Tuesday 30 December 2008

Breaking Point

What the fuck (If Quazam-Rockets would bombard Berlin Paris and London)

Israel Matzav: Video: CNN reporter ducks for cover during rocket attack#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Video: CNN reporter ducks for cover during rocket attack#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Great balls of fire!#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Great balls of fire!#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Israel's 'crimes'#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Israel's 'crimes'#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Video: Israeli Navy attacks on Hamas December 29#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Video: Israeli Navy attacks on Hamas December 29#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Video: IAF strikes in Gaza December 29#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Video: IAF strikes in Gaza December 29#links#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: 'Hamas' military capabilities have hardly been dented'#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: 'Hamas' military capabilities have hardly been dented'#links#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: 'Palestinian' child interviewed on PATV: Hamas responsible for war#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: 'Palestinian' child interviewed on PATV: Hamas responsible for war#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Jordanian Islamist MP incites to jihad#links#links#links

Israel Matzav: Jordanian Islamist MP incites to jihad#links#links#links

Stop Raping Israel: Strip Blitz

Stop Raping Israel: Strip Blitz

WHAT WE TEACH OUR CHILDREN



This morning we completed the Kidushin tractate; tomorrow we start Bava Kamma. The final Mishna in the Kidushin tractate talks about the education and vocational training a father must give his sons. The final viewpoint, that of rabbi Nehorai, is that the single most important, perhaps even exclusively important one, is to teach them Torah.


As I've written elsewhere, the tradition of Daf Yomi, the daily page of Gemara learned in cycles of seven and a half years, is new: it was invented a mere 80 years ago or so, even if by now hundreds of thousands of people, men and women, participate. The tradition of learning, however, is ancient. On any given day, and every single given day over the past 2,200 years, through thick or thin (there has been lots of thin), Jews have been studying the Mishna and its ever-growing supplementary layers; the Mishna itself looks back to centuries of learning Biblical sources. When we participate today, and tomorrow, and next year, we're participating in a lively conversation that has been going on, literally uninterrupted, for more than 2,500 years. The conversation has spanned the entire Jewish world, with contributions coming from today's Iran westward to America (recently); from Northern Europe to Yemen. At all times the discussion included intricate and detailed things about the Land of Israel, Erez Yisrael; most of the time, though not for a few centuries before and after the fist Christian millennium, some of the participants have been Jews living here. The last time this wasn't true was about the time Columbus was discovering America, perhaps a bit earlier. Ever since then, however, there has been an uninterrupted presence of scholars contributing to the discussion from this holy and unique land.


Zionism is not, by and large, a religious phenomenon, nor even a cultural one, though it is also them. It is not to be explained simply by the Jewish insistence on carrying on that conversation no matter what, nor because of their insistence on doing so here. But it is also that. Jews who wish to look away from these facts may do so: we're an argumentative bunch and we always argue about everything, including crucially important things. Non-Jews, however, who take for themselves the right to decide what we may or may not dream of, may or may not aspire to, may or may not attempt: they surely are denying us the right to be who we've always been. This, most emphatically, is a form of antisemitism, have no doubt about it. No matter how they play with words or profess otherwise.


We teach our children to be Jews: we teach them to be part of the discussion, with all the responsibilities that entails.


Achikam just called. They're turning off their cellphones now. We've done our best to teach him; now he's shouldering the responsibilities.
taken from :Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

ANOTHER COMMENT ON ARAB SOLIDARITY



Apparently the Egyptian leadership isn't happy that Hezbullah's Nassrallah has called for masses of Egyptians to rise against their leadership and march to the assistance of the common brothers in Hamas. According to Y-net (but not the BBC), the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Aboul Ghreit, said earlier today


"This man (Nasrallah) spoke of Egypt's armed forces. These honorable armed forces are meant to protect Egypt and if he does not know that, I am telling him: No and no! "The honorable armed forces are capable of defending this homeland from people like you. You want to create chaos in this region as a service to interests that are not for the good of this region.


"Now, it's of course a pleasure to poke fun at the prophets of "the angry Arab street" in the Western media, and since these are grim days, finding things to draw pleasure from is OK. On a more significant level, the divisions in the Arab world are a sign of hope. If they all operated by the same Stalinist (or Nasserite) Groupthink, it would be impossible ever to live with them in peace because the extremists would dictate the line for everyone.


The Groupthink folks in the West, by the way, look at the same set of facts and tell you that the Arab regimes are all evil puppets of the even more evil Americans, themselves controlled by the Big Corporations and Oil Companies, while it's the Nassrallahs of this world who represent the brave alternative, as demonstrated by the fact that the Arab Street backs them, across the Arab World. All 12,000 of them.
taken from :Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

SO WHAT DOES THE ARAB WORLD THINK ?



The Arab world is mostly not democratic. Iraq seems seriously to be trying to get there; Lebanon sometimes is and most-times isn't. The Jordanian non-democratic regime is benign - but not democratic. Actually, when it comes to democracy the Palestinians are closer than most Arabs, except when they aren't.


This means it's not easy to know what "the Arabs" think about issues. Not that it's easy to know what "the Americans" think, even less "the Europeans" and their interesting layers of doing business. It's not even clear if there's any particular significance to what "the Arab World" thinks about anything.


Though of course there is the rock-solid constant that representatives of Arab countries at the UN will always be against Israel, and that includes Egypt and Jordan who are officially at peace with Israel. Even regarding Israel, however, there are differences, tones, shadings, and complexities among the hundreds of millions of Arabs.


In order to really get an understanding of what's going on in the Arab world, you'd need first to have complete command of the Arab language, which itself is common as a literary language, but is extremely diverse in its local vernaculars to the extent of mutual incomprehensibility. Yet that's not enough. You also have to know a lot of facts. I speak English, but that doesn't mean I can tell you much about Australian society, nor about India. Just look at Juan Cole: he knows all sorts of languages but doesn't understand the countries he talks about.


So when Western journalists assure you that


the Arab "street" is unanimous in its support of the Palestinians as the demonstrations from Damascus to Baghdad showed.


(that's Anne Penketh in The Independent), it's either unnecessary, because of course the Arabs prefer the Palestinians over the Jews, or it's Ms. Penketh yearning for some confirmation of her own emotional needs: the Evil Israelis Armed by the Evil Americans are hated by the Noble Downtrodden. Or some such psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo.

But it's not only The Independent. This morning, the rot is rather clearly on display even at the New York Times. Their top article at the moment is titled Israeli Troops Mass Along Border; Arab Anger Rises.


The continued strikes, which Israel said were in retaliation for sustained rocket fire from Gaza into its territory, unleashed a furious reaction across the Arab world, raising fears of greater instability in the region.


Remember, it was only two days ago the New York Times itself said the Israeli attacks were a response to Hamas rockets, but maybe a three-day memory is too much to ask from journalists. But let's stay on message. The NYT tells us about these furious reaction, and also adds that their danger is that they'll create greater instability. We're not told who is the person or people with the rising fear levels. It's general, generic, something like that. Until we read the very next paragraph of their own item:


Much of the anger was also directed at Egypt, seen by Hamas and some nearby governments as having acceded to Israel’s military action by sealing its border with Gaza and forcing back many Palestinians at gunpoint who were trying to escape the destruction.


Witnesses at the Rafah border crossing described a chaotic scene as young men tried to force their way across into Egypt, amid sporadic exchanges of gunfire between Hamas and Egyptian forces. Egyptian state television reported that one Egyptian border guard was killed by a Hamas gunman. A Palestinian man was killed by an Egyptian guard near Rafah, Reuters reported.


To the best of my knowledge, Egypt is the largest (though not richest) Arab country. It's decidedly not democratic, so who knows what The Egyptian Street thinks, but the Egyptian government is hardly pro-Hamas in this conflict, and Egyptian troops in Rafah seem to be killing and being killed in confrontations with - well, I'd say, other Arabs, for lack of better information.


Meanwhile, all according to the same single NYT news item, there may be other inter-Arab tensions:


In Lebanon, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, put his fighters on alert, expressing strong support for Hamas and saying that he believed Israel might try to wage a two-front war, as it did in 2006. He called for a mass demonstration in Beirut on Monday. And he, too, denounced Egypt’s leaders. “If you don’t open the borders, you are accomplices in the killing,” he said in a televised speech.


Sounds brotherly, doesn't it. The article goes on to tell us about other folks who are angry about the lack of Arab solidarity:


Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the silence of some Arab countries, which he said had prepared the grounds for the “catastrophe,” an Iranian news agency, ISNA, reported.


“The horrible crime of the Zionist regime in Gaza has once again revealed the bloodthirsty face of this regime from disguise,” he said in a statement. “But worse than this catastrophe is the encouraging silence of some Arab countries who claim to be Muslim,” he said, apparently in a reference to Egypt and Jordan.


Now as we all know (don't we?), Iran isn't part of the Arab World, so it's not clear what they're doing in this article, which certainly implies that they are. The article then continues in the same vein: Protesters in Beirut are furious at Israel - abut also at Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.


So what do we really learn from this? First, that the Arab world is complicated, even in the ways if faces the universally accepted enemy of Israel. Second, that even the journalism of the New York Times is probably not a very good way to learn about the world. In more ways than you'd like to think, even they are not that much better than bloggers, especially when the bloggers write about things they're really specialists at, in ways the journalists aren't.


Third, that even the NYT looks over its shoulder all the time and fits its message to some perceived "public sentiment" (Liberal Street?): else how to understand this paragraph from the same item:


News agencies reported that a rocket fired Monday from Gaza killed a man and wounded seven people in the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon. Three Israelis were also stabbed by a Palestinian in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the reports said, quoting the Israeli military.


News agencies said. The rising Arab Anger is so factual it goes into the title. The death of an Israeli, the wounding of ten others, not to mention that they're all civilians, this is unverified information that has come in to the notice of our reporters, but we can't vouch for its veracity at this stage.
taken from: Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
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