Tuesday, 7 April 2009
TALK TO HAMAS
Shlomo Avineri gets it right:
According to Hamas, the Jews are responsible for all the ills of modern society - the French Revolution; the Communist revolution; the establishment of secret associations (Freemasons, Rotary and Lions clubs, B'nai B'rith) designed to help them gain control of the world by secret means. They control the economy, press and television; they are responsible for the outbreak of World War I, which they initiated in order to destroy the Muslim caliphates (the Ottoman empire), to get the Balfour Declaration and set up the League of Nations with the aim of establishing their state. They also initiated World War II in order to make a fortune from selling war materials; they use both capitalism and communism as their agents...
GENOCIDE WITH YOGHURT
Here's a book review that shows how history has the ability to reach out of the past and rattle us, no matter how much we pretend to be forward-looking.
Last month, while I was visiting my father in Florida, we had dinner one night with my aunt. We were discussing the way Jim Jones had poisoned 900 of his followers with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in 1978, and suddenly my aunt was explaining that another way to poison someone is with a yogurt smoothie. "That's how the Turks poisoned your grandmother's classmates in Constantinople in 1915," she said. "They poisoned the tahn."
This story was new to me, and I am 47. But as a second-generation Armenian American, I've found that it's not uncommon for one of these UFO horror stories to materialize out of nowhere over coffee.
Thus begins Chris Bohjalian's review of Armenian Golgotha, by Grigory Balakian. It hardly sounds like a pleasant read, but well may be a necessary one, especially if you're of the persuasion that knowing history and engaging with it is preferable to having it spring on you unawares.
Hitler, by the way, knew his history. He repeatedly told that what he learned from the Armenian genocide was that no-one cared at the time, and no-one remebered afterwards.
USING INTERNATIONAL LAW IN VAIN
A law professor named George Bisharat yesterday published a pseudo-learned op-ed about how criminal Israel is. Since his terminology was legalese, and I'm not a legal expert, I decided not to comment on his screed. Fortunately, the folks over at Powerline are all attorneys, and John Hinderaker decided to have a look. His verdict:
There was once a time when it would have made sense to wonder why the New York Times would publish such drivel. Now, publishing left-wing drivel is the paper's business plan. Bankruptcy impends.
RACISM. APARTHEID. T-SHIRTS AND GENERAL CONFUSION
Remember those horrendous IDF T-Shirts? And it's common knowledge that Israel treats its Arab citizens abominably. So here's a story from Haaretz this morning that demonstrates it all. An Arab professor at Haifa University was thrown out of a restaurant when he complained that a bartender was wearing a shirt encouraging the killing of Palestinian children. Ha! Gotcha.
Though if Israeli Jim Crow is that bad, how is he a professor at Haifa University? No matter.
Hajaj said the bartender had never served in the army and was unaware of the message his shirt conveyed. As a result of the incident, the bartender is no longer working at the restaurant.
BOYCOTT ISRAEL...AT ANY PRICE !
Even if it means not diagnosing skin cancer. After all, Israel itself is a cancer of sorts, and must be broken. Anyway, this particular discovery is not yet a certainty, so let's hurry up and divest from research projects with Israeli academics. That way the project will fail, and we'll never know if any good might have come from it, so won't need to have any pangs of regrets for our righteousness.
Monday, 6 April 2009
IRANIANS AND FOOLS
Jefferey Goldberg has helpfully posted 19 (nineteen) quotes from Iran's president Ahmedinejad in less than four years in which he talks about Israel disappearing. His reason for doing so is that his fellow Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan is casting doubt.
Reading them all, it becomes quite clear to me that Ahmadinejad does indeed want Israel to cease to exist, but equally clear that he is not speaking of dropping a nuke on it.
Well, that's certainly comforting, isn't it? Andrew knows the Iranian fellow is merely talking through his hat, and we have nothing to worry about.
I hope no national leaders, in any country, glean their information from the blogosphere. I write this as a (part-time) blogger.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
PICK THE REALITY YOU WISH FOR
Pick the Reality You Wish For
The Guardian, this morning:Nato pact to send 5,000 troops for Afghan polls The agreement in Strasbourg to beef up security ahead of elections is being hailed as proof of a new era of co-operation between the United States and Europe.Deep down in the 17th paragraph of the article there is a toned-down admission that many of the promised troops will be sent to Afghanistan only for six months, and then even this:
Nato members are to send 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan to boost security ahead of critical elections, as the country's troubled president was yesterday forced into retreat over a controversial law effectively legalising rape within marriage. The outcome of yesterday's critical summit in Strasbourg will be a relief to Barack Obama, allowing the US president to argue that his offer of a new partnership with Europe has reaped tangible results and ensured the burden of fighting the war on terror is more broadly shared. Yesterday he welcomed the deal as a "strong down payment" on securing Afghanistan's future.
Obama is committing an extra 21,000 troops, and possibly another 10,000 later in the year. He knows that he will come under sharp domestic pressure to revert to hard power if the mix of charm and intellectual persuasion he has displayed does not lead to tangible European response.But it's a boring, poorly written article, and one can assume most readers won't get that far down. It does mean, however, that the editors know for a fact that their rendering of the event is not, perhaps, the only possible way of seeing it.
Contrast the depiction of the UK's top Lefty newspaper, then, with that of the New York Times, the top American newspaper and rather lefty itself:
STRASBOURG, France — With protesters raging outside, NATO leaders on Saturday gave a tepid troop commitment to President Obama’s escalating campaign in Afghanistan, mostly committing soldiers only to a temporary security duty...
The Afghan war, too, remained a dividing line for alliance leaders. Despite a glowing reception and widespread praise for Mr. Obama’s style and aims, his calls for a more lasting European troop increase for Afghanistan were politely brushed aside, as they had been in negotiations leading up to the meeting.
As expected, European allies agreed to provide up to 5,000 new troops for Afghanistan, the White House said Saturday. But 3,000 of them are to be deployed only temporarily to provide security for the August elections in Afghanistan.
A further 1,400 to 2,000 soldiers will be sent to form embedded training teams for the Afghan Army and the police.
Mr. Obama is raising the number of American troops this year to about 68,000 from the current 38,000, which will significantly Americanize the war. The new strategy, which the Europeans have pressed for, is aimed at creating larger and better-trained Afghan security forces that can defend the country and allow the West to leave.
The two newspapers are reporting on the same event, so far as I can tell: a big meeting in Strasbourg yesterday. True, there were violent demonstrations only at the NYT meeting, and overall satisfaction and resolute determination in the face of enemies only at the Guardian meeting, but I do think it unlikely that there were two separate events. Or am I wrong?
PS. The NYT article is topped by a picture of violent demonstrators, flying various communist flags. Someone really ought to suggest to those folks that they read Juan Cole's blog: today's fashionable Useful Idiots no longer serve the Kremlin nor read Mao's Little Read Book. Today they cover up for different hateful regimes. Really folks! You're way behind the times!
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations ( http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
Sunday, 5 April 2009
KILLING A CHILD
A young Arab woman appeared at the gate of a Border Police base and started shooting. The Border Police is a unit with an unusually high percentage of Arabic-speaking Israelis, and they tried to talk to her in her own language, but she kept on shooting. Eventually an officer arrived and killed her. After her death it turned out she was only 16 years old, something that wasn't clear while she was behind the gun.
Sooner or later she'll appear in a statistic about Palestinian children killed by Israeli troops.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
RIGHT AND WRONG EVEN AMONGST THE SHADOWS
Yesterday a Palestinian man armed himself with an ax and made his way to a Jewish settlement to murder civilians (there's no army base there). Once there he hacked a child to death, started on an even smaller child, was then stopped by a local, but managed to escape. Since the security forces know who he is, it's only a matter of time before he's caught.
THE WIZARD OF OZ - THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
The Wizard of Oz or, the Man behind the Curtain… aka Obama
by Arlene Peck
When my son was in high school and had his “team,” he had to keep records about the progress or lack thereof; he had to keep showing what they were doing. Yet, this body of people went right into politics from college and haven't a clue as to what is needed in the “real world” to earn a living. Yet, these are the people that we, in our stupidity, have turned over our finances and allowed to quadruple debt for future generations, in order to 'bail us out of the disaster that they created in the first place.
Saturday, 4 April 2009
Friday, 3 April 2009
Thursday, 2 April 2009
CONCERT FOR PEACE: NEVER !
Following my comment about the unfortunate Palestinian response to some of their teenagers playing music to an audience of Israeli Holocaust survivors, Claudio sent me this depressing link.
It is really hard to write on this subject without getting angry. We all know the extent to which Israel can be evil and satanic. After all, we Palestinians have been on the receiving end of Israeli savagery for decades.
In fact, being thoroughly tormented and killed by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust has always been and continues to be “the” Palestinians’ way of life.
However, for some Palestinians to allow themselves to be duped to sing and play music to their oppressors and child-killers is simply beyond the pale of human dignity.
It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.
It goes on and on. Khalid Amayreh is a person whose primary motivating force is hatred.
I don't know enough about the Palestinians to say how typical he is. He talks similarly to the people in Jenin who got so angry the other day, so he may not be a lone voice in the wilderness.
I'm of the persuasion that Israel should always be on the lookout for whatever policy might lead to peace with our neighbors, and should be willing to pay a reasonable price to encourage it to happen; I'm also of the persuasion that no matter what we do, the ultimate decision is of our enemies. They're the ones who need to decide to live alongside us in peace; a large majority of Israelis has long since wished to live alongside them in peace. Items like this demonstrate that some Arabs, in this case, Palestinians, are so consumed with hatred they'll pay whatever price needed to have it gratified - and since that won't happen, they prefer war.
Since Mr. Amayreh is so involved in Holocaust-Zionism comparisons, malicious nonsense as they are, here's another one for him to ponder.
While the Jewish grievances against Germany were vastly and incomparably greater than any Palestinian grievance could ever be, by 1952, that's less than a decade after the Shoah, Israeli society was at extreme loggerheads with itself about a proposal to accept indemnities from Germany. Ben Gurion the pragmatist sought German funds to help build Israel, recognizing that they would contribute to Germany's international rehabilitation; a large, vocal, and for a moment even violent opposition stated that Jews should never accept anything from Germany; better to slog on with food rationing and hundreds of thousands of refugees in tents, and never give the Germans the dignity of accepting anything from them. We'll put the past behind us and move on, but we'll not forgive.
Ben Gurion won the day, though it was close. By 1965 there were full diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, two years before the Six Day War; the first German ambassador was a one-armed veteran officer of the Wehrmacht. By the late 70s, (West) Germany was Israel's closest ally in Europe. The two national memories are complicated till this day, and will remain so for the next century or two, but they don't interfere with each side's ability to get on with promoting its interests in a reasonably civil way.
A WORLD OF KVETCHERS
The top item on Haaretz' website this morning is a poll that tells of 54% dissatisfaction with Netanyahu's government. The government was sworn in towards midnight yesterday, and Haaretz goes to press at, I dunno, probably 3:30 am, so either the folks were polled at 1:30 am, or - more likely - they were polled during the final hours of the previous government. I recognize that the stone-age tradition of allowing a government 100 days of grace is hopelessly anachronistic, but perhaps we might wait ten days? Ten hours? A hundred minutes?
Sheesh.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
UNIVERSAL TORAH: TZAV
By Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum
Torah Reading: Parshas TZAV Leviticus 6:1-8:36Jeremiah 7:21-8:3, 9:22-23
THE ALTAR FIRE
Parshas TZAV is taken up with sacrificial laws and rituals. For many people, it is easier to relate to narrative portions of the Torah or commandments that apply in our day than to those dealing with Temple sacrifices. It is now one thousand nine hundred and thirty-six years since sacrifices were offered to HaShem in the Temple in Jerusalem: the last time was in 68 C.E., before the Second Temple was destroyed. Many people would find it hard to conceive how the sacrificial system could actually be restored in practice in the foreseeable future, given the apparent geopolitical realities of today. Moreover, nothing could seemingly be more remote from the sensibility of contemporary Jews and Gentiles alike than the daily ritual slaughter of animals, sprinkling their blood and burning their fat and other parts with libations of flour, oil and wine on the Temple Altar. [Instead of accepting the Temple idea, a world unable to make peace watches the willful daily slaughter and injury of human "sacrifices", the civilian and military victims of global war and terror. in the name of what?]
The same world that resents two daily lambs on G-d's Altar in Jerusalem happily slaughters and consumes literally millions of oxen, sheep, and other living creatures every single day for its own enjoyment. While meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and other gifts of G-d's bounty are consumed in homes, restaurants, bars and canteens throughout the inhabited world every day, how many pause for a moment before they eat in order to bless the Giver of that bounty? How many stop to thank G-d after eating and enjoying their food, before continuing with other activities?
The Temple Altar may be more understandable if we think of it as a MASHAL or metaphor for the actual table at which we ourselves eat every day, containing lessons about the attitude with which we should go about satisfying this vital natural function. The daily "diet" of animal, wheat, oil and wine offerings on the Temple Altar corresponds to man's daily diet, be it of animal and grain products, fruits, and vegetables or any of the other foods and beverages that go onto his table and into his mouth.
Maybe the reason why some feel uncomfortable about the sacrificial ritual is precisely because it presents our existential situation so starkly in the form of the animal blood, fat and other offerings on the Altar. It is a fundamental law of creation that higher life forms consume lower forms of life in order to subsist. When a lower form of life is eaten and ingested by a higher form, the lower life-form is "elevated" in the sense of actually turning into the body and feeding the activities of the higher life-form. As humans, our blood and fat are made up of materials derived from other, lower levels of existence, mineral, vegetable and animal. Our physical life-functions come to "feed" and serve a higher life-form: the soul.
The Temple Altar and sacrificial system come to guide us to elevate our own blood, fat and energy to fuel the fire of the Service of G-d on the Altar of our own bodies. The Altar fire is a metaphor for the human soul, which indeed can only survive in the human body through a daily diet of "offerings", the various foods that "keep body and soul together". Our bodies "burn up" the various nutrients we take in, just as the Altar "consumes" the sacrifices.
The body requires tending in order to serve as an "altar" for the service of God, just as the Temple Altar had to be tended. Our parshah of TZAV opens with the Mitzvah of TERUMAS HADESHEN, tending the Altar each morning by removing the ashes, followed by stoking the fire with wood to keep it burning bright. This opening mitzvah of the day in the Temple -- removal of the ashes of consumed sacrifices -- may be compared to what is normally the first physical functioning in a person's day: elimination of wastes to cleanse the body for the service of G-d.
Keeping the Altar fire stoked was the daily task of the priests. So each one of us has the task of keeping the "altar" of the body, the digestive system and the liver, properly stoked with the right nutrients in the right quantities. As priests of our own bodies, our aim must be to keep the fire of the soul burning brightly every day -- as a "fire offering, a sweet savor for HaShem".
Last week's parshah of VAYIKRA introduced the subject of sacrifices by setting forth all of the different categories of sacrifices and the various animals, birds or produce that are to be brought in each case. The major part of our present parshah, TZAV, is a continuation of the subject of sacrifices. TZAV explains the specific procedures accompanying the actual offering of the each of the different kinds of sacrifices. The parshah begins with the daily procedure of removing the Altar ashes because this was the start of the Temple service each morning. Removal of the ashes and stoking the fire were preliminaries before slaughter of the daily TAMID (perpetual) sacrifice and burning of its parts on the Altar.
TZAV continues with the procedures accompanying the MINCHAH-flour offering, the CHATAS-Sin and ASHAM-Guilt offerings, the SHELAMIM-Peace Offering, and another specific kind of peace offering: the TODAH-Thanksgiving Offering for those who have been miraculously delivered from serious danger (illness, captivity, shipwreck or being lost in the wilderness).
Some sacrifices, such as the OLAH-Whole-burned offerings and certain other offerings, were "consumed" only on the Altar and were not permitted to be consumed by any humans. However, the priests had a share in eating Sin, Guilt and Minchah offerings, as well as the Peace and Thanksgiving offerings. In the case of the last two, the person who brings the offering also has a share in it together with his dear ones.
The fact that a priest can eat from a sin or guilt-offering and thereby accomplish atonement for the sinner is a wonder. So too is the eating of an animal to make peace between man and G-d. What distinguishes holy eating from animalistic eating for the sake of pure self-gratification is the motive of the person who is eating -- his KAVANAH (= intention). Having the correct intention is a recurrent theme in our parshah. The priest has to have the correct intention at every stage in the sacrificial ritual.
So too, when we eat, everything depends on our intention. The parshah is teaching us to eat with the intention of stoking the Altar of G-d with nutrients that we can elevate to His service by using this energy for our prayers and our mitzvot day by day. The blessings we make before and after eating serve us to focus upon this intention.
Eating may serve as a means of celebrating, as in the case of the TODAH-Thanksgiving offering. The rabbis stated that in the future, this is the one kind of personal offering that will remain. (Since people will be cleansed of sin, there will be no more place for sin and guilt offerings.) May we be worthy of offering the THANKSGIVING PEACE-OFFERING in the rebuilt HOLY TEMPLE in order to celebrate the true end of war and the inauguration of genuine peace with the coming of MELECH HAMASHIACH very soon in our times. Amen.
Shabbat Shalom!!!
Avraham Yehoshua Greenbaum
--AZAMRA INSTITUTE
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