Nigel Duara has been reporting for the Des Moines Register on the situation in Postville, Iowa in the aftermath of last week’s arrests at Agriprocessors. Here he talks with JTA’s Ben Harris about how the raid went down.

Audio sound funny? Upgrade your Flash player.

To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

One of the top candidates to be the new U.N. high commissioner for human rights may bring the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva to new lows, warns one pro-Israel watchdog organization.

Mexican Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba — who is the front-runner for the post, according to Human Rights Tribune, rarely missed an opportunity to single out Israel for special opprobrium during his year as president of the Council, according to Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch. Neuer clashed with de Alba in this session of the Human Rights Council.

This week, Neuer had this to say to JTA about de Alba, who was president of the Human Rights Council from mid-2006 to mid-2007:

“His record was one of weakness, at best, in the face of the takeover by the Islamic group of the Human Rights Council. He oversaw the massive erosion of what was already a problematic institution. Under his watch, the supposedly reformed U.N. Council ended its scrutiny of Belarus, ended its scrutiny of Cuba, and he refused to let Canada vote on its package of reforms. He also oversaw the singling out of Israel as a permanent agenda item at the Human Rights Council.”

The current high commissioner, Louise Arbour, has held the post for four years. She, too, has endured her fair share of criticism from the pro-Israel camp — residents of Sderot stoned her when she visited the town in November 2006, just a few months after she warned during the Israel-Hezbollah war that “those in positions of command and control” could be subject to “personal criminal responsibility” for their actions in the 2006 war. But if Arbour is succeeded by de Alba, the Council will only get worse, Neuer warns.

Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, who can be seen here smiling with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a meeting in Tehran in March, reportedly is another leading candidate for Arbour’s position.

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights is an appointee of the U.N. secretary-general. Spokesman Brenden Varma told JTA on Monday that Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon hopes to make his appointment by the end of June.

Ben Harris is on the on the ground in Iowa, reporting on the aftermath of last week’s federal raid of the country’s largest meatpacking plant. Listen to his report on the first batch of undocumented workers to be deported, with hundreds more still in custody.

Audio sound funny? Upgrade your Flash player.

To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

Perhaps feeling besieged by the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of Israel’s 60th birthday — which seemed to be more an opportunity to question the Jewish state’s future than celebrate its past — the founding president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, Yehezkel Dror, argues in an essay in the Forward that Israel shouldn’t worry too much about morals when it comes to securing Israel’s survival.

Here is his justification of the use of Israeli nuclear weapons:

…if the threat is sufficiently grave, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Israel would be justified if likely to be necessary for assuring the state’s survival, the bitter price of large number of killed innocent civilians notwithstanding.

But Dror is a bit disingenuous to write an entire piece about the need for realpolitik to supersede Jewish morality and not once mention the Palestinians. In doing so, he ignores the most pressing moral dilemma Israelis face today.

Most Israelis don’t need to decide whether or not Jerusalem’s Defense Ministry should expand trade ties with Beijing or Ankara, but what they should do when facing an angry Palestinian woman at a West Bank checkpoint who could be either pregnant or hiding a bomb, how to feel after reading a Peace Now report that 40 percent of Jewish homes in the West Bank were built on private Palestinian land, or what to tell their children when they see a soldier pull aside Arabs on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem and subject them to tough questioning about where they’re going and why.

Are these measures necessary to secure Israel’s existence? It’s a tough call Dror doesn’t address.

The man behind the NPR program “This American Life” believes in stories, not in God. But, in an interview with Beliefnet, he has interesting things to say about his Jewish upbringing and religion generally:

Would you want your kids to bar mitzvah?

I don’t know. Culturally I am a Jew. I don’t have a choice about it. You can’t lose your cultural heritage like luggage at the airport. It’s a part of me. But my kids…it is weird to indoctrinate your child into something that you don’t believe. It violates some sort of golden rule. I don’t think it is bad to raise your child as an atheist, but I say that as someone without children.

I have to say that when I go to synagogue I find it very…if you don’t believe in God, what business do you have being in a synagogue? When I go into a synagogue, I know the songs, I read Hebrew, it is very reassuring to be there. It is a part of my life that hasn’t changed; it is like walking back into my childhood. But at some point you do notice the words and prayers and, as someone who doesn’t believe, it feels weird to use other’s moment of worship as a moment of nostalgia. It feels disrespectful; they are not there to entertain me. It feels strange to be chanting something with everyone else, but not believe it – it feels wrong. …

When you are interviewing religious people, do you think that their belief is just an experience that differs from your own or do think they are delusional?

I have a polite and a not-so-polite answer, and the polite answer is a huge part of what I feel. And that answer is: that is their experience of the world, it is different than mine. And then there is another part of me that is not so charitable which feels that what they are saying is nonsense. There is no big daddy in the sky but they need to tell themselves this story for whatever reason, and I am glad that is not me.

Ten years ago, when I was thinking about religion a lot more because a lot of things were happening at the same time, I did have moments when I really wished that I had faith, that I had the reassurance of that, that I could believe. But I don’t feel that way any more at all–ever. A couple of years ago I read a book by Bertrand Russell called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” And he lays out a thesis for how destructive religion is, and I remember thinking, “Wow, that is not someone who was raised in the United States of America.” Before that, it had not occurred to me that religion was causing a lot of unhappiness for people–people are estranged from each of other, people think there is something wrong with themselves because the faith they were raised in tells them that they are sick, whatever it is. But I wasn’t seeing this part, because the people who I am closest to who have faith, their experiences of it are so positive.

Sunday’s New York Times marks Israel’s 60th birthday with four Op-Eds about the Jewish state.

Thomas Friedman writes that the whispering campaign to stoke Jewish fears about Barack Obama is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the U.S. president in supporting Israel and promoting a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently interviewed Obama for The Atlantic, draws on his conversations with Ehud Olmert for a story in that same magazine to argue that American Jews are the monkey wrench in the peace process. He throws the U.S. Jewish organizational world some bones — “The people of AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning,” he writes — but, echoing the arguments of the new left-wing, pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, Goldberg writes that being pro-Israel sometimes means saying no to Jewish settlement in the West Bank and yes to a Palestinian state.

In her essay, Ruth Gruber recall the stateless Holocaust refugees for whom Israel’s establishment was a godsend.

And in the obligatory “Nakba” piece, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury ponders the “catastrophe” of Israel’s existence for the Palestinian Arabs. While an eloquent expression of Arab sentiment about Israel, Khoury ignores the nakba of the last 60 years: the Arab world’s insistence on keeping the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war homeless and disenfranchised, outsiders even after it became obvious they would never return to their homes in the Jewish state.

The Times’ coverage Sunday also included an insightful, amusing and depressing Reporter’s Notebook by Sheryl Gay Stolberg about President Bush’s Middle East tour. Turns out he doesn’t quite understand why Arabs and Jews don’t dance together.

On Monday, the Times added another a feature about how Israeli artists are undergoing a rare flowering, gaining international recognition for works that make universal statements about very Israeli phenomena.

The Jewish culture folks over at Nextbook are putting on the latest installment of their Festivals of Ideas series Sunday in New York. Among the literati lined up to talk about Jews and Power: Cynthia Ozick, Shalom Auslander, Ruth Wisse, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

Nowhere on the Web page, however, is it noted the irony of the festival venue — The Times Center, the event space on the ground floor of the gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times. Whether you see the Times as the citadel of American Jewish power or as the symbol of Diaspora Jewish weakness, it’s an interesting choice.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with Academy Award winning actor Jon Voight who is in Israel for the state’s 60th anniversary festivities. While here, Voight joined Chabad-Lubavitch in welcoming children evacuated from the devastated Chernobyl region of the Former Soviet Union to Israel. I spoke to Mr. Voight about his relationship to the Jewish community, his involvement with Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl campaign, and his affinity for the state of Israel.

Audio sound funny? Upgrade your Flash player.

To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

[Update] Here’s video of Jon Voight dancing on the Chabad telethon:

Agriprocessors’ PR folks just sent us a statement. The company says it’s trying to upgrade its immigration compliance procedures, but the first priority is getting the plant up and running again. No mention made of steps to address charges of illicit drug production on the premises, however, as reported in the government’s affidavit on the company.

Agriprocessors Addressing Challenges Following Worksite Enforcement Action

POSTVILLE, IA (May 15, 2008) – Agriprocessors, Inc., continues to make meaningful progress in addressing the challenges presented by the worksite enforcement action by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies on May 12, 2008.

According to Chaim Abrahams, a company representative, Agriprocessors is concentrating its efforts on production.

“We were able to bring the plant back into operation the next day, and even though we’re not running at full capacity, we are able to resume production,” Abrahams said. “We are in the process of replacing workers so we can avoid any interruption of meeting customer needs for high quality products.”

Abrahams also noted that the company was in the process of enhancing its immigration compliance procedures.

“We are working with experts in immigration compliance to help us bolster our compliance efforts to employ only properly documented employees,” he said. “We have signed up for a government electronic verification program, and are working with our consultants on additional compliance measures that will enhance our hiring process.”

Agriprocessors also has launched an independent investigation into the circumstances which led to the worksite enforcement action, and is cooperating fully with the government.

“We extend our heartfelt sympathies to the families whose lives were disrupted and wish them the best,” Abrahams said.

Rabbi Moses Weissmandel, the supervising rabbi at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, called this morning to categorically refute every allegation made this week by government investigators — except the illegal worker business. “That’s not my department,” Weissmandel said.

What is his department is the rabbinical staff, some 40 rabbis responsible for the actual slaughter of meat and for supervising the plant to make sure everything’s kosher. He claimed his rabbis provide round-the-clock supervision, and that none of the allegations – among them that workers were producing drugs on site, and that rabbis abused the workers with meat hooks – are true.

“I categorically say it’s false, it’s not true, it’s a lie,” Weissmandel said. “I have my rabbis supervising 24/7. We supervise every inch of that place in order to be sure that the place is totally kosher.”

(more…)