The student-run Harvard Ichthus Christian blog website apologized for an anonymous post by a Jewish convert to Christianity who wrote that Jews deserve to be persecuted for killing Jesus.

The apology was issued on Friday, and the original post that was published last Wednesday has been removed from the site.

“(W)e sincerely apologize for breaching the confidence of civil dialogue. This has been a growing experience for all involved here at the Ichthus, and, as students, we sincerely appreciate the patience and grace you have demonstrated towards us,” editor-in-chief Aaron Gyde wrote in his apology.

“We, the Jews, collectively rejected God and hung Him up on a cross to die, and thus we deserved the punishments that were heaped on our heads over the last 2000 years,” the post said, according to the Boston Globe.

“This particular piece has led to increasing misunderstanding and disinformation about the author’s views, the Ichthus, and Christianity,” the Ichthus wrote in the apology. “We do acknowledge that many of the claims of Christianity are offensive to those who do not believe it, but we think that much of the offense that has resulted from this article is not the offense of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And for that we apologize.”

Lawrence Summers, who was the first Jew to become president of Harvard University, will replace Ben Bernanke to head the Federal reserve, the Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported early Friday morning. It cited unnamed sources.

Bernanke’s term expires in January, and Summers was competing with Janet Yellen, currently the vice chairman of the Fed, for the post. Stanley Fischer, who recently quit in the middle of his second term as Governor of the Bank of Israel and returned to the United States, reportedly wanted the post. His age was one major factor that kept him from being a front runner.

Summers’ mother was of Romanian-Jewish ancestry, and his father, whose father’s name was Samuelson, was Jewish. Both parents were economist, and Summers Is the nephew of Paul Samuelson, known to thousands of university graduates for his textbooks on economics.

In 2002, Summers wrote of himself, “I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout.”

Invitations to a fictitious club saying “Jews need not apply” were slipped under the doors of students living in the Harvard University dormitories.

The flyers enclosed in the sealed envelopes discovered early Friday morning invited the students to the inaugural event of a new undergraduate social club, or finals club, called The Pigeon, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported. The flyer also said “Seriously, no f***ing Jews. Colors OK.”

There are eight all-male and five all-female Harvard finals clubs, which are not recognized by the university and which have been accused of promoting “an exclusive and dangerous social environment,” according to the Crimson.

The dean of Harvard College, Evelynn Hammonds, wrote in an email statement on Friday that the flyers were “deeply disturbing” to her and others in the Harvard community. Harvard College is one of two schools within the university granting undergraduate degrees.

“They are not a reflection of the values of our community,” Hammonds wrote. “Even if intended as satirical in nature, they are hurtful and offensive to many students, faculty and staff, and do not demonstrate the level of thoughtfulness and respect we expect at Harvard when engaging difficult issues within our community.”

The Crimson also reported that early Friday morning, two Northeastern University students who vandalized a menorah located on the Boston campus were identified on a surveillance video and will face disciplinary action.

Romney may say the right things, but will he really be able to affect change? And Obama says… and does… the wrong things, and he has no reason to change. Democrats complain that Romney has no sympathy for the unemployment problem.

Of course this is ironic since he has been hunting for a new job for the past year. In the recent debate, he stressed how he would work to improve the economy to help the middle class. He wants to cut out deductions, lower taxes, and simplify the tax code. Great idea, but that’s not how Washington politics work. With so many special interests, will he really be able to make the required changes? It doesn’t look good.

On the other hand, Obama wants to spend his way out of the problem. He gets the money from borrowing the same way overspending American citizens fund their personal largess. Instead of paying back debt that he racked up, Obama pays the minimum monthly balance. It’s like if you pay $50 on your $5,000 credit card debt. Based on the logic of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, the President feels he can double the amount of debt since he’d only have to make $100 monthly payments (or, in the case of the United States debt, make that an increase from $30 billion per month in interest payments to $60 billion!). This system of borrowing money will probably continue to work until at least the  election date, and maybe for a few more years. But at some point, that debt must be paid off.

On this week’s Goldstein on Gelt radio show, I asked former Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Harvard professor Ken Rogoff about the American Debt Crisis. He gave a great explanation.

Here’s part one of the show (below). Part two will be posted next week.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

If you have not yet read the blog post we wrote a month ago about Prof. Cyril Karabus ["26-Sep-12: Dubai, Dubai, Dubai"], please consider taking a moment to do that now. Even if you don’t have that moment, below is a summary of some of the issues we raised there, plus some fresh background. It’s followed by some thoughts by us on what the scandalous conduct of the authorities in the United Arab Emirates in this sordid affair might all mean.

The UAE is one of those nation states that was invented in the lifetime of many of us, in 1971. At the time, it had a total population of less than a million people, and control of one-tenth of the world’s oil. Those conditions meant it has been making very serious money ever since, while marching to the beat of its own distinctive drum.

The UAE is made up of several separate emirates. The two largest are Dubai and Abu Dhabi who have not always gotten along so nicely together; their armed forces faced off against each other for a while in the late seventies [source]. They were impoverished fly-specks before gigantic oil and gas reserves were discovered in the sixties. They are no longer poor.

It would be nice to say their phenomenal wealth has been used consistently for good. It would be even nicer if the mythology they like to spin about their leaders were true, but it is not. For instance, the UAE’s first president and acknowledged driving force, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, is described in glowing terms on one of its newspaper’s websites:

His firmly-held belief in Islam… was fundamental to his views and actions… He was a firm believer in the need for dialogue between different faiths and cultures, rejecting the intolerant views of those who would seek to promote divisions… His faith was fundamental to his views and actions [including] the duty entrusted to us by God Almighty, who commands us to treat all living creatures with dignity and respect.

Nice sentiments. Keep those last words in mind as we push ahead.

Zayed’s founding (in 1999) and funding of the notorious Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, a so-called think-tank that is now defunct, demonstrated motivations of a different sort. The Center [says Wikipedia]

became embroiled in controversy when it became known that it also disseminated and provided a platform for anti-American, anti-Semitic, and extreme anti-Israel views.

Its speakers were said [according to Wikipedia] to have described Jews as “enemies of all nations” and “cheaters whose greed knows no bounds.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous anti-Semitic forgery created in the 19th century to vilify Jews, was held up as a factual account of a Jewish plan to “control the world.”

Israel was accused by Zayed Center officials of developing an ethnic bomb that will kill only Arabs, an accusation echoed just last week in a wave of claims to identical effect that were published throughout the Iranian government-controlled media. See our blog post “9-Oct-12: The serious message behind the vile idiocy.”

The Zayed people asserted for good measure that the Mossad was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy and for the Watergate scandal as well. There’s more [here, for instance], but you get the picture.

And (here we get to our point) some Zayed speakers accused Israel of trying to sterilize Palestinian children by lacing the water “used by some Palestinian schools” with chemicals.

Matters came to something of a head in 2004 when Harvard Divinity School decided to return a $2.5 million gift from Sheik Zayed [source] “after 18 months of controversy over the donor’s alleged connection to anti-Semitic and anti-US propaganda… Sheikh Zayed gave the money to Harvard in 2000 to endow a professorship of Islamic studies.” But note that the London School of Economics was not quite so unctuous, and kept and spent a similar cash gift from the same source: we wrote about it in our blog two years ago: see “26-Nov-10: Gifts and good relations.”

Now fast forward to today’s UAE and Dubai, where the statelet’s huge airline, Emirates, has just done a deal with Qantas to essentially take over the Australian airline’s steering wheel. With the Australian government blessing the deal a few days ago [report], it looks like full steam ahead. And according to a UAE business news website story from six days ago headlined “No alternative to Emirates deal: Qantas,” the Flying Kangaroo is already thoroughly and irretrievably locked in.

The recurring uproar over the facts surrounding the life of Jesus now surrounds the discovery of an ancient papyrus bearing the words “Jesus said to them, my wife”.

The discovery of a 4th century Egyptian Coptic papyrus fragment was publicized at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome on Tuesday by a professor of the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at the school, released a statement noting that Christian tradition “Has long held that Jesus was not married,” and stated that the new find – being called “The Gospel of Jesus’s wife” – suggests that his being dubbed unmarried was likely due to “vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage.”

An analysis by King of the fragment will be published in the Harvard Theological Review in January 2013.

State Attorney Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case, recently called the Dean of Harvard Law School to complain about my criticism of some of her actions. She was transferred to the Office of Communications and proceeded to engage in a 40 minute rant, during which she threatened to sue Harvard Law School, to try to get me disciplined by the Bar Association and to file charges against me for libel and slander.

She said that because I work for Harvard and am identified as a professor she had the right to sue Harvard. When the communications official explained to her that I have a right to express my opinion as “a matter of academic freedom,” and that Harvard has no control over what I say, she did not seem to understand. She persisted in her nonstop whining, claiming that she is prohibited from responding to my attacks by the rules of professional responsibility—without mentioning that she has repeatedly held her own press conferences and made public statements throughout her career.

Her beef was that I criticized her for filing a misleading affidavit that willfully omitted all information about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained during the “struggle” it described. She denied that she had any obligation to include in the affidavit truthful material that was favorable to the defense. She insisted that she is entitled to submit what, in effect, were half truths in an affidavit of probable cause, so long as she subsequently provides the defense with exculpatory evidence. She should go back to law school, where she will learn that it is never appropriate to submit an affidavit that contains a half truth, because a half truth is regarded by the law as a lie, and anyone who submits an affidavit swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Before she submitted the probable cause affidavit, Corey was fully aware that Zimmerman had sustained serious injuries to the front and back of his head. The affidavit said that her investigators “reviewed” reports, statements and “photographs” that purportedly “detail[ed] the following.” It then went on to describe “the struggle,” but it deliberately omitted all references to Zimmerman’s injuries which were clearly visible in the photographs she and her investigators reviewed. That is Hamlet without the Prince! The judge deciding whether there is probable cause to charge the defendant with second degree murder should not have been kept in the dark about physical evidence that is so critical to determining whether a homicide occurred, and if so, a homicide of what degree. By omitting this crucial evidence, Corey deliberately misled the court.

Corey seems to believe that our criminal justice system is like a poker game in which the prosecution is entitled to show its cards only after the judge has decided to charge the defendant with second degree murder. That’s not the way the system is supposed to work and that’s not the way prosecutors are supposed to act. That a prosecutor would hide behind the claim that she did not have an obligation to tell the whole truth until after the judge ruled on probable cause displays a kind of gamesmanship in which prosecutors should not engage.

The prisons, both in Florida and throughout the United States, are filled with felons who submitted sworn statements that contained misleading half truths. Corey herself has probably prosecuted such cases.

Ironically, Corey has now succeeded in putting Zimmerman back in prison for a comparably misleading omission in his testimony. His failure to disclose money received from a PayPal account requesting donations for his legal defense made his testimony misleadingly incomplete. In her motion to revoke his bail, Corey argued that Zimmerman “intentionally deceived the court” by making “false representations.” The same can be said about Prosecutor Corey. She too misled and deceived the court by submitting an affidavit that relied on a review of photographs and other reports that showed injuries to Zimmerman, without disclosing the existence of these highly relevant injuries.

Even if Angela Corey’s actions were debatable, which I believe they were not, I certainly have the right, as a professor who has taught and practiced criminal law nearly 50 years, to express a contrary view. The idea that a prosecutor would threaten to sue someone who disagrees with her for libel and slander, to sue to university for which he works, and to try to get him disbarred, is the epitome of unprofessionalism. Fortunately, truth is a defense to such charges.