

This line of ethical reasoning seems to be the new big thing among leftist activists, but honestly, would anyone buy into this kind of argument unless they already possessed a strong bias against one party. Let us take a closer look at this.

Imagine we come across two men having a fistfight in the street. We see them fight, but don’t know why. Suddenly, one of the men falls to the ground dead. My guess is that our first reaction would be that the man still standing is in the wrong. Now, this is what I think anyone lacking more information would assume. From what we know, one man killed another with his fists. However, we later learn that the dead man attacked the killer and his family only minutes before our observation began. It turns out the killer defended himself and his family from a brutal attack, which resulted in the death of the attacker. Now, if we were to apply the reasoning of the article authors, the man who defended his family should be condemned on ethical grounds because the attacker’s loss was greater. After all, one party lost his life while the other will be able to go on with his. The loss was unevenly split.

Is this sound ethical reasoning? I say no, and so would probably most unbiased judges.

Palestinian terrorists, some elected leaders in democratic elections, have sent nearly 7,000 rockets into Israel over the past two years. Israel’s response was violent and resulted in many dead Palestinians, many of whom were civilians. These are the facts. And to fairly judge who is to blame in this conflict, one must contemplate all the facts, not just settle for a body count.

Via Erik Svansbo’s blog, I found this short and informative film about Israel and the Jewish State entitled What Really Happened in the Middle East. It is very emotional, and I bet many will find some if its contents questionable. However, one thing I found particularly interesting was what Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, said about the Palestinian refugees. Whenever I have pointed out that the Palestinians now trapped in horrific refugee camps in Arab countries were forced out by the Arab states, I have been accused of Islamophobia and been labelled a propagandist. Therefore, it is worth noting that Mr Abbas’s take on this historic event is the same as mine. In the film, he is quoted as saying:

The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.

People often talk about the Israeli occupation of Palestine as if this is a fact beyond questioning. I say it is far more complicated then that. It is true that the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union consider Jewish settlements in the West Bank an occupation of Palestinian land. I will not argue with that. The problem is that there never was a Palestinian land to begin with; at least not on the ground most settlers now consider their home. So the question we are faced with is as old as political philosophy: When and how do you take ownership of land? The libertarian answer normally dates back to John Locke and reads that unclaimed land becomes private property the moment someone starts working on it.

Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet reports that at least one Nazi organisation will join forces with the commies and Islamists in their attempt to stop the Sweden-Israel tennis match in Malmö on Saturday. I’m not at all surprised. European communists and Arab Islamists were close friends of the Nazis the first time around.

If you have nothing better to do you can watch Germans get undressed online. I’m not sure, but I think it’s an art thing.

Jeffrey Goldberg shares a Presbyterian joke with the readers of his Atlantic advice column:

A Presbyterian husband makes love to his Presbyterian wife. After finishing, the husband asks, “I’m sorry, dearest, did I hurt you?” The wife responds, “No, dear, why do you ask?” The husband answers, “Because you moved.”

Olof Holmgren, official spokesperson for the organisers of the anti-Jewish rally in Malmö on Saturday, has been seen frequently in Swedish media the past few days. And yesterday he was invited to speak at Malmö University. Why? The man heads a network that consists of the most outrageous racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic organisations imaginable.

Andrew Sullivan has published a picture of an Iranian woman who was blinded by a man throwing acid in her face. He writes that a 2008 ruling by the Iranian court says that the perpetrator should also be blinded with acid. It’s an eye for an eye, literally.

Lex talionis, as this law is called in Latin, was established in the earliest religious scriptures. It is one of the laws some philosophers say hint of a universal, culturally-neutral ethics. The idea of a perpetrator being forced to experience the crime he has committed is also established in Immanuel Kant’s ethics. Although I doubt the German philosopher would go along with blinding people with acid, he considered it an act of respect for the criminal person to treat him the way he had treated his victims.

I wish there were no such thing as Israel Apartheid Week, but it is for real. It’s truly sickening to see this display of anti-Semitism dressed up as a manifestation against racism and xenophobia.

Comic strip by Yaakov Kirschen, who also quotes the famous passage from Main Kampf where Hitler writes that “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility”.

Overall, the anti-Jewish rally was a failure for the organisers. For weeks, they have bragged about the 10,000 people who were to join them in today’s attempt to stop the Sweden-Israel tennis game. The police estimate that less than 6,000 people participated.

As is the case at all extremist rallies, a group of masked youth threw homemade bombs, paving stones, and bottles at the police. About a hundred people were taken into custody.

It is quite likely that the violence will continue overnight. The synagogue and other Jewish institutions have extra surveillance. Gay clubs have been warned of the Nazi troublemakers visiting Malmö this weekend.

Despite their failure in numbers, today’s march through central Malmö was the city’s biggest ever display of ethnical hatred and xenophobia.

Nearly five per cent of the world’s adult population take illegal drugs. America spends more than forty billion dollars each year on its domestic war on drugs. Half a million Americans are sentenced to prison every year for drug offences. Still, the United States government and others claim the war on drugs is a success. The Economist writes:

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless.

The newspaper offers legalisation as “the least bad policy”:

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

I agree. It is time to scrap the utopian policy of zero tolerance against drugs. Read the article in full here.

Funny signs from the Daily Telegraph.

A group of demonstrators at yesterday’s anti-Jewish rally in Malmö. Some communists are revoltingly stupid.

(By unknown photographer, received by email.)

Israeli tennis player Andy Ram writes about his experience of a Swedish city taken over by an anti-Jewish mob:

Up until the last moment, the protestors attempted to prompt the cancelation of the David Cup match between Israel and Sweden. After we already landed here, their leader met with Swedish team captain Mats Wilander and asked him to call off the contest.

The Swedish players actually understand us and are quite embarrassed by what is happening, yet these events have completely changed my perception of Sweden, and it is doubtful whether I’ll want to come back here ever again.

The feelings within the Israel team are very grim. All the innocence that prompted us to play tennis has disappeared, and this match, which was supposed to be a beautiful moment of sports, has become completely worthless. Nothing here is reminiscent of the Davis Cup; what we have is a war atmosphere, tension, and the feeling that something very bad may happen at any moment.

I have never seen the kind of security that we are receiving here; not even in Dubai, where I played a few weeks ago. At any given moment, we are surrounded by police vehicles, undercover police officers, and anti-terror forces. Every morning, they take us from the hotel to the stadium via another route, through an underground parking lot, with part of the ride being undertaken in armored vehicles.

[…]

During such days, we are even prouder to be Israeli, and we shall do everything to restore our honor, which they try to trample here. In this respect, the best service we can do for ourselves and for the country is to win, and I believe we can do it.

And they did just that. Israel defeated Sweden.

A new survey shows that Swedes are overwhelmingly in favour of the monarchy. Only nineteen per cent say they want Sweden to become a republic.

Impressively brave architecture for one of the world’s oldest and most historic cities. The project was approved last year and construction has now begun. The Tolerance Museum will be located only a ten-minute walk from the Old Town.

Friends of free trade should welcome President Obama’s move towards an end to the economic embargo. Cuban communism is no longer a threat to the United States and the democratic world, and the blockade only helps the communist propagandists. With open borders, Cuba will eventually move away from totalitarianism and embrace liberty. This might take a few decades, but slow progress is better than no progress.

In an outbreak of homophobia at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, one religious protester said, “Better a male with a dog than a male with a male.” That is an example of what homophobia do to Torah studies.

The religious student was part of a group protesting a decision to allow gay couple to stay in flats previously reserved for married heterosexuals. The attempt to reverse the decision failed, so the institute’s rabbi, Eliyahu Rachamim Zini, now demands that the mezuzot be removed from the flats of gay couples.

This seems very odd to me. I have always been taught that the more mitzvot one can comply with, the better. But now Rabbi Zini is bending this principle by denying gay Jews the right to do one mitzvah as punishment for not complying with another.

In my opinion, the negative mitzvah prohibiting men to “lie with a man as one lies with a woman” does not have the meaning homophobes like Zini want it to have. But even if you don’t buy into my liberal interpretation of halakhah, there are Orthodox rabbis more in tune with my reading than Zini’s. One of these is Steven Greenberg, who wrote this in an article on same-sex marriage:

Gay people cannot be asked to be straight, but they can be asked to “hold fast to the covenant.” Holding fast to the covenant demands that gay people fulfill the mitzvot that are in their power to fulfill. Same-sex couples cannot procreate without outside assistance, but there are other ways to build a family and a marriage.

My point exactly. Why, then, are many Orthodox Jews so eager to make gay Jews less observant than they need to be?

“It’s time for Sweden to change sides and come out against, not for, the new war against Israel and the Jews,” Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman write in the Jerusalem Post.

Comic strips by Yaakov Kirschen.

I was in a peculiar mood this morning. I couldn’t sleep and felt restless and sad. So, I took a long walk in the harbour before dawn and then decided to join the 7 a.m. spinning class at my gym. I snapped this photo when a walked through one of the quieter parts of Malmö’s harbour area. The sea and the sky made everything very blue, which felt suitable for my mood at the time.

Astonishingly, there are secondary school pupils in Britain who believe Auschwitz to the brand name of a particular kind of beer or bread. Others believe that the Nazi concentration camp is a religious festival.

British MP George Galloway, best known for his friendship with Saddam Huissein and every other fascist leader, couldn’t resist the opportunity to put some blame on the only democracy in the Middle East. As the fascist propagandist he is, he travelled to Gaza via Egypt to meet his terrorist buddies in Hamas. Ahmed Kurd, Hamas’s minister of social affairs, called Galloway a hero. It all makes sense, of course, but it’s so sad. Galloway is no hero.

If you are one of those who think homophobia is natural whereas homosexuality is something constructed, or if you are a gay man who has internalised homophobic ideas, this is the book to prove you wrong. In 450 pages, Professor Byrne Fone gives you the history of homophobia. In his Homophobia: A History, he explains how religious leaders “discovered” God’s hate of gay men when it suited them; and how secular leaders used homophobic rhetoric to demonise their enemies.

The article was published in The Local on Saturday, the day of the anti-Jewish rally in Malmö, but I did not read it until now. Anyhow, David Stavrou makes a few excellent points that still make the article well worth reading.

The article made me think of Edmund Burke’s words, “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.”

Precisely so. We must never give in to the extremists’ threats of violence.

For the first time in Israeli history, a court has ruled that a same-sex male couple can legally adopt their foster son.

BBC News reports:

Seven people have been arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of planning to blow up shops in Amsterdam.

Police said they had acted on a tip a day earlier from an anonymous caller in Belgium who had warned of attacks intended to cause many casualties.

The suspects, six men and a woman, have joint Dutch and Moroccan citizenship.

One of the arrested men is a relative to one of the terrorist responsible for the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and wounded another 1,800.

Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports that one of the planned targets was Swedish furniture retailer IKEA.

Venezuela’s de facto dictator Hugo Chávez has taken control of the country’s highways, ports, and airports. Considering how much the radical left has tried to convince the democratic world that Chávez’s hyped 21st century socialism is different from the 20th century socialism that ended when the Soviet Union collapsed, it is fascinating to see how Venezuela is turning into a traditional totalitarian-style one-man show. It is like watching a Brezhnev reincarnation at work.

Paulina Neuding on how a tennis match sparked riots in Sweden, in the Weekly Standard.

(Via Johan Ingerö.)

Paulina Neuding:

Two weeks after Jews were chased from the main square in Malmö under cries of “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,” the Jewish community decided to organise a second demonstration. This time the police were prepared for violent counterprotests, and swiftly placed their buses between the two groups as soon as they saw signs of aggression. And this time, the Jews got to stay on the square.

One protester, a computer consultant in his mid-fifties, had still armed himself with a knife for the demonstration. His grown-up children, who had never before seen their father carry a weapon, wondered if he even knew what he would do with it.

“What do you mean what will I do with it?” he said with his thick Polish accent. “I will give you time to run.”

I was there, and I know what happened. Reading about it now still makes my blood boil. And arrogant communists still pretend there is no anti-Semitism in Sweden. Humiliating Jews in the streets is all about criticizing Israeli politics, they say. Yeah, right! And Nazism was all about questioning kashruth.

A new report suggests three per cent of residents in the US capital has HIV or AIDS. This, according to an article in the Washington Post, is far above the threshold that constitutes a “generalised and severe” epidemic. Shocking.

Good news from the Danish Parliament:

There has been a majority vote in parliament today to introduce a bill giving same-sex couples in registered partnerships the right to adopt. The proposal, from Civil Centre Party founder Simon Emil Ammitzbøll, would give partners registered in civil unions the right to adopt unrelated children both domestically and internationally.

Denmark currently allows individuals to adopt, regardless of sexual orientation, and for couples to adopt their partner’s existing children. The new proposal would allow same-sex couples to jointly petition for adoption.

This is the first time such a proposal has received a parliamentary majority. Six members of the government’s Liberal Party voted against their colleagues to give a 62-53 majority for the proposal. It signals that parliamentary members want the government to draft a bill granting equal adoption rights for civil partnership and married couples.

Should the future bill be passed into law, Denmark will join the ranks of other Nordic countries including Iceland, Norway and Sweden in allowing equal adoption rights for couples.

According to the Swedish National Food Administration, at least four large abattoirs have been found to boil pigs alive.

And people say kosher slaughter is cruel.

Gay Jews do speed dating in Washington, DC. I know a few people who would love for such an event in Scandinavia. Perhaps something for the slumberous Jewish Group at the Gay Centre in Stockholm to pick up? Remember to credit me for the idea so the lovebirds know whom to thank!

I have been really stressed out the past few days. And today, when I finally had the time to relax, a severe cold hit me. Now I sit here feverish feeling sorry for myself as I can hardly breath.

Blogging will return to normal pace once I recover and gain enough energy to care about something beside myself.

British MP George Galloway, once a close friend of Saddam Hussein, has been denied entry to Canada for his bragging about giving financial support to terrorist organisation Hamas. Good for Canada.

I don’t understand why Haaretz introduces Mr Galloway as an “anti-war member of parliament”. He is very far from a peace activist; he is a despicable man. The only wars this man opposes are those fought by democratic states against fascist regimes and terrorist organisations.

The New Jersey Board of Cosmetology and Hairstyling is considering a ban on so-called Brazilian waxing. Now the professional beauty technicians fear that some customers might try to wax themselves. This is what usually happens when legislators ban things people demand. Instead of trying to seek safer methods on an open and legal market, people end up taking bigger risks when doing it themselves.

Hamas has fired thousands of rockets against Israelis civilians. According to Hamas rhetoric, every Jew, no matter what age or gender, is a legitimate target. And it doesn’t matter if the Jew lives in Tel Aviv or New York; Hamas aims to eliminate the body of Israel altogether.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) entered Gaza in January in an attempt to stop Hamas’s rockets from being fired into Israel. After being accused of wrongdoing, Israeli soldiers are now giving testimonies to what happened during the military operation. It seems apparent that at least some rabbis and commanders labelled the conflict a holy war, and some testimonies suggest Palestinian civilians were deliberately targeted on a few occasions.

When fighting evil fascist organisations like Hamas, one always runs the risk of copying the enemy’s methods. We could see this happen occasionally when Western Europe fought communist terrorist organisations like the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction in the 1970s. This copycat behaviour must never be allowed for the simple reason that it corrupts the mind of the righteous. Therefore, Israel is doing the right thing by allowing soldiers to testify about cases where the IDF did wrong to the Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Hamas would never admit any wrongdoing. To them, any civilian Jew is a legitimate target in their holy war. To kill and torment civilians is what a Hamas soldier is trained to do.

But Israel is better, and by openly recognizing and discussing its faults and mistakes, the IDF is once again proving its moral superiority in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Swedish state television has published an article I have written. It is about the war on drugs and its devastating effects. You can read it here.

I just read an article by Avi Shafran, an Orthodox rabbi who argues that Conservative Judaism has become superfluous since it is betraying its funding idea, which he says is to conserve Jewish religious practice in the face of the threat posed by Reform Judaism.

As always, whether to discriminate gays is seen as the ultimate observance test. Being fair to gay Jews simply will not do if one is to serve God.

In a respond to criticism from the Conservative Rabbi Samuel Fraint, Rabbi Shafran makes this telling comment:

I was, I admit, unaware that the Conservative rule allowing a dissenting opinion requires the opinion to have garnered a certain minimum of votes. My assumption otherwise, however, was hardly essential to my argument that the ground is clearly being prepared for an acceptance of homosexual lifestyles.

And why Rabbi Fraint sees an Orthodox rabbi claiming to be homosexual as pertinent to the question of whether halachah permits homosexual acts is unclear to me. Any “Orthodox rabbi” claiming that halachah sanctions such acts is, ipso facto, not Orthodox in belief.

Why does Orthodox Judaism encourage Torah studies? Why not just hand out booklets with all the right interpretations and shut down discussion altogether? Any reading not completed and written down in the ancient past is rejected anyway.

I could laugh at the arrogance. However, one thing that bothers be about Rabbi Shafran’s smug attitude is that it hurts many Orthodox Jews who struggle to be good men and women but fail to comply with traditional understanding of this one mitzvah, which in an old English translation reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.”

Seriously, I have never had sex with a man as with a woman. And in an Orthodox theological context, I would argue that God knew that gay men do not normally treat their spouses as women or wives, but that it would be a crime to do just that. The mitzvoth are about respect for God, nature, fellow Jews, family, and loved ones—which is precisely why a man should be treated as a man even when making love to another man.

Number two in Victor Davis Hanson’s list of the biggest ironies of 2008:

I confess this war on terror business is coming down to fear or no fear. A film maker, a novelist, or a comedian dreams publicly of killing George Bush—and he wins a big book contract or an arts award. A cartoonist does a sketch of a Mohammed and he faces death threats. Liberal contrarians honor the former and abandon the latter.

We are told terrorism bad, democracy good. Really? Every terrorist Hamas rocket is aimed at a Democratic civilian; every Democratic IDF air-to-ground missile is aimed at a terrorist.

The common denominator in all this? George Bush or an IDF colonel is not going to show up at your editorial office in New York or Madrid or Paris with a suicide vest on. Write a novel about Bush deserving to die, as did Nicholson Baker, and you win a Knopf contract; write one about the Prophet as did Salman Rushdie and you go into hiding for a decade.

Nyheter24, a Swedish online news website, has published a short interview with me. I talk about why I want drugs to be legalised.

The interview with me published by Nyheter24 yesterday has caused some stir in the Moderate Party. I’m not surprised—that article does not give a fair account of my position on drug legalisation. So, I urge everyone to read my own article about the global war on drugs and my reasons for advocating legalisation.

I know the topic is controversial, but I firmly believe that it needs to be addressed and debated. Sweden’s drug policy has failed. Compared to the Netherlands—which has Europe’s most relaxed attitude towards soft drugs—Sweden sees twice as many people die from narcotic drugs every year. The key is that the Netherlands has successfully focused on rehabilitation and harm reduction. It is not a crime to take drugs in the Netherlands, which enables people to seek professional help when they begin to develop an addiction. Furthermore, by allowing the “incurable” drug addicts legal access to narcotics, the black market has lost an incentive to recruit new addicts.

I want an open debate about drugs and how best to help people struggling with harmful addiction. It is a taboo subject, but people are dying from narcotic drugs and as a politician with a social conscience, I must ask myself how to make things better for those who suffer. I think a first step would be to stop treat drug addicts as criminals.

The graph (click to enlarge) to the left shows the mortality rate among drug users in the EU. The statistics come from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. The table to the right comes from the Swedish National Institute of Public Health and shows in detail the mortality rate among Swedish drug users. Nothing suggests criminalisation of addicts and the global war on drugs have done what the legislators predicted it would.

Update: “Incitement” changed to “incentive” in the second paragraph. The former would indicate encouragement to do or feel something unpleasant. I don’t think the illegal drug traders feel unpleasantness when they recruit new addicts. So, the correct noun is “incentive”, which means encouragement as in “reason for doing something”.

It is a joy listening to him attacking British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the European Parliament. How I wish Sweden could produce politicians like him.

Swedish state television invited me to be one of three panellists who answer a few questions on current events. You can read the panel’s answers here.

“Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how HIV spreads through the human body after filming the process for the first time ever,” the Daily Telegraph reports. The researchers found that the virus is transferred from infected cells to healthy ones in a previously unknown way:

The study was made possible after experts created a molecular clone of infectious HIV and inserted a protein into its genetic code which glows green when exposed to blue light.

This allowed scientists to see the cells on digital video, and capture the way HIV-infected T-cells interact with uninfected ones.

They noted that when an infected cell came into contact with a healthy one, a bridge was created between them, called a virological synapse.

Researchers were then able to observe the fluorescent green viral particles moving towards the synapse and into the healthy cell.

The US study has broken new ground by revealing that it is the synapse through which the viral proteins are gathered and moved into uninfected cells.

The team, comprising scientists from UC Davis university in California, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, believe that this knowledge could help create new treatments for HIV and Aids.

Vice President George Kunda of Zambia (picture) has called for Zambians to report suspected homosexuals so that they can be prosecuted. “Zambia is a Christian nation and it shall continue to be so because it is part of our constitution. And acts such as homosexuality are not part of the Christian norm,” Kunda said in a speech in the Zambian parliament on Tuesday. “In 2005, this house passed stiff laws against homosexuality. For people having carnal knowledge of each other against the order of nature the punishment is a minimum of fifteen years imprisonment.” The minister finished his speech by uging people to report suspected homosexuals. “If you have information about such people, report them to the law enforcement agencies,” he said.

Read more here and here.

If you ever doubt the existence of evil, a closer look at the rulers of Venezuela and Iran should set you straight. The close friendship of Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is nothing but co-operation in joint ventures for the destabilisation of democracy.

Expect more bad news from the Axis of Evil when Chávez visits Tehran next week.

In September 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas nearly all of the West Bank and a part of Jerusalem is a deal that could end the conflict. The offer included the eviction of tens of thousands of Jewish settlers. Olmert is still waiting for Abbas to reply.

The United Nation’s Human Rights Council has passed a resolution combating defamation of religions. It is now a human right not to have one’s religious ideas questioned by others. Freedom of expression is no longer considered a human right—unless you say what the religious want to hear.

I have received many emails after my article about the war on drugs and my thoughts on legalizing drugs was published last week. Unfortunately, I have a very busy schedule this week, so I don’t have the time to reply to them all individually. Therefore, I thank all emailers collectively.

I have read all emails, and most of them seem to be from people who share my concerns and ideas. Only a few were from people who expressed anger or contempt. Either way, I thank you for taking the time to write me.

“Gay rights activists in Uganda held a press conference today in response to a recent anti-gay push coordinated by Family Life Network (FLN) leader Stephen Langa,” Ex-Gay Watch reports.

It takes a lot of courage to challenge organised homophobia in Uganda. These people deserve an award.