Viral Zionism - How an Israel-promoting web-video phenomenon bloomed in Latin America

The music video appeared, without much fanfare or explanation, in April. Its three stars—La Tigresa del Oriente and La Pequeña Wendy, both from Peru, and Delfín Hasta El Fín, from Ecuador—all populist specimens of unironic camp, were already YouTube stars. Maybe that's why “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” an inexplicable, Spanish-language musical tribute to the beauties of Israel, with a title that translates to “In Your Lands I'll Dance,” has effortlessly racked up nearly 4 million views and spawned countless tributes and parodies. But where did it come from? Why did three South Americans team up to sing about their love for Israel and their plans to dance in Jerusalem? And why does the video superimpose their dancing on shots of the Tel Aviv skyline and—of all things—Hamantaschen?

Some commenters saw a Zionist conspiracy (when they weren't expressing disdain for the video's “bad taste”). But could the Israeli government, or any sympathetic organization, have masterminded something so anarchic, brazenly neglecting to tout Israel's holy sites and instead pitching the Azrieli Mall highway bridge? Another theory: Maybe the artists were spontaneously moved by their love for Israel on their way home from an evangelical church. Yet others speculated it was all a big prank staged by an Israeli backpacker trawling the Incan ruins of Peru, who thought it'd be funny to juxtapose their song with footage of the Tel Aviv pride parade.

In truth, credit (or blame, if you prefer) lies with a different set of rootless cosmopolitans: several creative-class Argentine Jews (and one quarter-Jew) living in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and New York, only one of whom has actually been to Israel, and none of whom even met the singers during the video's production. Their intention, these impresarios say somewhat vaguely, was to fight preconceived notions that Israel is a sad and scary place.

“It's not a song in favor of Israel,” said Gastón Cleiman, an advertising man in Buenos Aires who wrote the song's lyrics and who, along with Sebastian Muller, dreamed up the idea. “It's a song against prejudice.” Cleiman is freelancer; Muller works for an interactive firm in Madrid whose clients include Nike and Coca-Cola. Both men swear the project was their own initiative, with neither official money nor messaging. The music was written by Gaby Kerpel, another Argentine Jew, who also scored De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta and is part of a Latin electronic collective known as Zizek and performs reinterpreted Colombian cumbia under the alter ego King Coyo, and the video was directed by Picky Talarico, better known for directing Latin mega-stars' videos and high-profile commercials.

It started with Muller and Cleiman, who were channeling their mutual obsession with the millions-strong YouTube sensations Wendy (who, at 8, recorded sugary-voiced videos about her thirst for breast milk and beer), La Tigresa (a surgically enhanced hairdresser from the Peruvian Amazon fond of leopard print and reborn as a singer at 65), and Delfín, an amiable but stone-faced Ecuadorean whose first rise to his feet in indignation had been for a disco-beat ode to 9/11.

“One sees them and is seduced,” Cleiman said, speaking in Spanish. “These are things upon which you cannot force reason, because then surely you will find defects. But the truth is, you cannot stop watching them.”

“I feel they are doing something new that relies on authenticity,” Muller, who studied film at Tel Aviv University, told me earnestly, in Hebrew. “They haven't learned the rules of how to communicate with images. It's a kind of dogma without consciousness.”

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The Four Horsemen of the Acropolis - An old battlefront returns in war on Euro

Michaela Schiessl  reports for Der Spiegel:

In 1998, four renegade German professors tried to stop the introduction of the euro with a legal challenge in Germany's highest court. Now, 12 years later, they are fighting against a German bailout for Greece -- and this time around, people are listening to them.

Wilhelm Hankel is sitting on the stage at a meeting of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He is beaming with joy. The 81-year-old professor has just explained why the euro has always been a monstrosity, and why it will and must fail. Although the current plans to "get a living corpse to walk" are touching, he scoffed, one thing is already clear: The euro bailout package will only save the banks.

Surprisingly enough, his presentation was met with long and enthusiastic applause from his audience of economists. For Hankel, it was about time. The recalcitrant professor has been waiting for what has seemed like an eternity for this recognition. Since Jan. 12, 1998, to be precise.

It was on that day Hankel drove to Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany, together with constitutional law expert Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider and economists Joachim Starbatty and Wilhelm Nölling. At the German Federal Constitutional Court, which is located in Karlsruhe, the four professors dropped off a 352-page brief that would change their lives. It was a complaint against the introduction of the euro. They didn't want this new currency. They wanted to keep their old Federal Republic of Germany, as post-war Germany is officially known, and its German mark.

Nothing was the same again after that. Suddenly they stopped getting invited to conferences. Newspapers were reluctant to print their opinion pieces. Political allies distanced themselves from the four men. "We were the Antichrists," says Hankel, describing the mood at the time.

'Idiot Savants with No Sense of History'

With the exception of a small group of people, hardly anyone agreed with them. The four men argued that the euro could not remain stable, because the economies of the participating countries were too disparate and the control mechanisms too lax. This would jeopardize German price stability and affluence. Besides, they argued, a political union had to precede a monetary union.

When the court in Karlsruhe dismissed their suit, they became the objects of malicious insults. Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), called them "idiot savants with no sense of history." It was an insult Hankel would never forget. After all, Hankel himself was a former close colleague of the legendary German Economics Minister Karl Schiller, who also belonged to the SPD, as well as being the former head of the Landesbank in the state of Hesse. He had also taught at Harvard and Georgetown University, among other institutions.

"For 10 years I was practically barred from writing articles," Hankel complains. He was so marginalized that only right-wing publications like the controversial weekly magazine Junge Freiheit would publish his writing, a circumstance he characterizes today as an act of self-defense.

The four professors, already viewed with suspicion by the public, were marginalized even further by such lapses, so much so that they came to be associated with German nationalism.

Suddenly in Demand

Although their views haven't changed, the world around them has. Now that the European single currency is in fact crumbling, the opinions of these opponents of the euro are in demand once again. And quietly enjoying their victory isn't in the nature of these four men.

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Rexroth: "These are new times, with new people, seeking new objectives by new methods"

The more things change...

San Francisco 50 years ago: From Kenneth Rexroth's Signs of a New Youth Revolt

These are new times, with new people, seeking new objectives by new methods. Something has been going on that, as so often before, the old folks have missed. For years after the last war everybody agreed that the youth of the land had lost their spunk. They were more conservative than their elders. They were interested only in security, a good job, a home in the suburbs. They never raised their voices or answered back. Those that took to the arts wrote flaccid poetry with all the rhymes in the right places, painted nice abstract pictures, wrote novels like bad imitations of Elizabeth Goudge and John Gould Cozzens. “The age,” said their professors, “of experiment and revolt is over.” Everybody was cool.

I was the first critic in the country to point out that under this cool surface of conformity there was growing up a whole little world of total dis-comformity. There was a small but significant group of young writers who rejected every value of the society in which they lived. They were so “far out” nobody knew they were there.

Well, once I had pointed them out, it didn't take the publishers, the picture magazines, television, the movies, long to discover and exploit them. As I have said so many times since, they made ideal television “rebels.” In the words of a famous book and movie, there were “rebels without a cause.” There is no sponsor they would possibly offend. Furthermore, their values, or anti-values if you will, were just those of their “enemies,” the commercial culture hucksters, turned wrong side out, and their amusements, booze, drugs and chaotic sexuality, fast cars and hi-fi records, were identical.

A snob is a person who tries to imitate the manners of the class he imagines above himself. A Bohemian is an under- or unemployed intellectual who gives up even the necessities of the poor so that he can enjoy some of the luxuries of the rich.

The point is — a revolt of snobs is not going to make the world a better place to live; it would make it worse, and it didn't take the youth of the land very long to find that out. Today, on campuses of all the colleges and universities of the country, if you want to label yourself a slightly dotty hick from a country high school, just break out in beard and sandals or sweatshirt and stretch pants and start talking jive.

I have come back from a long tour of American colleges and I have never seen more activity in my life, more concern, more responsibility. This is a wave of radicalism in the true sense of the word; a nationwide effort among large numbers of young people to get at the roots of the sickness and trouble and confusion that beset our time, to cut through the lies and expose the terrible dangers.

It is not political in the ordinary sense at all. The regular political parties don't even know it is there; the old political sects of the Left and Right, the Communists or the so-called New Conservatives, completely misconceive it. They think these new students are something like themselves and that they can convert them or at least use them. Nothing could be less true.

What is taking place is a great personal awakening. It is not the work of any organization of any kind, let alone any outside or national organization. What these young people are demanding is the direct application of personal morality to the great questions of mankind.

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Preventing homosexuality (and uppity women) in the womb?

By Alice Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, Anne Tamar-Mattis

Two weeks ago, Time magazine reported on our ongoing efforts to protect the rights of pregnant women offered dexamethasone, a risky Class C steroid aimed at female fetuses that may have a form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). It appears many women and children exposed to dexamethasone through this off-label use are not being enrolled in controlled clinical trials with IRB oversight, in spite of a persistent consensus among experts that this is the only way this treatment should be happening.

We have learned that, this August, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism will publish an expert consensus again stating this use of prenatal dexamethasone should only happen via IRB-approved clinical trials through research centers large enough to obtain meaningful data. An announcement of the consensus came at the Endocrine Society's meeting in San Diego last week (and an earlier version is available here).

This consensus has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology, the European Society of Endocrinology, the Society of Pediatric Urology, the Androgen Excess and PCOS Society, and the CARES Foundation. It was reached after review of the existing literature and consultation with researchers indicated significant cause for concern, including the fact that most of the children treated prenatally have been absent from follow-up studies.

The majority of researchers and clinicians interested in the use of prenatal “dex” focus on preventing development of ambiguous genitalia in girls with CAH. CAH results in an excess of androgens prenatally, and this can lead to a “masculinizing” of a female fetus's genitals. One group of researchers, however, seems to be suggesting that prenatal dex also might prevent affected girls from turning out to be homosexual or bisexual.

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University, and her long-time collaborator, psychologist Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, of Columbia University, have been tracing evidence for the influence of prenatal androgens in sexual orientation. In a paper entitled “Sexual Orientation in Women with Classical or Non-Classical Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia as a Function of Degree of Prenatal Androgen Excess” published in 2008 in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Meyer-Bahlburg and New (with two others) gather evidence of “a dose-response relationship of androgens with sexual orientation” through a study of women with various forms of CAH.

They specifically point to reasons to believe that it is prenatal androgens that have an impact on the development of sexual orientation. The authors write, "Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls . . . and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization.”

They go on to suggest that the work might offer some insight into the influence of prenatal hormones on the development of sexual orientation in general. “That this may apply also to sexual orientation in at least a subgroup of women is suggested by the fact that earlier research has repeatedly shown that about one-third of homosexual women have (modestly) increased levels of androgens.” They “conclude that the findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation.”

And it isn't just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?” Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls' behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms: “Long term follow-up studies of the behavioral outcome will show whether dexamethasone treatment also prevents the effects of prenatal androgens on brain and behavior.”

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The power elite and the secret Nazi plan

PART 14

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
June 28, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

Money was at the heart of the Nazis' secret plan for eventual world domination after WWII. Relevant to this, historian Marc Masurovsky testified on June 25, 1997 to the U.S. House Banking Committee that in late 1946 the Allied commissions searching for art the Nazis had looted were unfortunately closed down, and that from August 1944 to July 1946 perhaps thousands of these looted items “found there way out of Europe and into North and South American collections.” He also asked: “Why did the State Department agree to downplay the verifiable amount of looted gold in Switzerland as a means of obtaining ratification of the Washington Accord?”

In answer to the above, remember the role of the Dulles brothers concerning the State Department and vis a vis the Nazis. Allen Dulles had also negotiated deals between the Nazis and the Saudis, and while President Franklin Roosevelt may have not have been allied with all of Dulles' actions, one should remember what FDR wrote to the Saudi King on April 5, 1945. Relevant to the question of the Jews in Palestine, he wrote: “Your Majesty will also doubtless recall that during our recent conversation I assured you that I would take no action in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government which might prove hostile to the Arab people.” Not long after this letter, FDR was succeeded as president by Harry Truman, who approved of various operations that brought Nazis to the U.S.

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