My Aunt Ellen is an actress now.

She got a non-speaking bit part (which is a step up from "extra") in a Showtime miniseries. "Non-speaking bit part" means stuff like "actually hands the actor something, or shakes hands with the star or something like that" -- something more significant than "was just sort of there."

But this means that she got to meet and hang out with a whole bunch of stars.

So I have a picture of my Auntie Ellen hugging Jason Isaacs.

Okay, so, really, he just has his arm around her shoulder, but she's genuinely hugging Annabeth Gish in the next photo.

Anyway, I now have Kevin Bacon numbers of 2 for all the Clintons (aunt Linda and uncle John took them out on their boat for deep-sea diving in the Great Barrier reef for a week), Jason Isaacs, Annabeth Gish, Fionnula Flanagan, Jason Clark, Kevin Chapman and Ethan Embry (my aunt Ellen and uncle Rob acted with them), Satchmo (my grandfather and he were really good friends), everybody at DreamWorks (my Bible teacher was a script consultant for Prince of Egypt) . . .

One more thing I've been thinking about religious wars. . .

So, Egypt has been trying to crack down on an Islamicist party -- having their police beat up pro-that-party demonstrators, putting up roadblocks in front of polling places in areas that support that party, and the like.

And that sort of thing. . . I just don't think it works very well in the long run. Which is one of the (many) reasons that I think that what we're doing in Iraq is moronic.

See. . . I'm Jewish. And because of that, I can name a half-dozen religious fundamentalist fighters and clerics that are revered in my religion for their opposition to invading forces. And some of them could be argued to be terrorists. Bar Kochba, Akiva, Mattathaias, Judah Maccabee and the rest of his brothers. . .

I mean -- think how it would have been reported:

"Radical cleric Mattathaias ben Yochan today killed [insert name here] and a Roman officer as they attempted to perform a ceremony to show their desire for peace with Rome. He and his followers then fled, and are believed to be hiding in the mountains outside the city."

That would be a fairly unbiased report, frankly.

These are people that we revere. People who went through the rural villages forcibly circumcising boys, against their parents' consent.

Look: as Jews, we can point to the Maccabees, the Zealots, the Hagganah and the Irgun as organizations, deemed as terrorist organizations by the rulers of Israel at the time -- that we have at least SOME reverence for (okay -- the Talmudic rabbis weren't wholly thrilled with either the Maccabees or the Zealots, nor are modern Jews totally thrilled with the history of the Hagganah or the Irgun in British-Mandate Palestine -- but they all have a certain amount of reverence and respect).

This is more-or-less the situation we find ourselves in Iraq. Fundamentalist clerics gaining more and more popular support -- that they would normally never get, because nobody LIKES fundamentalists except during times of perceived oppression -- against an invader of a different religion.

And it amazes me that Bush couldn't see this coming. I mean, I know he doesn't study history, but he's presumably a Christian -- at least, he always says he is -- so I wonder that he never read the Books of Maccabees. I mean, as a Jew, they're not actually part of my Bible, but they are part of his.