Thursday, 9 April 2009
KOSHER CDOs
In a few hours it will be Pessach (Passover). We've been cleaning for weeks, hunting and destroying all vestiges of chametz (bread, yeast, etc), in the Jewish version of Spring Cleaning. Thank God that's behind us!
Chag Sameach - Have a fine holiday. Easter, too.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
IS EUROPE DYING ?
The Economist reviews a new book by Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age; A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. The central device of the book is the assumption that by knowing more about England in Shakespeare's day, we can better understand him.
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
Debbie Schlussel - Sharia's Here: Tennessee Muslims Seek Alcohol-Free "Buffer Zones"
OBAMA'S RABBI
Last week Gavin asked me how Jews define themselves. Since I didn't see how I could reasonably clarify that one with less than a small book, I put it aside to wait for a plausible hook to hang it on. Sure enough, one came along, in the surprising story of Michelle Obama's rabbi cousin. Not, as you might think, the story of a Jew who married into her clan, which wouldn't have been all that surprising. No. This is the story of a tradition started late in the 19th century of American blacks identifying with Judaism to the extent they proclaimed themselves Jews; the cousin, Rabbi Capers Funnye, is part of an offshoot of the tradition which actually seems to be serious about their Judaism.
50 INFLUENTIAL RABBIS
Newsweek has published its annual list of the 50 most influential American rabbis (and Jeffrey Goldberg nitpicks it here). I can't nitpick it, but I can make some comments, snide or otherwise.
4. Tho, now that I think of it, I bet 75% of America's Jews don't recognize ten of these 5o, either.
5. The list was put together
by Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman & CEO Michael Lynton, News Corporation Executive Vice President Gary Ginsberg and JTN Productions CEO Jay Sanderson
Huh?
6. The criteria used were
.Are they known nationally/internationally?
.Do they have political/social influence?
.Do they have a media presence?
.Are they leaders within their communities?
.Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements?
.Size of their constituency
.Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career?
.Have they made a "greater" impact?
THE "REAL" TWO-STATE SOLUTION
Hudson New York
How to Build a Palestinian State
The words and deeds of many Palestinian officials, whether they are from Fatah or Hamas, do not seem to be bringing the Palestinians closer to fulfilling their aspiration of creating a modern and democratic state next to Israel.
In this regard, the Palestinian Authority leaders in the West Bank are continuing to act [and speak] in a way that only radicalizes Palestinians and demonizes Israel and the Jewish people.
Almost every day, the Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by the secular Fatah faction, provides the world with evidence that it is not leading its constituents toward the path of moderation and co-existence. And this is without mentioning what Hamas is saying and doing.
If the Palestinians were serious about building their own state, they should not wait for Israel or any other country to present it to them as a gift.
Had the Palestinian Authority invested perhaps half of the money that went into Yasser Arafat’s secret bank accounts or to support the shopping sprees of his wife in Paris, it is highly likely that the Palestinians would by now have had their own state.
Had the Palestinian leadership built schools, hospitals, universities and housing projects instead of building a casino, there is no doubt that the Palestinians would have had their state several years ago.
Had the Palestinian Authority invested some of the billions of dollars for the welfare of its people, combating poverty and unemployment, it is certain that the Palestinians would not have resorted to violence in September 2000. That is because when the Palestinians launched the second intifada, many people had nothing to lose.
So has the Palestinian Authority since learned from its mistakes?
No.
While it is true that the economic situation in the West Bank has improved in the past two years, largely thanks to the fact that the international donors have finally begun holding Palestinian leaders accountable and are pressing harder for transparency, the messages coming out of the Palestinian leadership are not encouraging.
In the past week alone, the “moderate” Palestinian leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas took two decisions that will only have a negative impact on the future of the “peace process.”
First, Abbas’s representatives dismantled a Palestinian teenager musical band for performing in front of Holocaust survivors in the Israeli city of Holon. An Israeli-Arab woman who was in charge of the ban has been told by Abbas’s lieutenants that her life would be in danger if she ever showed her face again in Jenin. Fatah activists later sealed her apartment and confiscated all the musical equipment, accusing her of “exploiting” the children for a “political event” - the Holocaust.
In the second case, Abbas’s Chief Islamic Judge, Tayseer Tamimi, issued another fatwa [religious decree] that imposes the death sentence on any Palestinian who sells his lands to Jews.
And then there is Mohammed Dahlan, one of Fatah’s senior operatives who is closely associated with Abbas, who went on Palestine TV to proudly declare that his faction has never recognized Israel’s right to exist.
He also boasted that as a former security commander he and Fatah had killed more suspected Palestinian “collaborators” with Israel than Hamas.
Dahlan, who has long been hailed by US Administration officials as a “moderate” leader and a staunch supporter of the peace process, even went as far as urging Hamas not to succumb to pressure to accept Israel’s right to exist.
The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank has also been fighting “normalization” with Israel by boycotting Israeli products and banning Palestinian teenagers from participating in joint Jewish-Arab events aimed at promoting tolerance and coexistence.
It is no wonder then that public opinion polls continue to show that Hamas’s popularity is on the rise and that a majority of Palestinians support suicide bombings.
Over the past few weeks, numerous Palestinian spokesmen have been warning against the “dangers” of having a right-wing government in Israel. According to these spokesmen, the rise of Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to power is an indication of the Israeli public’s shift to the right and the beginning of the end of the “peace process.”
The Palestinian officials say they are particularly worried about Netanyahu’s refusal to accept the two-state solution.
But were these folks expecting? That Netanyahu and Lieberman would give them more than what former prime ministers Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin had either given the Palestinians or offered to give them?
There is absolutely no reason why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu should be worried about American and European pressure on him to accept the two-state solution.
Even if Netanyahu accepted the two-state solution tomorrow, he will quickly discover that the Palestinian Authority in particular and the Palestinians in general are the least prepared for establishing an independent and normal state alongside Israel.
Netanyahu and Lieberman can sit relaxed. Even if they offered the Palestinians a state, they will discover that there is no credible partner, neither in Ramallah nor in the Gaza Strip, to deal with.
Finally, the failure of the Hamas-Fatah “reconciliation” talks means that the world will have to live with the fact that the two-state solution has already been realized. In the end, the Palestinians got two states - a mini-Islamic republic in the Gaza Strip and an incompetent, powerless and unreliable entity in parts of the West Bank.
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.


