Mr. Netanyahu, Just What Is "Clear", And To Whom?

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FromPM Netanyahu's Channel #10 Interview (as communicated by the Prime Minister’s Media Adviser)

Following are excerpts from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's interview yesterday evening (Monday), 27.12.10, with Israel's Channel 10 News:

...Prime Minister Netanyahu: "I have set very clear policy; I did this in my 14.6.09 Bar-Ilan University speech. There I said as follows: If the Palestinians recognize a Jewish State, if they shelve the idea of the Palestinian refugees' right of return, if they have a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state – I tell you here and now that I will go with this to the end and that no coalition consideration will stop me, and I have no doubt that a majority will support me."

I think the opposing side has been very clear in its opposition to this policy, its refusal to acknowledge Israel's inherent Jewish character, its refusal to permit Jews to reside in "Palestine" if it will ever be established, their refusal to yield on a supposed 'right of return' that doesn't exist, their unwillingness not only to become demilitarized but to surrender to terror option.

Mr. Prime Minister, isn't that clear?

I'm sure Netamyahu will realize this, sooner than later I hope.

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That Pro-Iran Ad Removed

I received this in response to my inquiry on the bank advertising Iran (background), this ad:

Here:

Dear Mr. Medad:

Your email correspondence directed to Diane Bergan, Senior Vice President – Public Affairs, regarding an “Unlocking the World’s Potential” campaign advertisement has been forwarded to the Executive Offices of HSBC Bank USA, N.A.

First and foremost on behalf of HSBC Bank I apologize for the concern which our advertisement in Greece caused. The advertisement was part of an HSBC global campaign and one of many which identified simple but surprising facts as a way to facilitate a conversation about unlocking the world’s potential.

So while our aim is to encourage debate and discussion we certainly have no intent to cause offense or be insulting, in fact quite the opposite.
Given the clear level of offense that this advertisement has caused the decision has been taken to remove it from our global campaign.

We respect your position and thank you for taking the time to raise your concerns with us.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Moog
Senior Vice President
Head of Customer Experience

Never yield on you right to have your voice heard.

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Economic Cooperation Can Lead to Peace

The PA exhibits commonsense:

PA lightens ban on working in settlements Jewish communities to ease Palestinian unemployment

Figures show number of Palestinians employed in settlements Jewish communities has increased to nearly 35,000; PA legislation barring employment there would be an economic blow to Palestinian population...

...The settlements Jewish communities and laborers who work in them have a mutually beneficial relationship, and settlement Jewish community construction relies on Palestinian labor. Many Palestinian workers who do not have permission to work in Israel proper find employment in the settlements Jewish communities.

According to Israeli figures from September 2009 that were provided to the PA's donor countries, 22,000 Palestinians were working with Israeli permission in the settlements Jewish communities, including the settlements' Jewish communities' industrial zones. Non-governmental organizations have said, however, that about 10,000 other Palestinians are working in the settlements Jewish communities without formal permission, mainly in seasonal agricultural work.

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Dershowitz, With Hamas Assistance, Buries Goldstone

Here.

Excerpt:

Because it uncritically accepted the original Hamas claims of very few combatant deaths, the Goldstone Report was able to reach its flawed conclusion that the purpose of the operation must have been to kill civilians, not combatants.

Now that the truth has been admitted by the Hamas leadership -- that as many as 700 combatants were, in fact, killed -- the Goldstone Commission is obliged to reconsider its false conclusion and correct its deeply flawed report.
Richard Goldstone himself has repeatedly said that he hoped that new evidence will prove his conclusions wrong. Well, this new evidence -- a classic admission against interest -- does just that!

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When Did It Start?

If you are noting a two year anniversary to the start of Operation Cast Lead, you're wrong.

Following this lead of EOZ, here's a screenshot of the news item before:

It's that old saying: "it started when he hit me back".

Or something like this:

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What's The Most Prominent Element in These Pictures?

From September 2009:

From March 2007:

From February 2006:

From this week 2010:

From January 2009:

So, do you get the picture?

All those microphones, all that media presence, all that media interest, all that global media distibution.

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Let's Talk Rationally with Iran

But not with these Iranians:-

Credit: Maryam Rahmanian

Oh, those Iranians covered with mud are engaged in a ritual ceremony called Kharrah Mali in Bijar located in Kurdistan province of Iran on December 16, 2010 mourning the slaying of Prophet Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein, in the battle of Karbala in the year 680 A.D.

Lot better than covered with blood.

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Can We Correct That Spelling?

UPI reported:-

Israel kills two Palestinian gunmen

Two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip struck southern Israel Sunday, hours after the Israeli military said it killed two Palestinians trying to plant bombs.  Soldiers spotted a group of armed Palestinians before dawn approaching the border fence and placing explosives and opened fire, the army said. A helicopter gunship was also deployed and fired at them, the army said.

Islamic Jihad in Gaza identified the two dead gunmen as Issa Abu Rock and Muhammed An-Najar, Ma'an News Agency said.

That's "gunman", not "rock".

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This Might Develop Into Something Critical

Reported:-

The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, warned that the death of “religious literacy” among those who made and administered the law had created an imbalance in the way in which those with faith were treated compared to sexual minorities.

Highlighting the case Gary McFarlane, a relationship counsellor who was sacked by Relate for refusing to give sex therapy to a homosexual couple, he said that the judiciary now went out of its way to protect the rights of minorities.

At the same time, for the first time in British history politicians and judges were largely ignorant of religion and so failed to appreciate the importance Christians placed on abiding by the scriptures rather than the politically correct values of the secular state.

The Bishop’s concerns were underlined by Lord Woolf, a former Lord Chief Justice, who agreed that in some legal cases the balance had gone “too far” in tipping away from Christians.

Following on Amnon Lord's blistering attack on Israeli intellectuals in Hebrew in Makor Rishon, there may be a rollback in sight against the one-worlders, moral non-relaivity, humnanists, et al.

Amnon attacked a statement by that Steve Plaut picked up on, writing:

In Haaretz today, Hebrew University Professor Daniel Blatman writes the most anti-Semitic article that has yet to appear in the Israeli mainstream media. Blatman claims to be a Holocaust scholar, and is employed by the Hebrew University at the Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry.

In his ranting anti-Semitic article, Blatman bleats: "...In the Israel of today, we can observe quite a few conditions whose presence in other societies and among other peoples led to racial separation, ethnic cleansing and even genocide...". Blatman's rant is part of the current wave of Jewish self-hatred in Israel under which leftist Jews insist that Israel's refusal to allow unlimited numbers of Africans seeking better-paying jobs to enter the country is the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Hundreds of Africans "protested" over the weekend in protests featuring signs in Hebrew written for them by leftist Israelis, making exactly such comparisons. Blatman joins them, insisting that Israel in 2011 is exactly the same as Germany in 1932.

Lord indeed compares the situation in Israel today to 1932 but notes that the reality is that just like then the Nazis and Communists managaed together to destroy Germany democracy, at present, Blatman and cohorts are the "Communists" and Salah Raad and his extremists pals are the "Nazis".

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Try Substituting "Jerusalem" In That Story

If you go to this NYTimes article, you'll read a fourth installment in a series on "exploring how large-scale urban projects are transforming parts of the Arab world".  The most recent is on Allepo (or 'Halab, and as we Jews know it, Aram Tzuba).

Did you know that

Mohamed Atta, the central planner of the 9/11 attacks, once wrote an urban planning thesis on the Old City of Aleppo in which he said he wanted to tear out centuries’ worth of buildings, Mr. Ruthven said. He dreamed of “an Islamic city that was pure and unchanged — frozen in aspic.”

Anyway, here's the action theme:

The project encompasses the rebuilding of crumbling streets and the upgrading of city services, the restoration of hundreds of houses in the historic Old City, plans for a 42-acre park in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and the near-decade-long restoration of the Citadel itself, whose massive walls dominate the skyline of Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world,

I could easily substitute "Jerusalem" for "Aleppo" in that and leave in "Old City", "massive walls", "park", "Citadel", "oldest inhabited", etc.

Interesting, but what strikes me is that if the NYTimes would attempt to do this in Jerusalem, somehow I feel that it just wouldn't work. After all, they do attempt it and all we get are stories of how Jews don't belong in the eastern neighborhoods of the city and how reconstruction of a Jewish past, a Jewish architecture simply cannot be. It's an "Arab city".

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Whoa There, WUJS

Found,

the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) upcoming congress schedule,

On the front lines of the battle against Anti-Semitism, assimilation and delegitimisation of Israel/BDS on campus, 200 elected Jewish Student leaders, representing hundreds of campuses, will be arriving from 52 countries to address the challenges facing Jewish students worldwide.

The Congress will be hosted by the Knesset and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and speakers include Zipi Livni, Saeb Erekat, Nathan Sharansky, Malcolm Hoenlein, Irwin Cotler, Fiama Nirenstein, Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi Lau, Danny Seaman, Danny Ayalon, Efi shtenzler, Hillel Neuer, Zev Bielsky, Shaul Mofaz, Avraham Duvdevani, etc.

Wait!  Whoa there!  Saeb Erekat?!

Will he be serving as a living example of what to struggle against and combat?

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On Kissinger's "Apology"

From Glenn Richter, former director of SSSJ, who has tried posting
responses to Kissinger's excusing himself (Kippa tip: JTobin) based simply on emigration figures. This to show that Kissinger lied both in his initial response a couple of weeks ago and again in today's Washington Post op-ed. Here's his retort, posted online on the Washington Post site of the op-ed, and I hope, on the Jerusalem Post webpage of the article on the op-ed:

I think history disagrees with Secretary Kissinger. Whatever White House quiet diplomacy worked to free Soviet Jews, it was against an increasing background of public pressure on both the Kremlin and White House, not despite it. As an activist for Soviet Jewry since 1964, I well recall these years.

Secretary Kissinger also misstates the facts. He asserts that in Nixon's first administration, over 100,000 Soviet Jews emigrated. The fact speak otherwise. Emigration in 1969 was 2979, 1027 in 1970, 13,022 in 1971 and 31,681 in 1972, for a total of 48,709. The international public campaign for Soviet Jewry took off in 1971 after the sensational first Leningrad Trial of Jews seeking to flee the USSR. In 1972, the Soviets wanted an arms control treaty and reacted to the introduction into Congress of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked trade credits to the Kremlin with Jewish emigration.

Dr. Kissinger also stated in his initial response and in this op-ed that Jewish exit didn't exceed the 1972 total (which he claimed was 40,000) until the USSR collapsed. Simply untrue. In 1979, 51,320 Jews were let out, as the Kremlin attempted to reverse the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, by then law; then 71,196 in 1989, 213,437 in 1990, and 178,026 in 1991 as the Soviets tried desperately and unsuccessfully to gain US economic assistance.

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And he adds:

Meanwhile, reading today the new and fascinating book, "The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust" (yes, title deliberately chosen) by Dr. Rafael Medoff and Rabbi David Golinkin, I found an eerie parallel.

The notorious Ass't Secretary of State under FDR Breckinridge Long testified on Nov. 26, 1943 before a Congressional committee re a proposed resolution calling on the White House to establish a rescue committee for European Jewry. Long declared that "we have taken into this country since the beginning of Hitler's regime and the persecution of the Jews, until today, approximately 580,000 refugees." The authors state that "a few days later his figures were exposed as false. The actual number of refugees admitted was not more than 250,000, and many of them were not Jews."

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Nice Game

Scorecard:

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Silly Post

Reported:-

Man Sues Restaurant For Not Stopping Him From Eating An Entire Artichoke

A doctor {sic!} has sued the Houston's restaurant in Miami after he ate a complete artichoke that he ordered, including the spiny and sharp exterior leaves. He subsequently suffered "severe abdominal pain and discomfort," and a "exploratory laparotomy" showed that the artichoke leaves were jammed in his "small bowel." His lawsuit claims that he had "never seen nor heard of previously" an artichoke and that it was the restaurant's fault for not teaching him how to eat it.

"It takes a sophisticated diner to be familiar with the artichoke," says the man's lawyer. "People might think that as a doctor, he'd know how to eat one. But he was thinking it was like a food he might have eaten in his native Cuba, where you eat everything on the plate."

A spokesperson for the restaurant group told Business Insurance, "What's next? Are we going to have to post warnings on our menu they shouldn't eat the bones in our barbeque ribs?"

As explained, and the way we Medads do it, if to eat an artichoke one plucks off a leaf one-by-one, placing the wide side in your mouth and, with your teeth lightly grasping the soft part of the fibrous part you 'scrape' the leaf, leaving the soft part in your mouth. Repeat until you reach the soft inner heart. Then you carefully remove the 'heart' from the dangerous thistle-like leave enclosure

Credit

better picture:

What is left is soft and delctable and can be consumed whole.

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Those Darn "Arab Neighborhoods"

Jeffery Goldberg gets uncomfortable with multi-ethnicity:-

..."the dirty little secret of Jerusalem is that it is a fully-functioning intercommunal city." I think this is true. Yes, there are terrifically difficult issues (not least of which is the seizing of several Arab homes by Jewish settlers eager to make their presence felt in Arab neighborhoods),

"Arab", like David's City.

"Arab", like Shimon HaTzadik.

"Arab", like Kfar Shiloah.

Leave it to the Jews to let the Jews have it.

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Discouraged? Construct!

As noted by Alana Goodman:-

Why do Israelis support a two state solution, but oppose a freeze on settlement construction?

Jeremy Sharon argues that it’s because they have become discouraged about the possibility of a peace deal at this point in time:

“Support for the notion of ‘two states for two peoples’ remains high at over 60 percent because Israelis acknowledge that ultimately, continued rule over the Palestinians is untenable. But there is no desire to rush into an irreversible agreement which could result not with the shelling of Sderot or Haifa, but of Tel Aviv.”

Think about that.

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Israel To Deport Hamas Leaders From Judea & Samaria

Oops.

Sorry.

That's all wrong.

Reported:-

50 Hamas leaders may be deported from West Bank by PA

How could I have erred?

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Haveil Havalim #297 Is Up!

And here it is.

Visit and read.

Ghasan Again

This fellow Ghasan Deglis/Daghlis gets paid for "creative thinking".

He now claims:

Israeli settlers seize 20 dunums near Nablus .

Israeli settlers from Shiloh settlement seized on Sunday 20 dunums from Khrba Sera, in the south of eastern area of Nablus.

The official of the settlement file in the West Bank, Ghasan Deglis, said that numbers of Israeli settlers are in the seized area and plowing the land...

Well, I now have to call up and find out what my friends and neighbors are doing but since he has been notoriously wrong and a teller of falsehoods, this is getting a bit extreme.


UPDATE

Ghasan, there is a small grain of truth in your tale.

This morning, three youngsters, without permission, attempted to plough about 1.5 dunams of land that had lain fallow for years on the borderline of Shiloh's area. Members of Shiloh's community board stopped them and asked that the Civil Administration intervene and to determine what the legal situation is.

Irresponsible individuals were involved and responsible community leaders ended the situation.


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Plaut Makes A Point

Haaretz reports that a group of “intellectuals” is calling on Netanyahu to fire all rabbis who signed the earlier call for Jews not to rent or sell property to Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas. Among the signers were Prof. Joseph Algassi (Tel Aviv University, philosophy), a leading proponent of the “One-State Solution” in which Israel will be obliterated and replaced by a Rwanda-style bi-national state with an Arab majority (see). Also signing was Prof. Haim Adler from the Hebrew University (education),
and Prof. Aliza Shenhar, the leftist head of the Galilee College (who was a Rector at Haifa University).

None of these same people called for firing leftwing anti-Zionist professors in Israel who call on people not to rent and sell property to Jews in East Jerusalem.

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