The Reform Movement has come up with an interesting, and we think helpful, concept. In anticipation of upcoming Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, the director of the movement’s Religious Action Center created a Web-based campaign inviting people to submit questions they would like to see Kagan answer.

AskElenaKagan.com, created “to best gauge our community’s concerns,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, yielded questions that are well worth asking — certainly more valid than those that may, and are likely to, be asked purely for partisan reasons. The questions, and a letter from Saperstein, have now been sent to members of the judiciary committee.

In January, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are entitled to the freedom of speech the Constitution affords U.S. citizens — and that, therefore, they may use unregulated amounts of money to try to influence elections.

This was a blank check for corporations to pack the highest offices in the land with people who would do their bidding. What if, for example, BP had put some of its millions (billions!) behind members of Congress who were up for election? The beleaguered (and reckless) company would be calling in its markers just about now. (Hmmm — maybe it is: Witness the “shakedown” quote — since apologized for — of Texas Rep. Joe Barton.)

Notice how all eyes are turned toward Israel in the aftermath of the flotilla incident.

How convenient. It diverts attention from more serious issues and allows countries with questionable human rights records to masquerade as humanitarians.

Take Turkey, for example, a country that certainly protests too much about perceived Israeli misbehavior. This is the same country that during the years 1915 to 1923 annihilated some one and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire — and denied doing it.

Terrified of terrorists? Two writers in the current Atlantic make “the case for calling them nitwits” — not to make us relax our vigilance but to reduce our anxiety by getting a bead on who they actually are. The “twin ideas” that “[t]hey’re fanatical and highly organized … keep us fearful and help them attract new members,” write Daniel Byman and Christine Fair. (Byman is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy and director of Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, where Fair is an assistant professor.)

Like the Wicked Witch of the West — whom, we must say, she greatly resembles (apologies to Margaret Hamilton) — Helen Thomas has melted. All it took to take the longtime White House correspondent down was a dash of cold water, in the form of a widely circulated videotape of her astonishingly ignorant and bigoted remarks about Jews and Israel. Indeed, you could say she splashed it on herself.

Those remarks have drawn a lot of attention (see page 30). One of the best responses we’ve seen was by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post on Monday. He called the Thomas diatribe that Jews should “go home” “a teachable moment,” and proceeded to remind the world that “after World War II many Jews did attempt to ‘go home’ to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them — killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

“The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust … played an outsize role in the establishment of the State of Israel,” he noted. “It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Harry Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered….

“For the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe, there was no going home — and no staying, either.”

Thomas also needs to be taught about the Jews who had a centuries-long history in Arab lands — and who were expelled from them.

Shulamit Kustanowitz, a former managing editor of The Jewish Standard, cites Jews’ long history in eretz Yisrael itself.

“My grandmother (Esther Shtampfer Englander),” the Fair Lawn resident writes in an e-mail, was the seventh generation in her family to be born in Jerusalem.

“So, figuring she was born in about 1885, and allowing 20 years per generation, I can claim Jerusalem as the place of birth of our family in particular going back to 1745.

“Of course,” Kustanowitz continues, “the Torah records that our ancestors were there at least 3,500 years ago.

“Therefore,” she artfully suggests, “I think we should do what Helen Thomas originally suggested and go back home where we came from. She just had the country of our roots wrong.”

Take that, Helen Thomas.

RKB

The government of Turkey has been shouting to whoever will listen for two weeks now about how its aid flotilla to Gaza was a humanitarian mission to an occupied people. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears quite concerned for the people of Gaza who are, he claims, suffering under occupation.

Indeed, we have been touched by Erdogan’s concern for people in occupied land, which is why we fully support the creation of a massive aid flotilla to a people who have lived under occupation for almost 40 years by a country that claims half of the indigenous people’s land as its own. We speak, of course, of the citizens of Cyprus, who have lived under Turkish occupation since 1974.

Only Turkey recognizes the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, created after that country invaded the Greek island and deposed its ruler, President and Archbishop Makarios III, and divided the Greek isle. The events that led to the invasion are, of course, more complicated than can be elaborated on here, but the short take is that Turkish forces declared themselves the independent rulers of part of the island.

Then there is the matter of Turkey’s bloody past: the Armenian genocide, long a taboo topic in American and Israeli political circles because of the delicate relationship with Turkey. Now that Turkey appears to have realigned itself with Iran — seemingly leaving the derech of westernization and its quest for membership in the European Union — we have seen American and Israeli leaders begin calling Turkey on its past crimes.

We want to see more.

In April of 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested more than 250 Armenians and then initiated a series of deportations, death marches, and massacres that resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000 Armenians.

Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, denies that the word genocide is appropriate to describe these events.

We urge the United States, Israel, and the international community to call Turkey to task for its crimes past and present. For Israel to be judged by countries with such horrific human rights records — need we even begin the list of Iran’s crimes? — is laughable at best and perverse at worst.

J.L.