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20 hours ago
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Israel Matzav: Hope and change? Gazans tiring of Hamas
Hope and change? Gazans tiring of Hamas
In the next-door tent, bitterness against Hamas is brewing. Many Gazans do not accept the party’s official view that the war was a great victory. Instead, many now blame Hamas for recklessly dragging them into a futile war that devastated their already beleaguered territory. “Where is Ismail Haniyeh?” cries a Gazan, referring to Hamas’s prime minister. “Why hasn’t he come here to see how we live? I lost my home. Why? For Hamas to succeed! It has destroyed Gaza. That’s a fact.”
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Israel Matzav: Hope and change? Gazans tiring of Hamas
Israel Matzav: Emanuel's blackmail: 'Give up half your country or die'
Emanuel's blackmail: 'Give up half your country or die'
According to Israeli media reports, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told a closed-door meeting of 300 top AIPAC donors on Sunday that thwarting Iran's nuclear program is contingent on 'progress' on the 'Palestinian' front. In other words, if we don't get going on giving away half the country, the Obama administration isn't even going to try to thwart Iran
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Israel Matzav: Emanuel's blackmail: 'Give up half your country or die'
Israel Matzav: Israeli Jews by the numbers
Israeli Jews by the numbers
A poll released today by the Begin - Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and the Anti-Defamation League has been widely discussed in the media. The poll was taken by Maagar Mochot, a well-known polling service here. Limited to Jewish Israelis, the poll focused on attitudes toward an Israeli attack on Iran and the Obama administration.
A vast majority (66%) of Israelis said they would support military action if diplomatic and economic efforts failed to get Iran to stop uranium enrichment, and of that number, 75% would support this action even if the Obama administration were opposed, according to a survey jointly commissioned by Bar-Ilan University's BESA center and the ADL, published on Sunday.
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Israel Matzav: Israeli Jews by the numbers
Israel Matzav: The United Nations, the World Media and Jerusalem's zoning laws
The United Nations, the World Media and Jerusalem's zoning laws
The United Nations issued a report [pdf link] on Friday that claimed that as many as 60,000 'Palestinian' homes in the eastern half of Jerusalem may have been built illegally in violation of Jerusalem's zoning laws. That - according to the United Nations - would be as many as one quarter of the Arab homes (forget that there is no such thing as a 'Palestinian' - Arabs in the eastern half of Jerusalem are entitled to Israeli citizenship) in the eastern half of the City.
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Israel Matzav: The United Nations,
Israel Matzav: Washington's new-old infectious disease
Washington's new-old infectious disease
There's a new-old infectious disease going around Washington. No, it's not swine Mexican flu H1N1 virus, which is also an old disease. Here is "case zero" of the current outbreak of that other infectious disease in Washington.
Yes, that other new-old infectious disease afflicts mostly Washington officials and causes them to have an irresistible urge to bow to their Saudi masters. The latest manifestation comes from the US State Department.
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Israel Matzav: Washington's new-old infectious disease
Israel Matzav: Et tu Danny?
Et tu Danny?
Several media reports in Israel this morning are pointing to this report at Bloomberg.com which claims that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has 'accepted a two-state solution.'
Israel agrees that a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians will entail a two-state solution, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said.
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Israel Matzav: Et tu Danny?
Israel Matzav: Gingrich: 'Obama is endangering Israel'
Gingrich: 'Obama is endangering Israel'
Former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has told the Jerusalem Post in an interview that the Obama administration is setting up a confrontation with Israel to make a point to the Arab world, and that it is endangering Israel.
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Israel Matzav: Gingrich: 'Obama is endangering Israel'
VICTIMHOOD
Glenn Greenwald seems not to like Israel much. It's not a major theme for him, at least not in the month or two since I started watching him, but it slips through from time to time. The other day he posted some comments which are useful for the insights they offer into his own Weltanschauung, even while not saying much about Israel or America's Jews. His title was The need of the most powerful to turn themselves into victims, and it was a critique of, in this order, Jeffery Goldberg, AIPAC,
Israel, Republicans in general, and AIPAC.His post purports to be about the dropping of criminal charges against two former AIPAC employees, but it's actually about a much more fundamental subject, which is why it's interesting. First, he sets up his argument by quoting Jeffry Goldberg's post on the matter:
The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to dismiss all charges against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman in the AIPAC leak case. It's about time. It was an idiotic case to begin with; the men were being prosecuted (under an ancient, seldom-used law) for receiving classified information passed orally -- not even on paper -- from a government stooge, and then passing it on to a reporter and to an official from the Israeli embassy. I'll gather up some reaction later, but suffice it to say that this day was long overdue. Rosen and Weissman did what a thousand reporters in Washington do everyday, hear about information that's technically classified. The only difference is that these two worked for a demonized lobby.
It's a sad day for the Walts and Mearsheimers of the world, who believe that AIPAC is a treasonous organization, and it's a sad day for AIPAC too, because it abandoned the two men to the fates when it should have stood by them. More to come.
The italics are Greenwalds', and straightaway he launches into Goldberg (another one of his pet dislikes):
The idea that AIPAC is a "demonized lobby" that is treated unfairly in the United States generally -- or by the Bush administration specifically, which commenced the prosecutions -- has to be one of the biggest jokes ever to appear in anything having to do with The Atlantic. What other lobbying organization can boast of summoning to its Conference half of the U.S. Congress -- as bipartisan a cast as possible -- along with the Vice President, following the visit last year by Obama, who read faithfully from the organization's script? With rare exception, Congressional action that AIPAC demands -- even on as controversial matter as the Israeli attack on Gaza -- not only passes the Congress, but often with virtual unanimity. Is there anyone who disputes that AIPAC is one of the most influential and powerful lobbying groups in the U.S., if not the most influential and powerful?
It's easy to point out two problems with Greenwald's argumentation. First, the assumption that being powerful contradicts being demonized, which is of course tosh. Logically there is no necessary connection one way or the other; factually, the powerful are often also demonized. Someday Greenwald might wish to learn a European language - German, say, or French, or British - and travel incognito through a land where it's spoken, and experience the extent to which his county is demonized irrespective of who its president is. The second is that being demonized can be objectively measured. I don't have the time patience or motivation, but it would be easy to pick a definition of demonization, and then use it to test if AIPAC is or isn't, if Israel is or isn't. (The former is easy, the latter is a no-brainer). Meryl Yourish sometimes does little research projects like that: be my guest if you wish, Meryl.
Greenwald continues:
Just ponder the depths of irrationality and pathological persecution complex -- the desperate need to self-victimize -- necessary to claim that AIPAC, of all entities, is "demonized" and treated unfairly by the U.S. Government. AIPAC. But that's the self-pitying, self-absorbed syndrome that drives so much of our political discourse (an amazingly high percentage of right-wing political dialogue in particular adheres to this formula: "I am X and X is treated so very unfairly" -- where X is virtually always among the groups wielding the most power: American, white, Christian, Republican, male, etc. etc.). It's the same mentality that leads people to insist that the true victim in the Middle East is the same country that, by far, possesses the greatest military might and uses it most often. It's a bizarre process of inversion where those who are most powerful insist on claiming that they are the weakest, most vulnerable and most oppressed.
Again, two comments. The first is that he seems to have his causes and effects reversed and his chronology backwards. I can't say about his vaguely described Republicans, but the Jews, who eventually invented both Israel and later also AIPAC, did so only after millennia of well documented persecution and demonization, and as a response to them. The real question is why it took them so long, far longer than most nations have existed, to decide that a bulwark against persecution might be to have power. First came the demonization, then the persecution, and only much much later the power to combat them.
The real reason I'm writing this post, however, is to comment on his extremely illuminating formulation "Just ponder the depths of irrationality and pathological persecution complex -- the desperate need to self-victimize". This is one of the more powerful themes of our age: the weak are victimized, victimhood commands the moral high ground, so everyone competes to have it, while pushing aside everyone else in their mad charge for its throne.
The response to which is that victimhood is not a moral category. Morality is a function of the decisions we make, which is why being perpetrators of crimes is evil, and choosing to be inactive bystanders can also be, but being a victim doesn't automatically convey anything. The only way being a victim can carry moral weight is when the victims can choose how to respond - and the ones who choose wrong are... wrong. Not right.
In Greenwald's Weltanschauung, however, choice isn't the issue; one's identity is; the group one belongs to; and the degree of blame that can be apportioned to it. Victims are right by virtue of belonging to the correct group. Moreover, since he sees the world this way, he assumes we all do. Since being victims is so positive, he's convinced we're all striving for the victim's mantle.
We're not. I can't speak for all Israelis nor all AIPACians, but I think most of them would agree with me that Israel is indeed powerful and will remain so, while facing diverse enemies some of whom are obscenely evil because of their decisions. We're not victims, we're at war, and what makes us right isn't our status on some non-existent scale of victimhood, but rather the decisions we make.
In Hebrew we've got a saying that al rosh haganav boer hakova, which can be roughly translated to mean that too much protestation tells of a bad conscience. When Greenwald and his ideological comrades protest loudly about our striving for victimhood, they tell nothing about us, but speak volumes about themselves and their understanding of morality.
taken from :Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
Stop Raping Israel: More Codependent YeSh"A Coucil PR Crap
10 Iyyar 5769Tremping (hitchhiking) into Jerusalem Erev Shabbath, I had an opportunity to take a picture of the huge billboard at the entrance to Shiloh, Shevuth Rahel, and their surrounding hilltop communities. The sign next to the blond haired, blue-eyed boy, dressed up in a Kohen Gadol (High Priest) costume, reads "Yehudah and Shomron (Judea and Samaria), the story of every Jew."
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Stop Raping Israel: More Codependent YeSh"A Coucil PR Crap
Chesler Chronicles » Let Us Praise Extraordinary Activists Who Stood Against Radical Islam in Times Square.
Let Us Praise Extraordinary Activists Who Stood Against Radical Islam in Times Square.
My esteemed colleague, Carolyn Glick, recently penned an article for the Jewish Press in which she praised individual American Jewish grassroots activists as “extraordinary Jews,” who, on their own, and without any support from larger Jewish organizations have, one by one, been ensuring that strong pro-Israel views are being heard in America. Glick views these individuals as “part of a growing (volunteer) army of individual Jews throughout the U.S. who are moved to act by their conviction that Israel must be defended against the expanding alliance of the international Left and the forces of global jihad.”
And now, let us praise (and continue to praise) those extraordinary grassroots civilians who organized yesterday’s rally in Times Square against Radical Islam and those 300-500 people who came and stood in the driving rain to listen to the words of Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians, direct and indirect victims of Islamic terrorism, enslavement, and persecution, who came together to stand against a common global enemy.
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Chesler Chronicles » Let Us Praise Extraordinary Activists Who Stood Against Radical Islam in Times Square.
German detectives cast doubt on demise of Nazi 'Doctor Death' - Haaretz - Israel News
German detectives cast doubt on demise of Nazi 'Doctor Death'
By News Agencies
Tags: Germany, Dr. Death
BERLIN - German investigators have doubts over a media report that Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim, known as "Doctor Death," died in Egypt in 1992, Der Spiegel magazine said.
German public television channel ZDF and the New York Times said in February that that Heim died of bowel cancer in 1992, citing his son and acquaintances in Cairo.
But a report by Der Spiegel to be published Monday said investigators believed the ZDF and Times report did not provide "any proof of his death" and were continuing to examine "every lead" on the Austrian-born Nazi.
In particular, they believe Heim's circle of support during his time on the run was wider than was previously thought, and that he received money via wire transfers from Switzerland and the U.S. and letters and letters and cash from messengers.
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German detectives cast doubt on demise of Nazi 'Doctor Death' - Haaretz - Israel News
Waiting for the magic carpet - Haaretz - Israel News
Waiting for the magic carpet
By Natasha Mozgovaya
CHURACHANDPUR, India - When Asher Kipgen is asked the Hebrew name of his father, who immigrated to Israel six years ago from a village in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, he blurts out "Netanyahu" without thinking twice. The real name of his father, who lives in Kiryat Arba, is Natan, but the mention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's name is no coincidence. Many of the 7,232 members of the Kuki, Mizo, Lushai and Shin tribes carefully followed the elections in Israel, in the hope that the new prime minister of Israel would bring them to the country.
That's because they consider themselves Bnei Menashe, residents of northeastern India, along the border with Burma and Bangladesh, who claim descent from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who were sent into exile by the Assyrian Empire more than 27 centuries ago.
Since hearing rumors last summer that the Israeli government planned to bring the Bnei Menashe to Israel, Kipgen and his family have been waiting - though they aren't concerned about what to bring with them.
Since hearing rumors last summer that the Israeli government planned to bring the Bnei Menashe to Israel, Kipgen and his family have been waiting - though they aren't concerned about what to bring with them.
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Waiting for the magic carpet - Haaretz - Israel News
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