Happy birthday Israel

Happy birthday Israel, today they celebrate 64 years of existence as the modern State of Israel. let us hope they have many more and all of them peaceful.

 

Yasmin Levi - Me Voy

Yasmin Levi is an Israeli singer song writer who does Judaeo-Spanish music. both my wife and I enjoy here music.

Hypocrisy

This article really captures some of what truly bugs me about the critics of Israel and Muslims in general.when I speak to Muslims and they go on about how bad Israel is, I tell them; "The most dangerous thing to a Muslim is another Muslim".
According to Mssrs. Heinsohn and Pipes, the grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts all over the world since 1950 numbering around 85 million. Of that, the Muslim Arab deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict were at 46,000 including 11,000 during Israel’s war of independence. That makes 0.05 percent of all deaths in all conflicts, or 0.4 percent of all Arab deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict.


In another calculation ignoring “small” massacres like the one that goes on in Syria and other deaths during the Arab Spring, only Saddam’s Iraq, Jordan, the elder al-Assad’s Syria, Iran-Iraq war, the bin Laden campaign in Iraq, the Iranian Islamic revolution and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict caused 1.65 million Muslim deaths by Muslims compared to less than 50,000 deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950, including fatalities during and after Operation Cast Lead which came after the Heinsohn-Pipes study. For those who don’t have a calculator ready at their desks, allow me to tell: 50,000 is three percent of 1.65 million.

Read the rest here:
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=why-golda-meir-was-right-2011-08-23

Obama, back to the 60's

What Israel looked like just before the 1967war

Maybe Obama does not remember the 60's, maybe all he remembers is Woodstock or the the girls with flowers in their hair. The Israelis have different memories of that time, war on their doorstep, threats to destroy them. in 1967 the Israelis pulled off one the most impressive feats of arms since the end of WWII, destroying 3 armies all poised to attack them. In turn making their tiny country more secure and winning the long sought prize of Jerusalem.

One factor that totally escapes Obama, is that even in 1966 there was no "Palestinian State", Gaza belonged to Egypt and the West bank to Jordon, in fact there has been no "Palestinian state" for centuries, prior to 1948, it was a mandate that UK took over from the Ottomans, who treated the area as part of a province of their empire.
The reality is that the Palestinians have enough to start a real state, Gaza strip is 364 sqKm and combined with West Bank land it compares well with Singapore. Also like Singapore, the only real resource that both countries have are their people. Singapore invested in it's people and the results are well known. The Palestinians instead invested in homemade rockets and suicide vests, the result are rather predictable. Their current plan to gain statehood by attacking Israel have achieved none of their aims and helped their economy to hit rock bottom and still digging.
So far all the "Great one" has achieved is to get both Israel and Hamas to agree his idea sucks, albeit for different reasons. No peace will be achieved till the Palestinians realize that the state of Israel is not going anywhere and the "Right of return" is a myth that will not happen. To people so morally opposed can not live in the same house and that is the simple truth here. The longer we enable the Palestinians to live this lie, the longer they will suffer. Fairly soon the number of people who actually did leave in 1948 will be a handful, every decade it will be less, till no one from that episode is alive from either side. Shall we allow the Palestinians descendants to carry living the lie and paying it's price?

If you need any help understanding why the Israelis don't want to give up land, take a look at this map. The 1967 borders were undefendable with no space to recover from a tactical error. In the 1973 war, the Syrians came within a hairbreath of breaking through the IDF lines in the Golan, only luck and a timid response from the Syrian saved them.

Note, can't remember the blog I got the maps from, but will credit them as soon as I find the link.

Eye for an Eye

A very good read by Der Spiegel

In the spring of 1989, a Palestinian terrorist murdered an Israeli soldier. Twenty years later in Dubai, the Israeli secret service agency Mossad avenged the killing. The operation succeeded, but nevertheless has become a fiasco. SPIEGEL has reconstructed the attack. By SPIEGEL Staff

He knew that he was a dead man. From the moment he shot the Israeli soldier sitting on the car seat behind him in the face, he knew that they would get him sooner or later.


For Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, it would take 20 years for that day to come. At about noon on Jan. 20, 2010, employees at the Al Bustan Rotana airport hotel in Dubai opened the door of room 230 to find the body of a man on the bed. According to the death certificate, the cause of death was "brain hemorrhage."

At the time, no one knew who exactly the dead man was. Mabhouh was considered to be the chief weapons negotiator for Hamas, the Palestinian organization's main contact to Tehran and the logistician behind rocket attacks on Israel coming from the Gaza Strip.

A man with a pedigree like that doesn't die of a brain hemorrhage. In fact, al-Mabhouh became a marked man long ago.The rest here

Wildfire

Stunning pictures of the wildfire in Israel that claimed 42 lives. Most of whom were in the bus pictured here moments before they were engulfed. It’s pretty clear that Israel was not prepared for this event and now that the crisis is over the blame will begin. I won’t cast a lot of blame, out here we are used to such fires and are prepared for them, yet even we have had to learn the hard way that fire can never be taken for granted.
Now they must rebuild, relearn and replant. For some families, they must live with the grief of young sons never to return home. What does give me hope is that despite the harsh words between countries, one of the Canadair waterbombers pictured there is Turkish. There was also a Russian or Ukraine waterbomber and the recently deployed Evergreen 747 waterbomber.

FUBARed

Below is an apt description of Israel politics, from an Israeli who posted it on a forum I frequent, other Israelis and people familiar with the country felt it was a very good description of how the puzzle palace works over there. For more mundane descriptions go here and here is a somewhat dated but amusing piece on their political parties. As Canadians we have much to learn from them as to how to run a minority government, certainly their political turmoil makes ours a tempest in a tea pot. a thank you to Tezfa for allowing me to quote him.

But Israeli external politics depend a lot on Israeli internal politics, and those are totally FUBARed.
Basically our elected representatives are like a bunch of epileptic monkeys with grenades locked in a cage. The cage in turn is surrounded by drunken spectators. Some of them try to make the monkeys do tricks by offering them free bananas, some try to overturn the cage, and others try to set it on fire.

So what comes out as a result is a balancing act, where any given government, consisting of a bunch of monkeys who manage to climb on top of the pile, spends most of its effort on not letting the other monkeys overwhelm them, while at the same time preforming tricks to get their bananas, and trying to fend off the pyromaniacs.
Occasionally a couple of monkeys will actually throw their grenades and then we get something like the Oslo accords. But most of the time what comes out is a balancing act, and the result of it inevitably is trying to walk the middle ground.

So guess which is the safest country for Gays and Christians in the Middle East?

Quotes:
This trend has accelerated in the last 10 years." The Center focused on disturbing trends in the Palestinian territories, where "Christians are declining dramatically.

Syrian security forces are implicated in the disappearance of an estimated 17,000 individuals during this period. (lets not forget about Hama either)

Reports have revealed that gay Palestinians are regularly assaulted and tortured by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Human rights activists have cited severe discrimination - enshrined in legislation and enforced by the government - of the estimated 300,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. In 2001, Lebanon's Parliament passed a law banning Palestinians residents from owning property.

"Unfortunately we have heard about a lot of sexual harassment and assault specifically towards women in the West Bank recently. We have included this section to address how women can hopefully avoid sexual assault and harassment, what to do in case it happens, and how we can all help to stop this and support people that it has happened to.

Enforced Misery

An excellent read on how the politics and propaganda of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict uses ordinary Palestinians as pawns, where there suffering is more important than living a normal life. When it comes to the Muslim world sympathy for the Palestinians because they are their “Muslim brothers and sisters” I take it with a large bag of salt. I noted in Malaysia that the sympathy for the Indonesians (who are both their Muslim and ethnic brethren) is quite a bit less than it is for the Palestinians, I guess distance really does make the heart grow fonder! My heart does go out to the average Palestinian who wants a normal life, they are caught between a rock and hard place.

Any regime with an ounce of compassion would have shut Balata down and integrated its people into the surrounding community. Balata is a place without hope, a quagmire of despair, where the day-to-day misery of its inhabitants is partially ameliorated by Western charities and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), while inadvertently building a culture of dependence.

Balata’s creation could ostensibly be laid at Israel’s doorstep, but its perpetuation cannot. The current residents of Balata are only refugees by a crude reworking of the meaning of the term. They themselves have fled from nothing, and sought refuge from nothing. They are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the people who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war.

Read more at Pajamas Media

I guess the word “Israel” is missing and so is so the MSM

Just weeks after the global media outrage over Israeli "crimes against humanity" in Gaza, the mainstream media is keeping strangely silent over allegations that Turkey is using chemical weapons against its own citizens in Kurdistan.

via Pajamas Media

Let see google news on Israel and then Turkey Hmmmm....

Turkey Accused of Using Chemical Weapons against PKK

Hmmm seems the Turkish government might have some very broad double standards about human rights. Seems they might have used chemical weapons on the PPK

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using
It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts.
The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings. Turkish-Kurdish human rights activists believe the people in the photos are eight members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) underground movement, who are thought to have been killed in September 2009. more here

What’s the Turks score card, let me see:
Kurds plus Human rights = no
Palestinians plus human rights = yes (As long as they don’t live in Turkey)
Armenian plus human rights = Well a 100 years have passed, maybe we might think about saying sorry for that thing we really didn’t do.

There is a lot I like about the Turkish people, but you can’t fight a nasty war against the Kurds and suppress them and then help create international incidents so you can criticize Israel for far less.

The three state solution?

RAMALLAH: A senior Hamas official on Wednesday said that achieving a national unity agreement between Palestinian factions, mainly the rival Fatah movement, is “beyond reach.” read more

More likely he means: The evil Zionist are preventing us from tossing you from tall buildings like we did to your comrades here in Gaza. However if you submit peaceful to our enlightened rule we will only toss you from 2 story buildings.

Warning following link is not safe for work, children or squeamish stomachs: Death of Fatah member.

The new kinder and cooler IDF

Soldiers on patrol in Hebron show a new technique to reduce tensions. They got in trouble for this when the video went viral. Militaries in democratic countries are struggling with the impact of the new generation and social media. This includes blogs and videos.

One of the issues concerning militaries and social media is “Opsec” short for “Operational Security” Many of the military forums self police in this manner, but once posted it is difficult to erase from the internet. Another issue is “Persec” short for “Personal security” which for the military means protecting serving members and their families from terrorist attacks, intimidation or from attempts to turn holders of sensitive posts into spies. In the Cold war “Persec” was used by both sides to prevent the other from knowing which units were where. Your average teenager and many adults could use a few lessons in “Persec” when it comes to posting stuff online.

Is it just hate or do people really care?

I am truly amazed at the local, national and international attention that the Gaza issue gets, from media, activists and politicians. An alien coming from another planet could be forgiven to think this was the worst humanitarian disaster to strike our planet in the last 100 years. But reality is so different. The IRC estimates that in the Congo 5 million people have died there in the last 10 years with 45,000 a month dead in 2008. A decade of war and infidata between the Palestinians and Israel have accounted for somewhere around 5,000 Palestinians killed (Number of civilians vs insurgents is disputed)
Let’s also look at the record of Islamic countries and how they treat minorities or other groups within their region. Syria is estimated to have killed between 7,000-40,000 people in the city of Hama alone in 1982 when attempting to destroy Hard line Islamists. Saddam gassed his own Kurdish minority in the town of Halabja killing approx 5,000 and injuring another 11,000. All the Sunni states harass their shiite minorities. Turkey, Iran and Iraq actively try to prevent Kurds from creating their own state. Saudi is building a 560mile long border fence which will prevent nomadic tribes from crossing into their historical grazing lands. This is a small taste of the volition of human rights by states that routinely criticize Israel. Yet I never hear about the other side of the coin. As for the locals here who love to bash Israel, how many are willing to give up their property that the First Nations have never relinquished claim to? We certainly are the pot calling the kettle black!

History of the M.E. in 2 minutes

Do you find the history of the Middle East confusing? Don’t feel bad, most people who try can not follow it and the majority ignore it, something that becomes painful oblivious when they talk about it! History is everything in this land and colours the actions that happen in the present. I have found this map useful to glimpse th complexity of that history. More maps at: http://www.mapsofwar.com/