The thing I like the best about Hanukkah is the lightening of the candles. The menorah is also the foremost and oldest symbol of Judaism—far older than the Star of David.

Seen in the image above are various menorahs, used for Hanukkah, taken from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopaedia, now in the public domain. The locations of the menorahs reflect their locations as of the publication of the Jewish Encyclopaedia and not their present locations.

1. Bronze, French, attributed to 12th cent. (in the Musée de Cluny, Paris).
2. Yellow copper, modern (in the synagogue at Pogrebishche, Russia).
3. Silver, medieval (in the possession of Dr Albert Figdor, Vienna).
4. Yellow copper, modern (in the synagogue at Padua, Italy).
5. Silver and bronze, 17th century (in the possession of Jacob H. Schiff. New York).
6. Silver, late 19th century (from the collection of the late Rabbi Benjamin Szold, Baltimore).
   
7. Bronze, Italian, 15th century (in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
8. Silver, English, 16th century (in the possession of E. A. Franklin, London).
9. Silver, Nuremberg, 17th century (in the possession of N. S. Joseph, London).
10. Silver, modern (in the possession of Maurice Herrmann, New York).

The local shopping centre has come under fire for not attracting enough customers. It’s now undergoing a major redecoration in an attempt to become more popular with Malmö’s shoppers. Personally, I like it the way it is. In part because it’s so very modern—almost futuristically so. When I visited the centre yesterday, I was fascinated by the Christmas decoration they were doing. It’s so kitsch—in a good and queer sort of way.

A great man has died.

Update: CNN has more.

I haven’t blogged as much as I used to in the past month. In part, the reason is that I have begun to write a new novel. But the slow blogging is also a result of declining interest on my part. Arguing over politics with anonymous people online is not as fun as it used to be. In fact, politics as such is not as fun as it used to be. I sometimes daydream about a life in solitude, where no news ever got through and I could spend my life writing fiction.

I’m not at all surprised by this:

Drawing on the results of the National Child Development Study, which tracked for 50 years all British babies born during one week in March 1958, Kanazawa found that kids who scored higher on IQ tests grew up to drink larger quantities of alcohol on a more regular basis than their less intelligent peers.

“A decision by a Swedish newspaper to run an advert for a book critical of multiculturalism, immigration policy, and media reporting of the issue has been slammed by critics who argue that the ad is tainted by xenophobia,” The Local reports. Only a few days ago, it was reported that two of Sweden’s biggest online bookshops sold the anti-Semitic document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (cover of original Russian edition pictured above).

The Jerusalem Post reports that twenty-seven women have been killed in Palestinian territories this year alone.

“The Supreme Court on Wednesday set aside the decision of the Delhi high court, which had in 2009 decriminalised sexual relation between persons belonging to same sex,” Times of India reports. “A bench of justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya upheld the constitutional validity of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code that makes anal sex a punishable offence.”

This is yet another horrific example of homophobia gone berserk. The idea that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice is truly misguided.

The Canberra Times reports:

The critical point was that the court held that the word “marriage” in the Constitution means the union of any two natural people. It was not restricted to unions between a man and a woman.

Good news!

Andy Towle has posted the full list of nominations.

I wrote about Gravity here.

“Our message is that, whatever your background, sexuality or gender, love is the same the world over and equal rights make every society fairer and stronger,” Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg writes on Pink News.

In a new report entitled Information Sacrificed on Altar of Religion, Reporters Without Borders makes some good points. But there are some problem in the report, too. One such problem can be found in these two recommendations:

• Rejects any criminal law restriction of freedom of expression and information except in cases of spoken or written words manifestly inciting hatred, violence or discrimination against a community or individual, or violating a person’s privacy.
• Holds that, in this respect, a strict and irrevocable distinction must be made between offences against beliefs, ideas and dogma, on the one hand, and offences against persons, on the other, and that only the second are admissible in law.

The problem is see is that criticism of religious practice often legitimises hatred, violence or discrimination against targeted community and individuals belonging to it. I have a very local example of this. When the Sweden’s extreme right put up posters of the Prophet Muhammad next to a child bride on public buildings about two years ago, they didn’t wish to criticise Islam and the Prophet’s life. They made the posters because they wanted the general public to link Muslim immigration to paedophilia.

The only way to get around this problem is to eliminate the limitation of free speech. The attempt to uphold a strict and irrevocable distinction between offences against religion and people is bound to fail. To me, it has it equivalent in the homophobic mantra that goes, “we don’t hate homosexuals, only homosexuality”. Which I’m sure they believe is true, but every gay person knows is fake.

So what is the solution? As always, it’s liberty. Allow people to express their opinions without limitations. But that liberty goes both ways. When someone makes insulting comments on religion, sexuality, nationality, etcetera, he or she must realise that those who feel the attack have the right to retort. In the best of worlds, the equal freedom of everyone will balance itself out and force the unruly extremists into obscurity.

“Students should be able to sing hymns at graduation,” The Local reports.

To an outsider, it may seem ridiculous. But in this country, the unease about the tradition of ending the public school year in church has created a situation where no one really knows what they law says about it. Now, the Government says it wants to make it clear. A hymn at graduation is permitted. Personally, I’m torn. I don’t really consider hymns that much of a problem. Religious minorities—including atheists—can simply be quiet while the rest is singing. In my circles, the problem of religion in public schools has a lot more to do with being able to keep Shabbat during the winter months when sunset is early in the afternoon. This is a much bigger problem to many Jewish teenagers who wish to be more observant.

I found this version of Elektra on YouTube. Elektra is one of my absolute favourite operas, composed by Richard Strauss is 1909 as a modernistic experiment. The singers and the orchestra are pushed to their absolute limits.

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Eminem: “I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.”

Schopenhauer: “Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.”

The future is here.

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This time it’s Jason Kottke who declares blogging a thing of the past:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

Personally, I think blogs are now normalised. Blogging is no longer the big new thing that everyone does; it’s what some people do for themselves just as keeping diaries and making scrapbooks have always been.

“The New Mexico Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage in the state Thursday, declaring in a ruling that it is unconstitutional to deny a marriage license to gay and lesbian couples,” Salon reports. “New Mexico joins 16 states and the District of Columbia in allowing gay marriage.”

“Parliament has passed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009, which proposes life imprisonment for homosexual acts,” Ugandan news website New Vision reports.

Fascism is alive and well.

Love is in the Utahan air today, according to CNN.

Michelle Malkin is upset about gay rights advocates criticizing a pastor who says gay people will not enter the Kingdom of God. Fair enough, the pastor has the right to believe God is a homophobe like himself. But what Malkin’s critic sour is that she somehow thinks it’s OK for a Christian to be a bigot because there are Muslim bigots that are worse.

I found the website of Swedish artist Olof Inger. I like his work. Take a look!

Kindness glides about my house.
Dame Kindness, she is so nice!
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit’s cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.
Sugar is a necessary fluid,

Its crystals a little poultice.
O kindness, kindness
Sweetly picking up pieces!
My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,
May be pinned any minute, anesthetised.

And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses.

Abraham Bloemaert (1564–1651), Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (1624).

Christianity considers sloth one of the Seven Deadly Sins to which humankind was subject as a result of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, to whom the two naked sleepers allude. Bloemaert’s painting depicts this passage from Matthew 13:37-39:

The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil.

I haven’t quite figured out what the tree house is about.

Laurie Penny:

We are the fools, if we believe that accepting aggressive distinctions between nice, safe western sexism and scary, heathen Muslim sexism is going to serve the interests of women. The people making these arguments don’t care about women. They care about stoking controversy, attacking Muslims and shouting down feminists of all stripes.

The same could be said about the hijacking of gay rights by the same bunch of Islamofobes. It’s pathetic how often they get away with it. Far-right extremist who never cared one bit about women or gay people suddenly pretend to be offended by sexism and homophobia in Islam.

Christmas is my favourite non-Jewish holiday for two reasons:

1. It lightens up Sweden in the darkest time of the year. Candles and sparkling Christmas kitsch is everywhere. Walking through the city centre is like being part of one big drag show.
2. It gives me and everyone else a few days off work. Nearly everything comes to a stop for a couple of days, whish I unusual in this modern era with 24-hour shopping and constant updates on just about everything.

There’s a peculiar debate about Christmas in Sweden at the moment. Some atheists want to un-Christianise Christmas by reminding everyone about the original Yule. They make a big fuss about the Christian church taking an ancient holiday and turning it into a commemoration of Jesus’s birth even though most scholars agree that he wasn’t born in December. But what difference does it make? The fact is that no one knows for sure and that most holidays are traditions with little or no link to what they are said to celebrate. Christmas has been a Christian holiday honouring the birth of Jesus since at least 354 CE.

Painting: Christmas Eve (1905) by Carl Larsson (1853–1919).

Andrew Sullivan has a tradition on his blog. Every year, he hands out a number of awards to people who deserve them. The Malkin award is by far the most hilarious. Here’s what it’s about:

The Malkin Award, named after blogger Michelle Malkin, is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible—to give others a chance.

My vote goes to Congressman Steve Stockman:

Democrats do not want abortion to be safe or rare. Democrats oppose even the most basic of health and safety standards for abortion mills. Democrats don’t care how many women are maimed, infected with diseases or die on the routinely-filthy abortion mills. Democrats worship abortion with same fervor the Canaanites worshipped Molech.

In case you don’t get the Molech reference, it’s about an ancient religion that included child sacrifice.

Vote!

According to Giles Fraser, he was:

Jesus spent much of his time laying into the pious and the holy and lambasting the religious professionals of his day. And this was not because he was anti-Jewish—as some superficial readings of his anti-Pharisee, anti-Sadducee, anti-Temple polemics would have it—but precisely because, as a Jew himself, he came out of that very Jewish prophetic tradition of fierce hostility to religiosity.

This painting by Rembrant from 1655 reminds me of Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat from 1954.

“France is considering banning performances by a black comedian whose shows have repeatedly insulted the memory of Holocaust victims and could threaten public order,” Yahoo News reports.

Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is an outright anti-Semite with a clear Nazi-like political agenda. The problem is that banning his performances will only serve his purposes and plat into his movement’s distorted ideas about being “anti-establishment”. Free speech is for everyone and the best ay to handle racist like Dieudonné is to openly criticise his fascist opinions. And it’s not very hard to do in this case since Dieudonné is a complete nutjob who makes Nazi salutes for a living and whose work is supported by Iran’s fascist regime. This is a man who is open about hating Jews and believing that CIA is responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. He also uses the usual mumbo-jumbo of present-day fascism by relabeling anti-Semitism as “anti-Zionism” and camouflaging attacks on Holocaust victims as criticism of Israel and Judaism.

Liliane Maury Pasquier, head of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development, has penned a self-pitying article for the Washington Post about evil Jews who put their own religious rights before their children’s wellbeing. This, we are told, is not at all anti-Semitic. Why not? Because she says so. She and her gang just want to save the Jewish children from their parents’ evil Judaism. From the article:

There is not, and cannot be, a “right” to circumcise young boys. Children are not mini-beings with mini-human rights. By contrast, in an accompanying recommendation, our assembly invited European governments to consider making “children’s right to physical integrity” a continent-wide standard.

I’m sure this appeals to many, but what she wants to enforce is Christian ideals on everyone. The Jews should become mini-Christians to fit the new European norm. Physical integrity is part of the new weaponry against Jewish life in Europe. John O’Sullivan of the National Review puts it well:

Unlike the old anti-Semitism of neo-Nazis and skinheads—who have no wider social influence and are effectively pariahs in modern European politics—the new anti-Semitism is the work of respectable intellectuals, politicians, union activists, journalists, students, and lecturers in the media, the universities, and in various “progressive” organisations, often in alliance with radical Muslim groups. It organises academic boycotts of Israel, disruption of concerts by visiting Israel orchestras, campaigns to prohibit traditional Jewish practices such as kosher butchering or circumcision, and other aspects of Jewish life. The distinction on which it relies for its own respectability between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is growing less and less credible; radical Muslim groups don’t really bother to cite it. Yet when this fig-leaf disappears entirely, those preaching the new anti-Semitism doesn’t seem to become less respectable. In other words anti-Semitism is becoming more respectable in Europe.

Michel Gurfinkiel is also spot on:

Once again, Jews are accepted on condition: that they separate themselves from their brethren in Israel and join the official European consensus in demonizing the Jewish state; that they learn to accommodate the reality that so many ethnic Europeans hate them and wish them ill, and that Islamists on European soil seek their extinction; and that in the interest of justifying their continued claim to European citizenship, they accept Europe’s proscription of some of the most basic practices of their faith.

This is exactly what it’s about—conditional acceptance. Jews are tolerated only on the condition that we renounce Judaism in everything that makes it different from the European mainstream. We are now slowly drifting further and further away from the ideals of the Enlightenment that brought us freedom of religion.

Liliane Maury Pasquier finishes her article by announcing that her committee will hold a hearing on circumcision on 28 January 2014, where medical experts will gang up on Jewish and Muslim religious leaders. Anti-Semitism is once again science.

I have decided to put in words my two resolutions for 2014:

1. I will finish my final essay for a Master of Arts. It’s long overdue and I cannot postpone it any more.
2. I will continue writing the novel I’m working on and have manuscript sent off to literary agents before the year ends.

And, as always, I will live a healthier life and try to become a better man. I never succeed in any of this, but it’s a nice ambition to have.

This will be the last diary entry of 2013. Tomorrow, I’ll leave Sweden—and the Internet—for Amsterdam and a week of festivities with friends. This year, I have decided to leave my computer at home and go completely offline until I’m back home on 5 January 2014. This is me, signing off.

Happy New Year!