#lawrence davidson

[eretzyisrael]

An Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia is accused of "cultural genocide"

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

...To demonstrate just what is going on here, I reproduce below my August 2018 essay on the seriousness of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian food. It is hard to believe that the owners and staff at Zahav are not aware of this less-than-honest dimension of their business. The rest of us—those of the James Beard Foundation in particular—should as well be aware of what is happening if only to avoid complicity in a nasty bit of theft. Food Appropriation as a Form of Cultural Genocide—An Analysis (6 August 2018) by Lawrence Davidson

Zahav does not claim that there is no Levantine influence - it revels in it, as its webpage says:

Zahav offers a small plates menu that encourages guests to sample the large variety of cultural influences on the cuisine of Israel - from Eastern Europe to North Africa and from Persia to the Eastern Mediterranean.

It isn't that Israeli restaurateurs are trying to steal anyone else's cuisine - it is that people who hate Israel are claiming that there is no such thing as Israeli cuisine, which is a fusion and update of the others. Those critics are the liars, not the Israelis.

If a Palestinian Arab wants to open a five star restaurant and call the food Palestinian cuisine (which never existed as a separate cuisine) and get an award from James Beard and they call it "Palestinian cuisine," no one would give a damn. The Lebanese and Syrians and Egyptians who actually created the cuisine won't care.

[occupiedpalestine]

[westchesterview]

Libya: what about Congress?

This is such a complex situation and like, I dare say, anyone reading this, I have never been to Libya.

One could say the US has the duty to save civilians from being massacred.  Yet, the US has done far more than its share of massacring civilians (usually overseas) and has stood by in countless cases where countries massacred each others' civilians or governments massacred their own people, whether slowly or en masse.

Nationally read blogger and WCU professor Lawrence Davidson states it trenchantly in "Washington and the Civilians of Libya – An Analysis," To the Point Analyses, 3/19/11:

"...the rationale put forth by the United States government for supporting the impending NATO intervention, that this action is to be taken to bring about an immediate end to attacks on civilians, is one of the biggest acts of hypocrisy in a modern era ridden with hypocrisy."

One could say the Western powers should have intervened faster, to stop the Gaddafi forces at least in the middle of the Libyan coast.  It could make some sense to reason: That dictator is about to massacre the people who rose up against him in the eastern part of his country, and we're drawing another line in the sand (not that the first one worked out so well) to protect them.

Of course, that sets up the partition scenario we've just seen finally play out in Sudan.  The US hasn't been in the business of permitting secession at home, but would likely view Libya differently, especially when most of the oil would be in the non-Gaddafi part.

At the least, I find it very hard to disagree with the dissident liberals in the US Congress, as described in "Liberal Democrats in uproar over Libya action," by John Bresnahan and Jonathan Allen, Politico, 3/19/11, which can be summed up as:

“'They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress,' one Democrat lawmaker said of the White House."

It's true the US, almost constantly at war, hasn't declared war in almost 70 years. 

But, in this year when people are looking more closely than usual to the goings-on in the nation's capital, wouldn't this be a good time to pay attention to the Constitution, which stipulates (art. I, sect. 8) that not the president, not the Supreme Court, but the US Congress shall have to power to declare war?

After all, if we're going to tell Gaddafi he needs to follow international rules (no killing your own civilians), shouldn't we follow our own rules first (no war without Congress)?