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Friday, 27 March 2009
AND STILL COUNTING IN GAZA
I'm not certain why we have two items on this on two consecutive days, but perhaps Haaretz was simply being sloppy yesterday. Knowing them, it's certainly possible. Anyway, Y-net cites an official announcement from the IDF today.
The IDF said Thursday that an internal inquiry found that 1,166 people were killed in the three-week offensive that ended in January. It said 709 were Hamas militants, and just under 300 people, including 89 children aged 16 and 49 women, were civilians.
According to the military, it is unclear clear whether an additional 162 men who died were militants or civilians.
These numbers are rather different from the Palestinian ones that were quoted world-wide and are by now etched in stone and won't be dislodged.
It's possible they're both wrong; it's not possible they're both right. You might perhaps expect respectable media outlets to try to get to the bottom of the matter, and figure out what the truth is - but I can't say why you might expect that.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
THE ROT REACHES THE WASHINGTON POST
I don't know much about Pat Oliphant, a Washington Post cartoonist. Abe Greenwald at Contentions intimates he's a fellow with a record, tho Greenwald doesn't think that exonerates anyone. Personally, I'm more interested in the top editors of the Washington Post, perhaps the second most influential newspaper in the United States, for allowing this on the pages of their paper:
As Meryl Yourish adds, it's a version of the Israeli flag. Do you suppose Ari Roth would say that means it's art, and thus not to be evaluated for its truth?
They're not good days, these ones. Sure, our descendants will dance on the graves of these hate mongers, if they can find them in the dust, unless they're distracted by the antisemites of their own generation, but knowing your enemies will fail doesn't make them more palatable.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
ISRAEL AND INNOVATION
From time to time - with rising frequency these days - I ponder on how it must have been to be a Jew in the 1930s, with antisemitism the official policy of some of the world's greatest powers, with antisemitic parties in most countries, and with loud antisemitic cries from all sides. It must have been very frightening.
Not like these days, when the rising tide of Jew-hatred is very aggravating, certainly, but not really frightening.Less often, I think about how the world must have looked to the dazed survivors in Europe of summer 1945, or to their grim relatives elsewhere. Their story is not told that often, and very rarely is it dwelt upon. As a general statement, Israel's critics and enemies, both, detest it when Jews in general and Israelis in particular talk too much (or at all) about the Shoah. Israel hasn't learned the lessons of the Jews' own past, they'll tell you. Israel has learned the lessons too well, and is now copying its tormentors, they'll tell you. Israel, of all nations, should understand better, they'll tell you. Israel is trying to wield the ultimate victim-weapon to as to stifle thought, discussion or recognition of what's really going on, they'll tell you. And so on.
I expect a more profound reason for all the shrieking is a dim awareness that actually, the multi-stranded story of those dark days has the potential to disrupt almost all the pat templates they use to explain the world - so they ward it off.
Take, for example, the multiple-tiered explanations about how when people suffer, they aren't nice in return. They must be assuaged, their needs addressed, their woes removed, their grievances respected, acknowledged, and rectified. You know the line; it's one of the top meta-narratives of our age. It's also all wrong, fundamentally wrong, and quite pernicious. Those Shoah survivors disprove it by the simple fact of how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (after they acquired boots) in a mostly indifferent and partially hostile world.
Some fifty years later, on February 20th 1999, the Economist published a Special Report titled Innovation in Industry. It was a fun read, so much so that I made myself a copy, which was fortunate because I can't find it now on their website. They talked endlessly about Silicon Valley, of course, but also had this:
Apart from its genius for networking, Silicon Valley seems to have an abundance of two other ingredients that other places lack. One is a culture that rewards risk, handsomely, but does not punish failure. The other is simply chutzpah—that upbeat sense of self-confidence that says anything is possible, go for it, and never be too shy to ask for help. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the place emerging as California’s most likely rival in innovation is Israel, with its close-knit society that networks ceaselessly, deals daily with risk, reveres learning, and is blessed with a torrent of well-educated immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Natan Sharansky, a physicist and former gulag prisoner who is now Israel’s trade and industry minister, points out that a fifth of his new country’s population arrived in the past five years, doubling the number of technicians, engineers and scientists there. Israel has 135 engineers and technicians for every 10,000 people, compared with America’s 18. This abundance of talent shows up in the success rate of new ventures in Israel. No surprise that Israel trails only America and Canada in its number of new listings on the innovation-driven Nasdaq stockmarket each year. With such stellar results, the amount of venture capital chasing Israeli innovations has been increasing by around 35% a year. Last year more than $4 billion of high-risk money found its way into innovative start-ups there, not far off the figure that venture capitalists invested in Silicon Valley. If it can keep this up, Israel is set to become the innovation centre of the world.
That was then, and now is now. The Dotcom bubble exploded, the "Peace Process" did too, the Palestinian culture of death attacked Israel with its full potency while the world media looked on and tut-tutted; more recently the entire world economy is staggering. And on March 12th 2009, a decade and a week after the previous report, the Economist came back with another (it starts here). "Global heroes. A special report on entrepreneurship".
For me personally this one was even more fun that the previous one, since - contrary to any reasonable expectation I ever had - I'm deep in the entrepreneurship world myself, in spite of my advanced age and encroaching senility. More pertinent, however, after the first few conceptual chapters about the phenomenon in general, the reports turns to discuss who's doing what, and why. Sure enough, as if the decade never happened, Israel gets mentioned, again, and again, singled out beyond all others. Here, for example:
DOV MORAN’S desk is littered with the carcasses of dismembered phones. Mr Moran has already had one big breakthrough: inventing the now ubiquitous memory stick. But he dreams of another one: he wants to separate the “brains” of the various gizmos that dominate our lives from the “bodies” to enable people to carry around tiny devices that they will be able to plug into anything from phones to cameras to computers. Mr Moran sold his memory-stick business to SanDisk for $1.6 billion, creating a thriving technology cluster near his office. This time he wants to build an Israeli business that will last, challenging the giants of the camera and phone businesses.
Israel is full of would-be Dov Morans. It is home to 4,000 high-tech companies, more than 100 venture-capital funds and a growing health-care industry. Innovations developed in the country include the Pentium chip (Intel), voicemail (Comverse), instant messaging (Mirabilis, Ubique), firewalls (Checkpoint) and the “video pill”, which allows doctors to study your insides without the need for invasive surgery.
Even more than other countries, Israel has America to thank for its entrepreneurial take-off. A brigade of American high-tech companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have established research arms there. And a host of Israelis who once emigrated to America in search of education and opportunity have returned home, bringing American assumptions with them. Many Israeli entrepreneurs yo-yo between Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv; almost 70 Israeli companies are traded on NASDAQ.
The Israeli government helped by providing a ready supply of both human and physical capital. Israel has the world’s highest ratio of PhDs per person, the highest ratio of engineers and scientists and some of the world’s best research universities, notably Technion. The country’s native talent was supplemented by the arrival of 400,000 well-educated Jewish refugees from the former Soviet empire.
However, Israel’s main qualification for entrepreneurialism is its status as an embattled Jewish state in a sea of Arab hostility. The Israeli army not only works hard to keep the country at the cutting edge of technology, it also trains young Israelis (who are conscripted at 18) in the virtues of teamwork and improvisation. It is strikingly common for young Israelis to start businesses with friends that they met in the army. Add to that a high tolerance of risk, born of a long history and an ever-present danger of attack, and you have the makings of an entrepreneurial firecracker.
Eat your hearts out, Guardianistas and boycotters.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
LOOK WHAT EVERYONE MISSED
Last Friday Haaretz had an article about the nauseating T-shirts some IDF units print. The worst, according to the article, emanate from the sharpshooter units, and they include depictions of the wrong Palestinians in the cross-hairs: a child, a pregnant woman, a fleeing teenager who is taunted with the slogan "run faster before we get you".
True, the soldiers themselves admitted they'd never wear these T-shirts in public because of the total opprobrium they'd be greeted with; and also true the sharpshooters are carefully controlled and have strict guidelines for their operation and I can't remember a single case where it was alleged that even one of them ever did such a thing as is depicted on these shirts; but still, it's an ugly tale, and someone clearly needs to add some common sense to that course of training. Make no mistake: I'm condemning the shirts.
And yet. Achikam got home last night, and at about 1PM he got up to eat breakfast, wearing a T-shirt prepared recently by his unit depicting a hand shooting lightning over Gaza. He read the article, and agreed with me that it's an ugly story, but pointed out something I, and everyone else, had overlooked. In most of the cases where the drawing showed Palestinian civilians in the cross hairs... they weren't civilians. The pregnant woman shown behind the above link is brandishing a rifle, as is the child ("when they're smaller they're harder to hit"), while the teenager being exhorted to run has the full set of drawn knife, grenade, and suicide belt (these picture aren't online, they're in the paper version).
Bottom line: we've got ugly T-shirts,worn by sharpshooters whose actual combat behavior belies the message, while the message itself is much more complex than anyone gives credit for. Including the sophisticated journalist at the sophisticated newspaper whose main marketing line is that it's "a newspaper for thinking readers".
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
HATRED TRUMPS FACTS (ALWAYS...)
A Palestinian who writes for an Israeli newspaper wanders around America talking at campuses. He repeatedly encounters a vocal minority who aren't even slightly interested in what he has to say, unless he castigates Israel. When he doesn't always, they turn on him with fury, and attack him for not being attuned to the circumstances of the Palestinians; when he cites facts he is threatened:
I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.
Nice, isn't it?
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
AESTHETIC TRUMPS MORAL
Jeffry Goldberg has posted a fascinating conversation he had with Ari Roth (yes, of course he's Jewish, with that name). Roth is playing Caryl Churchill's antisemitic screed "Seven Jewish Children" at the Jewish theatre he runs in Washington, DC. Goldberg thinks that's a horrible idea. They argue past each other at great length; it's the transcript of an argument, not an edited article.
Roth's main justification for playing the screed is that it was written by a master, and is an accomplished work of art.
AR: I read this play and I said, "My God, she's been listening really, really closely to how Jews speak." She's not Jewish. She's gone to a shitload of cocktail parties, she's memorized every play that David Hare ever wrote about Israel. You know, her referencing the swimming pools is a reference to David Hare's "Via Dolorosa" when he talks about something fundamentally un-Jewish about Jews is Gaza sitting by their swimming pools and watching a Palestinian walk two kilometers with a jerry can for two liters of water. That's a direct reference to that. Every fucking line there comes from something else she's overheard or watched or said. And who the hell knows if she's ever been to Israel or not. I have no idea. But she is smart. She is a smart writer. And each one of these lines is doing something that is more sophisticated than you're giving her credit. And then --
JG: Oh, I'm not saying that she's not sophisticated. I'm just saying that she's using her skills and her shrewdness in order to paint a picture of Israel's that's a caricature. And she knows that Jews, because of their self-flagellating nature, will just go along with this to an extraordinary degree. I mean if she were brave, she would write about the Qu'ran, about Islamic fundamentalism...
AR: If it was written by a halfway decent writer and somebody wrote a play about the so-called pernicious Jewish lobby that's affecting the way the make our decisions. So listen to this. Here's why we're doing it. The fact that, over eight pages, so many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception. Meaning she has overheard, she has seen, she has captured the language that Jews speak to each other with and that is astonishing.
JG: It's astonishing that she overheard the ways Jews talk at cocktail parties?
AR: Because that makes her a ten-times better theatrical reporter than anybody I've ever seen. This is play written with extraordinary precision. She wrote a play that arrested my attention. And it has a problem title. I hate the title. It is a problem place where it ends, but it is subject to an incredible amount of interpretation. It's written with multiple characters. People argue with each other. It's not written as a diatribe. And so you have to allow for the art form of theater to have its way with her text. That is what's going to happen, that's what's happening in this rehearsal room. I struggle with the play. God bless me. I'm a struggling Jew. You know?
JG: You can't decontextualize it. I'm sorry. It comes out of a certain moment and it comes out of a culture that has demonized Israel. It comes out of a particular theater subculture in Great Britain that demonizes Israel...
AR: Okay, just stop for a second. Let's pretend we're not talking about a play but we're talking about a painting. Let's pretend Picasso. Picasso was going to paint, à la Chagall, the story of Gaza, like in "Guernica" -- he's outraged by the killing of children in Gaza. So let's say Picasso does with simple brush strokes, little artful renderings of who his friends, the Jews, used to be; who they were in the '60s; how they were in the '90s; and what he sees today. And he does them with little stokes, little hints of this. And they just happen to be the strokes of a master artist, as opposed to an idiot. And they end with a horse braying and an electric light bulb going off and bombs falling. And that is his cry from the soul.
JG: Are you saying Caryl Churchill is Picasso?
AR: I'm saying it's Caryl Churchill's "Guernica." Come and debate this. And how did Franco feel about "Guernica?" Who knows? He was angry too. I'm angry. I don't think this is a great work of art, but I think there's a great artist doing something interesting here...
AR: I want your very, very smart blog readers to understand that the way to discuss this play is not to lift lines from the last page and a half of it. That is not how to fully experience and understand the meaning of any drama. I can't cede this to journalists who don't love theater enough to understand what's going on here. That is not a sophisticated way to regard art, by picking out a sentence here and then going apeshit over it!...
AR: There's a lot at stake here. There are big intellectual and political questions. And to boycott this and to just turn away and say "We don't hear Caryl Churchill. We don't hear this criticism," that's wrong. You asked why I said yes to this. I said yes to this because it's disarmingly, and maybe even unfortunately, so well-written.
Morality and truth are subordinate to art, says Roth. Goldberg could have taken the argument even further, of course, and pointed out that loud and consistent antisemitism has this nasty propensity to end up with dead Jews: this is one of the few constants in Western history these past thousand years or more. By aiding and abetting it, you ultimately have to own its outcomes. Yet my understanding of Roth's position is that he's not interested. If it's high art, it's valuable, and real-world outcomes be damned.
Which, taken one step further, means that aesthetics are superior to morality, and even to human life. Read George Mosse's books on the cultural environment that fascism originated in: they're full of such ideas. Though Ari Roth would be deeply deeply offended if he heard me saying so.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
Thursday, 26 March 2009
MOTHER OF SLAIN FRENCH JEW ILAN HALIMI CALLS FOR PUBLIC TRIAL
Mother of slain French Jew Ilan Halimi calls for public trial
By Haaretz Service
Tags: anti-Semitism, Israel News
The mother of slain Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi has called for a public trial so that her son's death "will not have been in vain", French newspaper Le Figaro reported Tuesday.
The trial, which will open in Paris on April 29, is scheduled to be held behind closed doors at a juvenile court, because two of the 30 gang members allegedly behind Halimi's murder were minors at the time of the act.
French law allows for a public trial to be held in certain cases where juveniles are involved.
Halimi, 23, was found naked, tortured and covered in burns near Paris on February 13, 2006, after being held captive by a gang calling itself "The Barbarians" for three weeks in a crime that shocked France and raised fears of surging anti-Semitism among French Muslims. He died of his injuries soon afterward.
He was reburied at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem in February 2007.
Halimi's mother, Ruth, made the decision to reinter his body in Israel after speaking with Jewish Agency Chairman Ze'ev Bielsky.
UNIVERSAL TORAH: VAYIKRA
UNIVERSAL TORAH: VAYIKRA
By Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum
Torah Reading: Parshas VAYIKRA Leviticus 1:1-5:26
AND G-D SPOKE TO HIM FROM THE TENT OF MEETING
The last five parshahs of the Book of Exodus explained the form of the Sanctuary and its vessels, and Exodus concluded with an account of how the completed Sanctuary was finally erected by Moses on the 1st of Nissan, almost one year after the Exodus from Egypt. With the erection of the Sanctuary, the Cloud of G-d's Glory covered the Tent of Meeting.
"And He called to Moses." (Lev. 1:1). G-d's call to Moses, with which VAYIKRA opens, is the immediate continuation of the narrative with which Exodus concluded. Now that the Sanctuary was complete, the next step is for us to learn what is to be done in it. The book of VAYIKRA, which takes its name from its opening word, thus begins with the detailed commandments relating to the sacrifices, since these were to be the main activity in the Sanctuary and in the Temple throughout the generations.
Leviticus, the Latin name of VAYIKRA, corresponds to the name used by the rabbis of old when referring to this book: Toras Cohanim, "The Torah of the Priests". The book is so called not only because much of it is taken up with the sacrificial services and other ritual practices (such as purification from leprosy) in which the role of the Cohen-Priest is central. In addition, G-d's challenge to ALL of the Children of Israel was to be "a kingdom of PRIESTS and a holy nation" (Ex. 19:6). While only the Cohen-priest may officiate at the offering of sacrifices, they could be brought by all. Many of the other commandments in Leviticus relating to "holiness" apply not only to the Cohen-Priests but to all of us. At the very heart of Leviticus is Parshas KEDOSHIM, "Be holy." (ch's 19-20), which contains the fundamental laws governing man's behavior to his fellows. This is explicitly addressed to all of the Children of Israel (Lev. 19:2). The book of VAYIKRA also contains commandments that apply to gentiles. These include the laws of sacrifices with which our present parshah of VAYIKRA, opens: the first commandment is that of KORBAN OLAH, the "elevation" or whole-burned offering, which both Israelites and Gentiles are eligible to bring.
* * *
TESHUVAH
It is an ancient tradition that little boys who have learned their Aleph-Beis and are just starting to read, commence their study of the CHUMASH (Five Books of Moses) with VAYIKRA. "Let pure souls come to study the laws dealing with purity." For a cynical, sophisticated age that feels entitled to call anything and everything into question, the Torah code of sacrifices and purification may appear ancient, primitive, complicated and irrelevant. But if we are willing to explore the Torah with the fresh eyes of children, ready to take the word of G-d on trust, with faith and belief, we can discover that the sacrificial system contains the keys to repentance and the healing of the soul and the entire world.
The theme of sacrifices enters Genesis and Exodus in a number of places. Adam, Cain and Abel, Noah and Abraham all offered sacrifices. Moses' declared purpose in taking the Children of Israel out of Egypt was to bring sacrifices, and the animal sacrifices brought at the time of the Giving of the Torah were described (Ex.24:5), as were the sacrifices that were to be brought at the inauguration of the Sanctuary (Ex. ch. 29). However, it is here in the opening parshahs of LEVITICUS that the sacrificial system of the Torah is laid out in detail. The universal significance of this teaching is brought out in the use by the Torah of the word ADAM in introducing the sacrificial commandments: ".when a MAN (ADAM) would bring a sacrifice." (Lev. 1:2). The sacrificial system comes to heal man's alienation from G-d through atoning for his sins and bringing him back into a relationship of peace with Him. This is the ultimate rectification of Adam's sin of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This sin caused the mix-up of good and evil in this world that is the root of all subsequent sin.
VAYIKRA begins with the laws of the OLAH, "elevation" or "ascending" offering, which could either be an ox, a sheep or a goat, a dove or pigeon, or take the form of a MINCHAH offering of wheat in the form of flour or unleavened loaves or wafers. In the case of an animal OLAH offering, the blood of the animal was splashed on the sides of altar, while its fat and other portions were burned on the altar. The OLAH offering comes to atone not so much for "sins of commission" -- something a person did -- as for "sins of omission", what he failed to do (such as if he failed to fulfil a positive commandment). The laws of OLAH are followed by the laws of SHELAMIM, the peace-offering, an animal sacrifice whose blood and fat were offered on the altar but whose meat was shared between the priests and the one who brought the offering. The SHELAMIM sacrifice is a celebration that signifies that man has made his peace with G-d.
Next come the laws of CHATAS, the sin-offering brought for unwitting violation of Torah prohibitions whose willful infringement carries the penalty of excision. Different kinds of animals are to be brought and different procedures of atonement apply depending on whether the sinner is a private individual, the "Prince" (Nasi, king or leader), the Supreme Court (Sanhedrin) or the High Priest. [Rashi on Lev. 4:22 comments: Happy is the generation whose leader is able to admit he made a mistake and who tries to make amends.]
The last part of Parshas VAYIKRA contains commandments relating to a variety of CHATAS ("Sin") and ASHAM ("Guilt") offerings for specific sins. It is noteworthy that while some of the sins in question are bound up purely with man's relation with G-d (such as unwittingly entering the Sanctuary or eating sacrifices while ritually impure), there are certain sins in man's behavior to his fellow men that also make him liable to a sacrifice. These include the sin committed by one who, having received goods or money on trust, subsequently denies it under oath. This is at once a sin against G-d and against the person from whom he received the goods or money. It is normal and natural for a person to choose a private place without witnesses in order to entrust someone with valuable goods or money for safekeeping. Besides the two people involved, the only other "witness" to the transaction is G-d Himself, who knows what really happened. If the trustee invokes the name of G-d to swear falsely in denial of what G-d knows, this is a denial of G-d Himself. Not only must the trustee return the goods or money together with a twenty-five per cent supplement. He must also make amends to G-d by bringing a sacrifice.
* * *
THE ARI ON THE MEANING OF THE SACRIFICES
The outstanding kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria (ARI) explains that the sacrificial service consisted of elements from the inanimate world (salt), the vegetable world (flour, oil and wine), the animal world (the sacrificial animal or bird), the human world (the sinner, who had to confess his sin over the offering) and the world of the souls (represented by the officiating Cohen-priest). These five realms -- inanimate, vegetable, animal, human and spiritual -- correspond in turn to the "worlds" of which the kabbalah speaks: Asiyah (the material world), Yetzirah ("formation", corresponding to the vegetable realm), Beriyah ("creation", corresponding to the animal realm), Atzilut ("emanation", corresponding to Man) and Arich Anpin, the Crown or Root of Atzilut, corresponding to the soul.
"Know that all the different animals and birds have a soul which descends and is sustained by the CHAYOT ('living animals') of the Divine "Chariot" (Merkavah). The pure animals and birds are sustained by the Holy Chariot, while the impure animals and birds are sustained by the Unholy Chariot. Sometimes it happens that a soul falls and a person becomes wicked. As a punishment, this soul might be incarnated in an animal. When this animal is brought as a sacrifice (KORBAN), the effect is to bring this soul back close G-d again. Through the proper performance of the sacrificial ritual, the soul is brought back to its root and rectified. Even when the sacrificial animal is not an incarnation, it nevertheless contains holy sparks that fell at the time of creation and that are now rectified.
"When the impure animal aspect of man's soul gains dominion over him, it causes him to sin. To rectify this, he must bring an animal as a sacrifice. The burning of the animal on the altar draws down an exalted fire that burns away the sins, drawing cleansing to the person's animal soul from its very root. Since the impurity of the vegetable and inanimate levels is even greater than that of the animal level and also causes people to sin, they too must be represented on the altar in the form of the wine and flour libations and the salt.
"The sin of Adam caused good and evil to become mixed up, bringing a flaw into all the worlds and giving strength to the forces of evil. Accordingly G-d commanded man to bring together representatives of the inanimate, vegetable and animal realms. and through the service of the priests while the Levites sing, the Israelites stand by and the owner of the sacrifice repents, all of the worlds are cleansed and purified.
"When the Temple stands, the sacrifices elevated and purified all the fallen sparks. Today this is accomplished by the prayer services." (Ta'amey HaMitzvos VAYIKRA).
Shabbat Shalom!
Avraham Yehoshua Greenbaum
--AZAMRA INSTITUTE
PO Box 50037 Jerusalem 91500 Israel
Website: www.azamra.org
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STILL COUNTING IN GAZA
Still Counting in Gaza
The IDF is still collecting information on the people it killed in Gaza. It's touching, their belief that a careful accumulation of verifiable facts will sway anyone's mind.
So far, close to half of the names are of dead Hamas men. A quarter are of civilians. 14 are of Fatah men killed by Hamas. The rest - many of them identified by name - are still being investigated, apparently most of them were young men, who may or may not have been Hamas fighters.
The IDF also has some indications the Hamas list of victims is not fully reliable:
The fatality list presented by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has numerous inaccuracies and contradictions, the IDF says. For example, Tawfiq Ja'abari, the commander of the Hamas police, and Mohammed Shakshak, a personal assistant to the head of Hamas' military wing, Ahmed Ja'abari, are both described as dead children on the Palestinian list.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
GAZA FOOD BLOCKADE OVER
The government decided yesterday to allow as much food into Gaza as anyone wants to send in. If you see this mentioned in your local media, feel free to tell me. Even more interesting will be to see if any media outlets continue to talk about the hungry Gazans being starved by Israel: If they say so, we'll know they're lying. If they don't, we'll know they know, and we'll also know they didn't tell what they know.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
MULTICULTURALISM AND ISLAMIFICATION IN BRITAIN - PART I
Just watch this movie.
Thanks to Nikon-Man for sharing this
Thanks to Nikon-Man for sharing this
IDF - PICTURE OF THE WEEK - OZ BATTALION
Oz Battalion of the Armored Corps Completes Training Exercise
ISRAEL NAVY'S BEAUTY QUEEN
Israel Navy's Beauty Queen
23 March 2009 , 11:56
Rani Sneh
Without a doubt, the most presentable Corps in the IDF is the Navy. White uniforms, impeccable ceremonies reflect an impressive sense of duty. It was therefore not surprising to discover that Miss Israel 2009 Adi Rodnitzki is also a corporal in the Israel Navy. Even less surprising is the fact that she serves as the secretary of the head of the Foreign Relations, whose job it is to present the Navy to the world. “This is an important role that represents the unit. In addition to office work, we participate in meetings with senior personalities from abroad,” commented Rodnitzki, “I enjoy my service and I am happy to be in the place I am.”
Miss Israel 2009, Corporal Adi Rodnitzki. Photo: IDF Spokesperson
"I learned to deal with situations that were difficult for me, physically and mentally. Learning about personal communications also contributed for my preparation as a soldier "
Corporal Adi Rodnitzki, as she won the Miss Israel 2009 competition . Photo: Michelle Dotcom, "Israel Today"
Adi, single, 20 years old and from Tel Aviv, has completed one and a half years of her service. She arrived to the Navy after finishing her basic training and notes that even at the time of her draft into the IDF she wanted the position that she now holds. “There are high quality people. Some of them speak foreign languages, which raises my interest level.” Adi was born in Israel and completed high school at the Alianz School in Tel Aviv, where she chose to study economics, psychology and French.
According to Adi, for many years people tried to convince her to participate in beauty competitions but she wasn't interested. Adi was a model for the Elite Agency and later joined the Look Agency. This was a turning point for her interest in joining the competition scene. “I met with representatives of Look and they asked me if I wanted to be a model in the competition. I thought about it, and told myself ‘Yes, I will go for it’. I asked how it was going to be arranged with the army and they told me that generally these things are approved by the IDF and that there shouldn’t be a problem. But it was a problem.”
In order to participate, Adi had to sign an agreement to defer her service for three months, during which she held intensive training and preparation for the competition. “Some of the rehearsals were not simple, but I really enjoyed them” she claimed. “The most significant rehearsal was in Haifa four days before the ceremony. We had rehearsals from seven in the morning until 11 at night” she says. The intensity and difficult rehearsals also helped her later in her performance as a soldier. “I learned how to work hard. The rehearsals and the pressure weren’t easy but they made me stronger. I learned to deal with situations that were difficult for me, physically and mentally. Learning about personal communications also contributed for my preparation as a soldier.”
“From the beginning of the competition until the end I got a lot of support from my friends in the army”
One of the things that surprised Adi the most was the support she received from the IDF, particularly her direct commander. “Normally, commanders don’t want their soldiers to leave and because of that I was afraid to ask her, but from the moment I did she was more excited than I was and that convinced me to do it.” She says her commander understood her need to leave the office for several months. “She called me during these months and also after I won, I received a phone call from her,” she remembers with a smile. Adi also received many calls of support from her friends in the Navy: “From the beginning of the competition until the end I got a lot of support from them.”
10 months of military service remain for the beauty queen and she fully intends to complete them even if things may have changed slightly. “I will not be in the army for a large number of hours, things will change. I do what I can.” Beyond the days where she is busy with interviews she is planning to compete in the Miss Universe competition in a few months. “The army will release me, I am not worried”, she stated. “It really doesn’t bother me, they release me every time I need to and when I don’t then I’m in the army. It is not contradictory,” she stresses. “I continue to do regular service as needed.”
from the IDF site(http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/)
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Monday, 23 March 2009
NO SURRENDER, NO RETREAT !!!
NO SURRENDER, NO RETREAT
" This video is intended to incite anger in the hearts of Americans. Let us never forget the threats we face. It is crucial to know our enemies and destroy them before they destroy us. As you look upon the images of September 11, which are featured in this video, look also at the faces of those responsible. The title of the song is "The Last Fallen Hero" Performed by: The Charlie Daniel's band
"Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget--lest we forget!" "
Thanks to HumbleInfidel (http://humbleinfidel.stumbleupon.com/) for posting this video. The text above is, also, his.
RADICAL ISLAMIC GROUP AND ISRAELI-ARAB COEXISTENCE
Jerusalem Issue Brief Institute for Contemporary Affairs founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation
Vol. 8, No. 24 20 March 2009
The Role of Radical Islamic Groups in Israel: Implications for Israeli-Arab Coexistence
Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar
Many in the Arab world felt deep humiliation due to George W. Bush. The Islamic view is that Islam came to the world to replace Judaism and Christianity, and all of the sudden comes a religious Christian president and occupies Iraq, the capital of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate and the beating heart of Arab history. So when Bush left office, this was viewed as a victory for Allah over the modern Crusaders.
The core question is to whom does this country belong? According to the Arab narrative, this has been an Arab Islamic state since the days of Omar, the caliph who conquered the country in the seventh century. According to Islamic tradition, he declared that the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is waqf land, meaning it belongs forever to Muslims all over the world, and no one else could ever have it.
According to Islam, land can only go one way, to become Islamic, and it can never go the other way, just like Spain, Sicily, and parts of the Balkans, which at different stages of history were lands of Islam. This is why Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood cannot even begin to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state on the land of Palestine.
At the same time, Jews feel that this country belongs to them. From the Jewish perspective, this country was populated by Jews and two Jewish kingdoms were here until 1900 years ago. We Jews were expelled with no justification and we came back to our country. This is what gives justification to the Jews having our state here and not in Uganda, Argentina or Birobijan. It even appears in the Koran that this country had been given to the Jews.
In 2006 a document approved by the Committee of Arab Local Authorities in Israel - entitled: "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and their Relations with the State" - opened with the statement: "Israel is the outcome of a colonialist action which was initiated by the Jewish-Zionist elites in Europe and in the West."
To call Israel a colonialist state means a total denial of Jewish history, and echoes the Islamic approach to Jewish history. According to this approach, since Islam came to the world in the year 622 CE with the hijra of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, all of history before that time lost any meaning or significance.
The End of the Bush Administration - A Victory for Allah
Some in the Arab world were very satisfied with the American election because to them it meant the end of the Bush administration. Many in the Arab world felt deep humiliation due to George W. Bush, above all else. The Islamic view of the world is that Islam came to the world to replace Judaism and Christianity, not to live side-by-side with them. Then, all of a sudden, comes a religious Christian president and occupies Iraq, the beating heart of Arab history, the capital of the Abbasid dynasty, which for 500 years ruled the Islamic empire. After a few days of fighting in Baghdad, this city came under American infidel rule.
Bush said right after September 11, 2001, that the Americans were on a "crusade." Immediately, his advisors told him not to use that word because it reminds Muslims of the Crusader Kingdom of 800 years ago, which the hero Saladin wiped out. But his statement was recorded and Al-Jazeera kept showing it. Muslims look at this from a religious point of view and many see what is going on in the region as some kind of test of whose god is more powerful: Allah or the Christian God. This is how too many people in the Middle East are viewing this now. So when Bush left office, this was viewed as some kind of victory for Allah.
One of the major differences between the Middle East and Western societies is the role of religion. We were brought up on the notion of a division between church and state, that the state is for everybody and religion is within your heart. This may be correct in the West, but it is not correct in the Arab world. In the Middle East, almost everything is connected to religion.
The Arab Minorities in Israel
Inside Israel, there are a number of different Arab minorities. There are Muslims, Druze, and Christians, from the religious point of view. There are Bedouins who live in the desert, which is one culture; rural peasants, which is another culture; and those who dwell in cities, either in Arab cities or in mixed cities, which is yet another kind of culture. So you cannot look at the Arab minorities in Israel as one package. You have to relate to them in different ways because they are different and they don't consider themselves as one group of people.
You can see this in the percentage of those who vote. The percentage of Arabs who vote for Arab parties in the Knesset is only 50 percent. The Arab sector in Israel altogether is about 20 percent of the population, which means in theory that Arab parties could have 24 members, or a fifth of the 120 Knesset members. However, the actual number of Arab Knesset members is around 10, and has been like this for years. Many Arabs do not even vote; they do not see the Knesset as a body that can represent them. In addition, the radical part of the Islamic movement is constantly calling on their people not to vote for the Knesset because that gives some kind of seal of approval to the Israeli state, which has no legitimacy to exist in their eyes.
The Acre Riots of October 2008: Why Didn't They Spread?
In the mixed city of Acre in October 2008, a car driven by an Arab went into a Jewish neighborhood on the night of Yom Kippur. This triggered five days of violence, demonstrations, breaking into shops, and burning apartments and houses.
At the time of the riots, Islamic Jihad and Hamas called on the Arabs in Israel to do the same thing in all the other mixed cities like Jaffa, Ramla and Lod. They tried to inflame the whole situation, but it didn't work. The calls to spread the riots to other places in Israel were not answered. Why didn't the riots spread to other cities? Because at the end of the day, both Jews and Arabs realize that coexistence is better than fighting.
To Whom Does the Country Belong?
In Jaffa, right next to Tel Aviv, there are processes that the Arabs don't like. Property is being taken by the state and given to contractors who are building new luxury housing near the sea, mainly for Jews, and this creates much resentment among the Arabs living there. This illustrates the key, bottom line question: To whom does this country belong? Every other question is derived from this.
According to the Arab narrative, this has been an Arab Islamic state since the days of Omar, the caliph who conquered the country in the second quarter of the seventh century. According to Islamic oral tradition, he declared that the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was waqf land, meaning it belonged to Muslims all over the world, and no one else could ever have it. So how could the Jews come in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries and buy land there and establish an independent Jewish state, one that has no legitimacy to exist on Islamic soil? It was just like Spain, Sicily, and parts of the Balkans, which at different stages of history were lands of Islam. According to Islam, land can only go one way, to become Islamic, and it can never go the other way.
The wings of the Muslim Brotherhood believe that the Israeli state or the Jewish state has no right to exist to begin with. This is why Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood cannot even begin to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist. A temporary peace of ten or twenty years can be given to infidels when Muslims are not powerful enough to conquer their lands, until Allah gives the Muslims the ability to do so.
The Muslim Brotherhood looks at the Jewish state in Israel as if the Jews occupied the country and removed it from the bosom of Islam in which it existed until 1948. When you ask to whom the country belongs, this is the basis of the Islamic perspective.
At the same time, Jews feel that this country belongs to them. From the Jewish perspective, this country was populated by Jews and two Jewish kingdoms were here until 1900 years ago. We Jews were expelled with no justification and we came back to our country. This is what gives justification to the Jews having our state here and not in Uganda or Argentina or Birobijan. It even appears in the Koran that this country had been given to the Jews.
We say today that the two narratives are fighting. The Islamic narrative says that this country is Islamic, and the Jewish narrative states that this country in its entirety belongs to the Jews. However, while we want to keep the Jewish nature of our state, most of us are not willing to kick out the Arabs who live here.
The struggle of narratives is a problem that we all have to live with. There are problems in life which cannot be solved, and the contradiction between those two narratives cannot be solved.
The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel
In 2006 a group of forty modern Arab intellectuals, politicians, and university lecturers published a very interesting document in both Hebrew and Arabic. The document, which was approved by the Committee of Arab Local Authorities in Israel - the most significant organ of Arabs in Israel - was entitled: "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and their Relations with the State."
Its opening statement reads: "Israel is the outcome of a colonialist action which was initiated by the Jewish-Zionist elites in Europe and in the West, was established with the help of colonialist states, Britain and France, and was strengthened by the influx of Jews into Palestine, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust." At least they recognize the fact that there was a Holocaust. In many other places Arab deny even that.
In addition, Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsour, chairman of the United Arab List, the largest Arab party in the Feb. 10, 2009, elections for the Israeli Knesset, said in a speech: "Participating in the elections to the Knesset does not abolish our ideology according to which the rule on earth, or at least on Arab and Islamic land, should be Islamic and headed by the Caliph."1 The party won 113,954 votes and 4 seats.
In the Muslim Narrative, History Only Begins in 622 CE
To call Israel a colonialist state is to undermine Israel's legitimacy as the state of the Jewish people who see themselves as the owners of this country. It means a total denial of Jewish history, and echoes the Islamic approach to Jewish history. According to this approach, since Islam came to the world in the year 622 CE with the hijra of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, all of history before that time lost any meaning or significance. Even the prophets - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Jesus - all became Muslims, according to the Islamic narrative. So since Islam denies what happened before Islam, they can say that Israel is an outcome of a colonialist action because the fact that Jews were here 1900 years ago, before Islam, has no meaning anymore since that was before Islam came into the world.
This leads us back to the way Islam as a religion looks at the State of Israel and its existence in this waqf land. The document of the Arabs in Israel, which we mentioned before, is replete with expressions of how Israel is an illegitimate entity and how the Arabs are the natives. This is the way they look at the state where they live.
What other states have to contend with the fact that a significant minority is challenging the very legitimacy of the state? Even Arabs and Muslims in Britain or France are not yet challenging the legitimacy of those states, but here, in Israel, they feel free to do it.
Are the Palestinians Really the Natives?
But are the Palestinians really the natives? Many Palestinians, even in Israel, bear names like al-Masri (referring to Egypt) or al-Iraqi or al-Tarabulsi (referring to Tripoli in northern Lebanon). The minister of refugees in the Palestinian Authority was Abdallah al-Horani, meaning that either he or his parents came from al-Horan in southern Syria. They are not originally from this place. They immigrated here and their family names reflect the name of the place they came from. Since when are they Palestinians?
What about the Palestinians who live today in Lebanon and the West Bank and are still in refugees camps sixty years after 1948? Where else in the world do you see refugee camps for sixty years? But where do they have the right to return to, those who came from Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria? To Haifa, where they worked for a few years for the British who brought them from Syria to work in the harbor, or to Syria and the other Arab countries where they originally came from? The world has bought this slogan of Palestinian refugees without checking where they came from originally.
The Only Arabs Who Live in a Democracy Live in Israel
Most Arabs today live either in Arab dictatorships or in democracies but in exile. No Arab state is a real democracy. The only significant group of Arabs who live in a democracy are the Arabs in Israel. Yet I would say the vast majority do not want to turn this state into an Arab state. Very few of them want to live in an Arab state. Everyone in Israel is free to emigrate, but there are no Arabs lining up to emigrate to other countries. They know exactly what the situation is because they see what goes on everywhere in the Arab world on Al-Jazeera, day and night: In Egypt, half of the population lives in unplanned neighborhoods with no running water, electricity, sewage, infrastructure, paved roads, or health care. Hardly anyone in the Arab sector in Israel lives in such conditions, except for some of the Bedouin in the Negev who willingly choose the culture of the desert.
The Arab sector in Israel does not want to change where they live into an Arab state. Maybe some in the Islamic movement would like to have an Islamic state here just like they want to have an Islamic state everywhere, to kick out the Arab regimes and establish a caliphate instead. But the majority of Arabs in Israel still prefer the current situation since, despite whatever discrimination they may experience, living in Israel is still far better than living in any Arab country in the Middle East.
The Arabs in Israel are much more clever than their brothers in the Palestinian Authority. The Muslims in Israel look at what happens in Gaza and do not envy those who live there. They don't envy the people of Iran under the regime of the ayatollahs either, where 95 percent of the Iranians are secular. And they don't want to live like the Shi'ites in Lebanon. Arab Israeli citizens are much wiser than that. They know exactly what the alternative is.
* * *
Note 1. See http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3216531,00.html and http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/ 0,7340,L-3217055,00.html. The issue of a caliphate is not mentioned in the party's formal platform.
* * *
Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and the Syrian domestic arena. Dr. Kedar teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University and is a research associate at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation at the Institute for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem on November 5, 2008.
This Jerusalem Issue Brief is available online at: http://www.jcpa.org
taken from:B'NAI ELIM (http://bnaielim.blogspot.com/)
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