What Happened Today: August 17, 2022
Abbas’ Holocaust slander draws swift rebuke; Israel and Turkey renew diplomatic relations; Quiet wind down of U.S. drone strike program
The Big Story
Standing beside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a media event in Berlin on Tuesday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of carrying out “50 Holocausts” against Palestine, a remark that drew swift rebuke from German lawmakers and the press, with many critical of Scholz, who remained silent. Abbas was in Berlin for a state visit with the German chancellor when a reporter asked if he would offer an apology on the upcoming 50-year anniversary of the deadly 1972 attack of Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants at the Munich Olympics. “If we want to dig further into the past, yes, please, I have 50 massacres that were committed by Israel,” Abbas replied in Arabic. “Fifty Holocausts,” he said, using the English word for the genocide.
Earlier in the press conference, Chancellor Scholz rejected Abbas’ characterization of Israel’s conduct toward Palestine as “apartheid,” but his indifference to Abbas’ slander enraged German media outlets, with BILD lashing out that there was “not a word of dissent in the face of the worst Holocaust relativization that a head of government has ever uttered in the chancellor’s office.” German lawmaker Armin Laschet wrote on Twitter that Abbas could have simply apologized for the terror attack on German soil: “Accusing Israel of ‘50 Holocausts’ instead is the most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery.” Scholz tried to temper the blowback, saying on Wednesday he was “disgusted by the outrageous remarks.”
In the Back Pages: The Fabricated Difficulties of HBO’s The Rehearsal
The Rest
→ One of 10 Republican lawmakers who had voted to impeach President Donald Trump early last year, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney lost her primary Tuesday in a landslide—leaving just 2 of those 10 GOP lawmakers to move ahead to the general midterm elections in November. Trump has largely succeeded in taking down this small opposition bloc within his own party, whether the eight Republicans either were defeated in their primaries or chose not to seek reelection. As the leader of the House committee investigating Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, and the most visible anti-Trump Republican in office, Cheney grabbed many headlines with her toward Trump, which has been criticized as counterproductive by even those Republican lawmakers conflicted about Trump’s GOP stranglehold. Cheney has engendered support from Democrats and hopes to leverage the martyrdom that failed her at the primary polls, already launching a new political action group to undercut Trump and his allies in the 2024 election. In a tweet, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard reminded members of both parties that before establishing herself as a bastion of moral integrity, Cheney earned a reputation as a fierce hawk for foreign military intervention: “It appears that Liz Cheney, one of the GOP’s chief warmongers, is about to lose. This is good news for every American regardless of party.”
→ Following a long spell of diplomatic conflict, Israel and Turkey agreed on Wednesday to the resumption of full diplomatic relations. The renewed ties will include the return of diplomats to embassies in each other’s nations for the first time since 2018. “The normalization of ties with Turkey is an asset for regional stability and an economic benefit for the citizens of Israel,” said Yair Lapid, the Israeli prime minister. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said the return of a Turkish ambassador to Israel is “important in the development of bilateral relations.” Iran’s spreading influence across the Middle East and a new version of the Iran nuclear deal rumored to be days away have become an increasing and shared concern for both Turkey and Israel, helping to thaw what had been at times strained relations.
→ Roughly 71% of California children between the ages of 6 months and 17 years old have been infected with COVID-19 at least once since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a new report by the CDC. For that same age range, the CDC estimated a similar infection rate in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and a slightly higher one in Florida, at 86%, with Mississippi near the top at 88%. In big education systems—like San Francisco Unified School District, with 49,000 students—kids reporting to class for the new semester won’t be required to wear masks, though other city schools, like those in Philadelphia, will require kids to wear masks for at least the first 10 days of school as “an extra precaution for everyone’s health and well-being,” said Kendra McDow, the school district’s chief medical officer. McDow cited a danger to the school population that would last 10 days because “kids are returning from summer break, [when] there’s increased social gatherings, increased mobility.”
→ A new deep dive by Remnant MD, a medical writer on Substack, takes a closer look at Big Pharma’s tens of billions of dollars in courtroom settlements and legal penalties. After noting how often the industry produces poor products—“One study from Yale found that between 2001-2010, nearly one-third of newly approved drugs were either withdrawn, given ‘black-box’ warnings or warranted a safety announcement about ‘new risks’”—the article goes on to cull data from the Violation Tracker, “the first wide-ranging database on corporate misconduct,” to determine that “the total fines levied against pharmaceutical manufacturers & distributors is over $128 Billion—since the year 2000.” This makes Big Pharma the second-largest offender in the country after the financial services industry, which has paid out roughly $335 billion in fines since 2000.
Read More: https://remnantmd.substack.com/p/pfizer-does-not-hold-the-record-for
→ This is how the world ends: A team of scientists at Georgia State University used CRISPR gene-editing software to remove a hormone receptor from a bunch of hamsters. After doing so, the adorable little fluffballs transformed into outraged, monstrous fluffballs who demonstrated “high levels of aggression toward other same-sex individuals,” according to the study. “We were really surprised at the results,” said the lead researcher of the study. Now it’s just a matter of time until these angry cuties reproduce en masse and gain access to the nuclear codes.
→ Map of the Day:
You’re looking at an ancient geological line, the fall line, that cuts across eastern Pennsylvania, dividing the Piedmont region to the west from the Atlantic coastal plain to the east, and where waterfalls cascaded down, west to east. It is also a “near-perfect boundary between left-trending & right-trending areas in Metro Philly,” as @PAMapper notes. This is because the east of the fall line is where modern industry flourished, making use of the strong water currents coming off the waterfalls for mills and transportation, and where industry and worker housing has continued to grow ever since. To the west of the fall line, meanwhile, is where industrialists built their homes and, in the centuries since, where white collar suburbs have expanded. “For decades,” PAMapper notes, “Democrats have performed much better below the Fall Line, which is poorer, less educated, and more diverse, than above it. But in the last two cycles, Democrats have increasingly made appeals to college-educated voters, while ceding the less well-educated to Trump.”
→ The use of drone strikes—“the signature American tactic of the war on terror,” as Ryan Cooper put it—has diminished considerably during the Biden administration, as have air strikes in general. Begun by President George W. Bush and beloved by Presidents Obama and Trump, the drone has been a much-debated mainstay of 21st-century warfare. Upon entering office, however, President Biden made a quiet policy pivot, tightening the rules pertaining to drone use that Trump had loosened and requiring that all air strikes outside of active war zones [sic] receive White House approval. The numbers are now in steep decline: Trump oversaw more than 1,600 bombings in Syria and Iraq; Biden, four. In Somalia there were 75 strikes last year; thus far in 2022, less than 10. Notable about the quiet reduction in the use of drones is just how quiet it is, with neither the Biden administration nor the media making much noise about a sea change in how the United States wages its wars.
Read More: https://theweek.com/foreign-policy/1007579/biden-nearly-ended-the-drone-war-and-nobody-noticed
→ Touted as the first piece of legislation to combat global warming, the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act sets aside $369 billion in tax credits for transitioning the U.S. energy infrastructure toward renewable energy sources. This is sure to be a slow transition, though, as the green energy industry faces import tariffs and bans (such as the one placed on Chinese goods coming out of Xinjiang), post-pandemic supply chain snags, and green energy sources unready to handle the higher demand. Companies building wind energy along the United States’ shorelines are also anxious that pending legislation will require the industry to use American labor for these pricey installations. “It’s something that is not realistic,” said the chief executive of Avangrid, one of the biggest U.S. wind developers. “You do not have them and it will take some time to build them, some time to train the crews.” A recent study from Princeton, meanwhile, found that reducing the United States’ emissions to net zero by 2050—the Biden administration’s current goal—would require a wind farm the size of Illinois and Indiana combined. There is hope, however, that with hundreds of billions of dollars coming down the pipeline, lawmakers will rush to remove some of the red-tape slowing down these projects.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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The Fabricated Difficulties of HBO’s The Rehearsal
By Maggie Phillips
How do two people of different religious faiths raise a child together? What if they aren’t married or even a couple? Also, what if the kid isn’t related to either of the parents but is actually a child actor? In comedian Nathan Fielder’s HBO docuseries The Rehearsal, he and his stalwart production crew stage elaborate dress rehearsals for events for which there are no second chances: a difficult confession to an old friend, emotional conversations after the death of a loved one and, in one woman’s case, parenthood. The rehearsal for this particular event involves a devout Christian woman, named Angela, who raises a child from infancy to adolescence.
Fielder asks Angela if she would mind if he moved into the house he’s arranged for her to rehearse raising her fictional son, whom she has named Adam (played by a revolving door of child actors, each one usually slightly older than the last). She consents, and the two begin to “rehearse” parenthood together. It’s an insane premise, and much has been written about what, exactly, the show is. Watching it is like watching footage of the Stanford Prison Experiment that’s been edited like an episode of The Office. Despite this, or because of it, it’s reliably good for a real, if uncomfortable, laugh, along with a healthy portion of incredulity over how the show manages its Inception-like levels of deception and fakery.
However, this past Saturday’s episode, “Apocalypto,” raised the emotional stakes when the Jewish Fielder decided to bring up six-year-old Adam in his faith tradition, running parallel to Angela’s (real) stated commitment to keeping a (pretend) Christian home. It also further confuses the already blurred distinction on the show between real life and rehearsal. Engaging with Christian-Jewish relations, the value of raising a child in a religious tradition, and Zionism, Fielder somehow manages to avoid really taking a stance on any of these subjects. And that may be the point.
Since only Fielder seems to have a full understanding of what’s real and what’s false or orchestrated, it can be puzzling for the audience to know what precisely we’re supposed to make of any given situation on the show. A seemingly random passerby can be (and often is) a hired actor instructed to disrupt the scene in progress as Fielder sees fit. Confiding in Miriam, the Hebrew tutor Fielder secretly hires to provide Adam with religious instruction when he’s supposed to be at swim practice, Angela says that “Nathan has a problem with lying. He lies a lot.”
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I write this from the road, where I stopped for a Sunday Mass this morning at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a church in New Orleans. The priest’s homily focused on the division people of genuine faith can bring about by their mere existence; the first reading had been the prophet Jeremiah getting tossed into a muddy cistern for demoralizing the people with his message. The priest observed that in the United States today, we are no longer accustomed to seeing knock-down, drag-out fights over religion. Much more frequently, he observed, division tends to be over political or racial differences (if a demonstration was needed, he recommended wearing a MAGA hat in the French Quarter). To the extent that religion is recruited to these fights, it’s often as a totem or a prop. To his point, there are fortune-tellers and people purporting to be voodoo practitioners out in front of Jackson Square’s iconic St. Louis Cathedral, but the only fight I witnessed in the old church’s shadow was between two guys over a bag of weed. Inside, a sign pleads for reverence, but the voices I heard while I was there were conversational in tone and volume, with visitors treating the cathedral as more of a photo op, posing with saint statues and altars as if they were at the Museum of Ice Cream and expressing bemused fascination with the bowls of holy water by the door.
The most cynical interpretation of Fielder’s choice to portray a fight between a pretend couple over their pretend son’s religious education is to underscore the absurdity of religion itself. While The Rehearsal has previously portrayed Angela’s apparently sincere Christian faith in a very matter-of-fact light, no more or less ridiculous than anyone or anything else on the slyly edited show, her intransigence in the face of Fielder’s request to raise Adam in the Jewish faith becomes uncomfortable, and the specter of antisemitism is raised. Jesus is the truth, she believes. For her, raising “Adam” Jewish would contradict that truth, and she’s not shy about saying so firmly to Fielder or to Miriam, whom he eventually recruits to persuade Angela to come to his side. The episode’s title, “Apocalypto,” comes from Angela telling Fielder that the Mel Gibson film is her favorite movie. He points out Gibson’s antisemitic past, leaving the implicit charge at Angela’s door as they sit in the ensuing awkward silence over dinner.
Given these events, it’s hard not to initially root for Fielder when he sneaks Adam into a Shabbat service. Things become more fraught, however, when he explains kippahs to the child actor pretending to be his son. You have to be Jewish to get one, he tells the boy, before asking him if he’s Christian or Jewish. The pretend son gives the answer clearly desired by the adult, and Fielder responds, “Good, so you get one,” and affixes the kippah on the boy’s head. During the service, when he asks Fielder why only men wear them, he tells Adam he doesn’t know, and soon engages Miriam to instruct the boy in the faith. Later, Fielder invites her over for a pretend, out-of-season Hanukkah celebration (fake snow outside included). Over footage of him putting up Hanukkah decorations and lighting a menorah with Adam and Miriam, he narrates a heartwarming speech about how he’s learned how rewarding it is to stand up for his values. At the end, Fielder grows quiet as a conversation over sufganiyot turns into Miriam pressing him to state his support for Israel, something he ultimately declines to do since “it’s a hot-button issue.”
Forcing Miriam and Angela to argue about Jesus while he sits off to the side, Fielder might most resemble Bugs Bunny painting an escape route for himself into the scenery. Look at these silly people fighting over religion, even when they know that the stakes are imaginary! See how easy it is to manipulate children into saying and believing what you want them to! Look, the show seems to say, what religion does to people!
It’s worth remembering that Angela had initially agreed to rehearse the raising of a child the way she envisioned it. By moving in and insisting on a Jewish upbringing for Adam, Fielder flipped the premise midstream. It’s also not clear whether Fielder’s own religious beliefs are entirely sincere; he says at one point that he stopped going to religious services because they were “boring,” but “I still do all the holidays and stuff.”
Of course, an actual observant Jew and devout real-life Christian in a genuine relationship who were actually committed to raising children together in a religious faith would have presumably discussed how they were going to raise their son before he was six years old. The Kuleshov effect of Fielder’s deadpan presence on the show, together with its masterful editing, makes it impossible to accurately ascertain his motives. Fielder’s understanding of religion as it’s portrayed in “Apocalypto” is emblematic of many in the West today: a series of rote rituals performed with little understanding of the why behind them, or as a form of idiosyncratic self-expression.
We don’t hear all of Angela and Miriam’s argument about Judaism and Christianity, but what we do hear—of Angela offering Christian Bible verses without any kind of explanation, nuance, or context, and Miriam asking her to acknowledge that “the world doesn’t revolve around Jesus”—reflects much of American discourse around what Fielder might call “hot-button issues,” characterized as it is by incuriosity and an inability to disagree without descending into either knee-jerk hostility or spineless relativism.
As someone who writes regularly about religion, I often say that it’s a great privilege to listen to people share what is, for most of them, the most important thing in their lives. Whoever he is, it’s unclear what the most important thing is to the Nathan Fielder of The Rehearsal. He is portrayed as a sort of Nietzschean Last Man, so unsure of himself that he makes everything small, manipulating virtually everyone he encounters with staged and rehearsed interactions in order to curate a nonthreatening existence for himself, in which he controls every possible detail of his environment. Of course, as Miriam shows him with her Israel challenge, he can’t, and so by the end of “Apocalypto,” he has begun a new cycle of recurrence, with the unpleasant and difficult either ignored or engineered away. If The Rehearsal is attempting to make religion appear ridiculous, it offers little in the way of a viable alternative.
Maggie Phillips is a freelance writer and former Tablet Journalism Fellow.