Israel’s former prime minister has died.

This is bizarre:

The UK Home Secretary has announced changes to the "Life in the UK" immigrant test. Instead of containing information on human rights, the nature of the political structure of the UK and the EU, and who has the legitimate right to access benefits, the test will focus on useful things that everyone in Britain really cares about: Shakespeare, Christianity, the Duke of Wellington and the Battle of Trafalgar.

So says a researcher who claims atheists are smarter people.

A well-known secret is no secret no more. Good for Anderson.

The text reads:

We, the undersigned declare that Germany has absolutely no moral or ethical right to pass any laws or make any statements regarding Brit Milah (circumcision) or on any other Jewish practice.

Germany, permanently stained with the blood of 6 million Jews, has not learned the lessons of history, and the German court’s recent ban on circumcision is an act of overt and explicit anti-Semitism.

It is a mark of shame on the German people.

Never Again!

Sign the petition here!

“Were we to introduce a ban we would be the only country in the world to forbid ritual circumcision. Consequently, I cannot imagine that it will happen,” Norway’s Health Minister Anne Grete Strøm-Erichsen says.

Read about it at The Local.

Painting: “The United States declares its independence in 1776,” by John Trumbull (1756–1843).

“United Nations ambassadors for South Africa and Brazil have demanded more action and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity as part as universal human rights standards,” Pink News reports.

Higgs Boson is that mysterious matter what Leon M. Lederman and Dick Teresi in their 1993 book labelled “The God Particle”.

“The Iranian military has launched a barrage of missiles at ‘mock enemy bases’ as part of a major war games exercise aimed at dissuading any potential outsider attack, the nation’s state-run media reported,” ABC News reports.

This what the immoral terrorist armies do. They hide their military amongst civilians. When Israel fights back, innocent people are killed and images suitable for anti-Israel propaganda is made and distributed to Western media. That method has been a great success in Gaza, and now Hezbollah in Lebanon is copying Hamas. So when the next big rocket attacks on Israel takes place, Israel must choose between being killed and risk kill innocent children.

Read about it at Jerusalem Post.

So says Rabbi Rick Jacobs, and I hope he is right.

But they will not give up. “The Jewish Agency will continue to work with Jewish communities in order to combat anti-Semitic and anti-Israel phenomena around the world,” a spokesperson says.

“There may be an honest medical, cultural, and philosophical debate to be had on the subject of circumcision,” A. Jay Adler writes, “but few if any public opponents of the practice, as reflected in the inflammatory and distorted language they use to discuss it, are engaged in that honest debate.”

Jeffrey Goldberg is right. This is too perverse for words.

The homophobic lobby is doing it again—linking gay rights to raping children.

“Sixteen years after allowing gays and lesbians to become priests, the Episcopal Church appears poised to introduce a rite that would specifically bless the unions of same-sex couples,” Los Angles Times writes.

This Saturday should be a a minor Jewish fast day commemorating the breach of the walls of the Jerusalem Temple, but because it falls on Shabbat, the fast is postponed to Sunday.

“A liberal alliance led by a former Libyan rebel prime minister said Sunday that the party’s unofficial preliminary results put it in the lead in the country’s landmark parliamentary elections, the first since the ouster of dictator Moammar Gadhafi,” Daily Star reports.

I don’t really care much about it personally, but it really fun that the Swedish Television has decided to make my city host the Eurovision Song Contest next year.

Read more in Swedish here.

I’m in a strange mood right now. I have no real interest in what goes on in the world, which is not like me. I had planned to take a few days off blogging later this week, as I’m going summer camping with some forty gay men, but I think the holiday must begin earlier—now. I’m back online next week.

I really, really look forward to seeing this film about a 48-hour romance.

“It is absolutely clear to the federal government that we want Jewish, we want Muslim religious life in Germany. Circumcisions carried out in a responsible way must not be subject to prosecution in this country,” a German Government spokesman says.

This is good knows for everyone who cares about minority rights.

No more fake beauty for Seventeen. A bummer for all the symmetric fetishists out there, I guess.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

This is big.

“Since when is sodomy a civil right,” mega-homophobe Scott Lively asked the crowd at an anti-gay rally on Friday.

The hatred against minorities is very similar no matter what it’s about. Sweden’s militant secularists argue that Jewish circumcision has nothing to do with religious freedom, and America’s militant Christians argue that same-sex love has nothing whatsoever to do with civil liberties.

I’m getting so depressed by reading this that I sometimes contemplate suicide. I don’t know if I want to be in this world with these people.

Naturally, the haters do this because “they love us” and are “concerned about the children”. In the eyes of the extremist, respect for the minority is always perverse. Parents having small children wear braces for years only to satisfy a cultural idea of beauty is no problem because it’s the mainstream. Government offering special ceremonies recognizing the love between heterosexuals is all good because they are in the majority. But when Jews, Muslims, and queers want the same rights and liberties, it’s so very, very evil—and governments are asked to discriminate and criminalise.

God, I can’t help hating the haters who dare not see the good in diversity and liberty.

Stephen Marche:

The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.

I’m currently in something of a fed-up-with-it-all mood when it comes to social media. I blog—admittedly not as much as I normally do—but that’s about it.

This is very good news. Freedom of religion is one of our most basic human rights. That doesn’t mean everyone has to like everything done in the name of religion, but it does prevent the rights of religious minorities.

From the inbox: Alfred aspires to be Sweden’s coming-out song of the year.

Good-looking bloke, but it’s not my kind of music.

Read More

In the name of children’s welfare, all oppression is allowed.

But Israel has solid information Hezbollah carried out the terror attack.

Nelson Jones is writing about a topic that makes both “ultra-secularists” and religious fundamentalists go nuts, not realizing that their own claim on absolute truth and the obedience of everyone is the bigger evil.

And we are the cultural takeovers, according to Vanity Fair.

Fourteen people were killed during a premiere showing of the new Batman film.

Sects like these bizarrely fascinate me.

Ah, modern times.

The bizarre thing is that the people who think a ban is modern thing don’t realise that they have turned the debate on state and religion back to mediaeval times. Freedom of religion was established as a basic civil liberty during the Enlightenment for exactly these reasons. Europe’s history of banning minority religions is dark and frightening.

Circumcision is to Europe’s anti-religion secularist what abortion is to America’s right-wing Christians. In an article in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, a flawed Danish study is once again referred to as proof of the harmfulness of circumcision. There are plenty of other studies showing little or no difference at all between circumcised and uncircumcised men, but these studies are actively and deliberately ignored.

Read my take of the Danish study here.

I have spent most of the day following the news about the Colorado killing spree. Now it’s time to stop this and focus on other things. It’s Shabbat in a few hours. Have a nice weekend.

I love the urban landscape. If God made nature, humankind made urbanism.

Yesterday, I took a long walk in an area of Malmö that is under development. Only a few years ago, these parts were open fields. Now, northern Europe’s largest shopping centre, Emporia, is under construction. Next to it is the new Malmö Arena, where next year’s Eurovision Song Contest will be held. In a couple of years, the empty space seen in the picture will be home to a few thousand people as new blocks of flats are built.

The young man who shot dead twelve people and wounded many at a cinema in Colorado thinks he is in a Batman film.

As regular readers have already noticed, I’m taking some time off blogging. The summer is not long in this part of the world, so I try to enjoy the hot sun for the few weeks that it’s here. Besides, the news doesn’t trigger the normal excitement in me at the moment.

Instead of blogging, I got myself a new tattoo today. The Star of David on my left wrist. Not exactly kosher, but in a time when anti-Semitic hate crimes make Jews hide their Jewish symbols, I want to make a statement.

During my blog break, I bought Apple’s new operating system, Mountain Lion. What I didn’t realise beforehand was that Apple has decided to scrap its support for RSS and that I therefore lost all the hundreds of news feeds I subscribed to. But I soon found a rescue in a new, slick program named Pulp, which allows me to read the feeds I’m used to read every day. However, it will take a few days to manually put in all the feeds I want to read.

In my opinion, the solution is simple: federalism.

I suppose encouragement is better than the usual flogging of “bad women”.