Today's WTF Moment

comes in the NYT article on Iran's Holocaust Denial conference. It's really the last line of this excerpt, which is the last line of the piece as published:

Despite the promises of open-mindedness, when one participant talked about the scholarship confirming the Holocaust, his views were quickly dismissed.

That speaker, an Iranian historian, Gholamreza Vatandoust, from Shiraz University, said, “Some facts about the Holocaust have been documented.” But he was criticized immediately by Robert Faurisson, a French academic, who said he had never found documents to support the Holocaust.

One of a few ultra-Orthodox rabbis at the conference, Moshe Ayre Friedman from Austria, said, “I am not a denier of the Holocaust, but I think it is legitimate to cast doubt on some statistics.”

Ultra-Orthodox Holocaust denial? Well I never. So who is he? First, his middle name is Arye, not Ayre--does no one proofread at the Times anymore? He opposes the creation of the state of Israel--he's THAT Orthodox. When told that G-d himself would be catering the event, he said "I'll just have fruit." (OK, an old joke.) And here's his picture, courtesy of Al Jazeerah, lighting a candle for Arafat: http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20Photos/2004%20News%20photos/November/5-7n.htm: scroll down. Oh the unruly multiplicity of the world, which is always much weirder than our accounts of it.

Nuttiness on this order is not amusing, of course. What's surprising is that there's not a whole lot more on this fellow when I google him. Why's that? It would seem that an ultra-Orthodox holocaust denier would be sort of a natural man-bites-dog affair, and in the news a bit more often than he turns out to be. Must remember to lexis-nexis him....

Can Obama Be For Real Without a Tie and With an "Arab-sounding" Name?

Everyone today seems to be remarking on Jeff Greenfield's bizarre comments on Obama's look. From TPM, here's an except:

But, in the case of Obama, he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb. Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable.

And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.

Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads?

Do we all really have that much time on our hands? Surely someone as smart as Greenfield could find something more interesting to say about someone as smart as Obama.

Or is political coverage really only about describing what buttons are being pushed?

Now surely this is an interesting ethnicity-morph. Sure, Dems and Reps both want to think of him as black, and already his blackness is being called into question. He ain't really black, just like all those affirmative action beneficiaries at the Ivy League schools ain't really black--this is one plan of attack. But if he ain't black, what is he? He ain't white. Why, he's an Ay-Rab. Of course, a real jihadi. I'm sure Osama has the phrase "audacity of hope" tattoed on his arm in Arabic.

As an Arab-American myself, I've been an interested observer of the way middle-easterners have been getting progressively less white since 9/11. So I wonder what it was about Obama that made Greenfield make the connection. In middle eastern terms, wouldn't his other name, Barack, link him with the Israeli side of things? And in policy terms isn't he rather pro-Israeli? How important is the whiteness factor?

This post has more question marks than my usual. I think this is because the Obama phenomenon is so hard to get a grip on. You can see to what lengths someone like Greenfield has to go to say something fresh about him without dealing with him on policy terms. Feel the condescension of it, too. The political reporters can't make it fit into the usual frames, and so look for the kinds of angles that rubes and hicks can reckon with. It's the same way sports reporters, for instance, approach female audiences--not as sports fans but as presumptive admirers of players' butts.