THE DAILY BLADE: Why The Outcome Of The French Election Matters To Hillary
The Washington Post writes about a woman who is aiming to be the first female president of her country, but has "weak support from women" and details the problems she has been having courting them: "some women feel angry she is playing a feminist card but has not been a particularly strong champion of feminist causes"; others point to her lack of charisma.
Hillary Clinton? No, Ségolène Royal.
But before Hillary breathes a sigh of relief, she should know that lefty American feminists apparently feel pretty much the same way about her:
We sat around the dinner table, a group of 50-something progressive feminists, talking to a friend from England about presidential politics. We were all for Hillary, weren’t we, he asked. Hillary? We hated Hillary. He was taken aback. Weren’t we her base? Wasn’t she one of us? Why did we hate Hillary? …
Women don’t trust Hillary. They see her as an opportunist; many feel betrayed by her. Why?
Baby boomer women grew up with the Feminine Mystique and then came of age with the Women’s Liberation Movement. As a result, millions of us have spent our lives crafting a compromise - or a fusion - between femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other. …
Hillary, by contrast, seems to want to be more like a man in her demeanor and politics, makes few concessions to the social demands of femininity, and yet seems to be only a partial feminist. She seems above us, exempting herself from compromises women have to make every day, while, at the same time, leaving some of the basic tenets of feminism in the dust. We are sold out on both counts.
Being a woman isn’t enough to capture the women’s vote - or even just the feminist vote - in France or the U.S. That’s bad news for both Ségolène and Hillary.
Marketing To Muslims
Advertisers in the U.S. are starting to "reach out" to Muslims and "focusing on ways to use the cultural aspects of the Muslim religion to help sell their products," according to The New York Times:
Companies in the Detroit area, where there is a dense population of Muslims, are leading the change. A McDonald’s there serves halal Chicken McNuggets; Walgreens has Arabic signs in its aisles. And now, Ikea, which recently opened a store in the suburb of Canton, Mich., that has had trouble attracting as many Muslim customers as it had hoped, has been touring local homes and talking to Muslims to figure out their needs.
The store there plans to sell decorations for Ramadan next fall and is adding halal meat to its restaurant menu, or meat that is prepared according to Islamic law. Catalogs in Arabic are being planned, and female Muslim employees are expected to be given an Ikea-branded hijab, to wear over their head if they wish. …
Just what approach companies should take to reach Muslims is far from clear. The market is diverse, including African-Americans, South Asians, Caucasians and people from the Middle East, as well as people who are more or less conservative in their religious views. American Muslims disagree about whether the Muslim women in ads should wear the hijab, for instance. …
"United States companies don’t want to risk alienating their domestic consumers," said Nasser Beydoun, chairman of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, Mich., which is working with Ikea, Wal-Mart and Comcast to develop strategies to reach Muslim consumers. …
Alia Fouz, a Palestinian-American who lives near the Ikea in Canton, said she never felt that ads were addressing her as a Muslim when she was growing up in Virginia. Sitting in the Ikea snack bar with her young son, she said ads that included American Muslims would grab her — and her son’s — attention.
Is Armenian Genocide Denial Good For The Jews?: Part II
On Monday, The Stiletto presented arguments by prominent American Jews for and against H.Res.106 (the Armenian Genocide Resolution). This Los Angeles Times opinion piece co-authored by Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and David N. Myers, who teaches Jewish history at UCLA, asks American Jewish organizations not to aid and abet Turkey's Armenian Genocide denial:
For the last 60 years, the Jewish community has labored to avoid granting Hitler, in the words of philosopher Emil Fackenheim, "a posthumous victory." Jews have taken as their motto "never again," and most tend to understand that this charge refers to all of humanity, not only to fellow Jews. One of the last surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Simha "Kazik" Rotem, once said that the central lesson of the Holocaust to him was that the Jewish people should stand vigilant against genocidal acts directed at any people.
This is why it is troubling that some major Jewish organizations have lined up in support of Turkey's efforts to keep the U.S. Congress from recognizing the Armenian massacres as an act of genocide. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and B'nai B'rith International recently conveyed a letter from the Turkish Jewish community opposing a resolution recognizing the genocide.
The ADL and the JINSA also added their own statements of opposition, suggesting that the massacre of Armenians was a matter for historians, not legislators, to decide.
The American Jewish community has insisted, and rightly so, that the U.S. Congress, the United Nations and other governmental bodies formally commemorate the Holocaust. Why should Jews not insist on the same in this case, especially given the widespread scholarly consensus that what happened to the Armenians from 1915 to 1923 was genocide? After all, the man who coined the term "genocide" to refer to the Holocaust — the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin — cited the Armenian massacres as a precedent.
The symbolic resolution, which calls upon the President to "ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide …," currently has 190 co-sponsors and is certain to pass if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi schedules a floor vote, as she has pledged repeatedly to do.
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