Hava Nagila played at the Olympics to take a Jewish athlete through to the finals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OapHAF8dFxI&feature=player_embedded
H/T the indomitable Richard Millet!
Monday, 30 July 2012
Elder of Ziyon: The fake Tunisian Olympic hero
If it wasn't already, Elder of Zion is really the epitome of what a blog should be, bringing people viral news long before it ever reaches the headlines.
Elder of Ziyon: The fake Tunisian Olympic hero:
'via Blog this'
Elder of Ziyon: The fake Tunisian Olympic hero:
'via Blog this'
Small Act of Kindness
In April, Israel's Channel 2 aired a story about Holocaust survivors in Israel who have trouble making ends meet. One of the individuals featured was an 84-year-old woman named Ruth, who saw her father shot dead before her very eyes. Now, she is forced to subsist on NIS 2,500 (approximately $625) a month. "I often go to the city and see children having ice cream," she said. "I so wish I could have ice cream, to lick a popsicle," she told the interviewer, but she simply can't afford it.
An Israeli woman named Michal Atlas saw the segment and decided to do something about it. She contacted numerous companies, but none of them would help. Then she contacted Aldo, an Israeli chain of ice cream shops, and they responded immediately, promising to treat Ruth to ice cream. "Today," Michal wrote on Facebook a few weeks ago, "the chain manager called me from Ruth's house to tell me he'd brought Ruth ice cream and that she would receive a delivery once a week from now on."
The caption on the attached photo reads, "Dear Ruth, you will never go wanting for ice cream again. :) At your service, Aldo."
There's a lot of work to be done and many more problems to be solved, but Aldo's kind gesture is a step toward easing the heavy burden carried by Israel's most vulnerable citizens.
An Israeli woman named Michal Atlas saw the segment and decided to do something about it. She contacted numerous companies, but none of them would help. Then she contacted Aldo, an Israeli chain of ice cream shops, and they responded immediately, promising to treat Ruth to ice cream. "Today," Michal wrote on Facebook a few weeks ago, "the chain manager called me from Ruth's house to tell me he'd brought Ruth ice cream and that she would receive a delivery once a week from now on."
The caption on the attached photo reads, "Dear Ruth, you will never go wanting for ice cream again. :) At your service, Aldo."
There's a lot of work to be done and many more problems to be solved, but Aldo's kind gesture is a step toward easing the heavy burden carried by Israel's most vulnerable citizens.
Saturday, 28 July 2012
Thursday, 26 July 2012
Confessions of a Jewish Jihadi
This was inspired by Shiraz Maher's post here.
God I used to hate England, I hated England with a burning, furious rage, I hated the politicians and the posh way that they spoke, I hated the country and I hated everyone in it.
The only people I liked were the Jews and that was because I didn't regard them...us, as English at all.
I used to think that when I died and came before my creator he wouldn't be in the least concerned with where I happened to be born, he would however care that I was a Jew.
I felt alone, I felt utterly apart from and outside of society as a Jewish boy growing to be a man.
I had no idea what class I was in and couldn't figure out how to find out. I didn't think Jews in England could really be in one class or another. I felt that it was just another part of British society that was denied to us.
I always wanted to be in the military but not for a fleeting second did I consider serving in the disgustingly anti-Semitic (in my mind) British army. Amongst other things the idea of having a cross pinned to me for doing something good revolted me.
Whenever it was time to sing the national anthem I mumbled along with everyone else but inside I was seething with rage. How dare they make me sing this song, saying that some bitch was born to reign over me! No one was born to reign over me!
There were always a good few Jews at the schools I went to and they were the only ones who I was ever really friendly with and slowly I stopped being friendly with a lot of them too.
I mentioned the politicians at the very beginning but it was the Jew politicians I hated the most. The Jewish MPs who sold their people out to live in the realm of power, who married out of their faith and used their Jewish roots to attack me and mine...and their own (in my mind). I learned about the convert Disraeli and his more famous son and I decided that the Disraeli factor was still in existence. "You are different and we'll have you close but we'll never bring you inside".
I knew a Jew who had gone to Eton, he wasn't like me though, he had become one of 'them'. The bastion of Britishness, stiff upper lip, shirt and tie and polished shoes and a "ya" instead of a "yeah"...schmuck!
I could literally feel the invisible eyes staring at me as I walked to synagogue in my suit on the 2 festivals a year that every Jew in London seemed to be in Synagogue, I felt like an alien in my own city.
My family had been in London longer than anyone alive could remember and I still wasn't a part of British society, I was still on the outside looking in and I hated it. The feelings may have been contradictory but they were real enough.
Damn I was angry, I was so angry and resentful and frustrated, just a ball of fury.
I started at my Jewish youth movement, B'nai Brith Youth Organisation when I was 13 and finished at 18 with a year in Israel. I was angry and frustrated throughout all of those dark, dark, wonderful teenage years but the movement gave me a direction that was away from...well blowing stuff up.
I was harnessed by BBYO, with it's emphasis firmly on education and leadership skills and minimally on Israel and I loved it. I was harnessed and my anger and frustrated energy was put to good use.
But it could have been so different.
It could have been a youth movement with a determination to change the England that I hated so much and I would have jumped into it with both feet, I would have worked around the clock to make it happen.
Had I been a member of a youth movement who taught me how to hate instead of how to learn I would have given them everything for I already hated and was just looking for someone to justify my prejudices.
Instead of inviting people to teach me about Holocaust denial and the history of my people they could have invited people who actually taught me that the Holocaust never happened and that events occurring in the world were doing so as part of a larger plot to keep me down.
They could have told me everything that I wanted to hear. That my feelings of fear were utterly correct and they could have recruited me to take real action in order to bring down the whole of British society and I would have agreed with gusto, with joy and the more dangerous it was the better it would have been.
You see the thing is that I was YOUNG AND ANGRY I'm not sure that all of the PREVENT strategies and de-radicalisation groups that the British tax payer can afford are able to find a cure for that.
Surely at some point people are going to have to admit that there are angry young men out there because some young men just tend to be that way and accept that maybe there isn't anything wrong with British society and just some things that are wrong with a minority of people.
The problem lies not with angry, young Muslims there are enough angry young people out there, for some of us being young and angry go (went) hand in hand. The issue is with a community infrastructure that is set up (or seems to be) to take their young and make them even angrier than their hormones are directing them to be. This can't and from what Shiraz was saying no longer seems to be being glossed over.
I appreciate that it is difficult to preach to an Imam about Islam but if the Al Awlaki's of the world are to be beaten it is the youth movements and outlook of certain community bodies, usually foreign funded, that need to be taken down rather than focussing on some general inability of Muslims to 'feel British' no one really feels British in this crazy world, especially not when they're young and filled with hormones.
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
Sunday, 22 July 2012
Thursday, 19 July 2012
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
I am a Racist
It's not racism that I have a problem with. I think that somewhere deep inside, everyone of us is racist.
Each one of us feels the temptation to throw blame for something at an easy target, to shut the brain off and just believe that it's all the fault of the blacks or the Arabs or the Jews or the Asians or the rich people or the poor or whoever your own pet hate happens to be.
I am sure that what we now call racism emanated from something that was set deep inside as an alarm to a caveman to fear something that was new and unrecognisable, be it animal, vegetable or mineral.
I have been racist in the past, I have laughed at racist jokes I have uttered racist terms, homophobic ones too for that matter.
Though I always knew that it was wrong.
Racism is the struggle between our instinct as animals and our intellect as the superior species on this planet.
As an animal my instincts tell me to be wary of that which I don't know and is unlike me. As an educated human being my intellect can overcome this instinct with the knowledge that someone's outward appearance or that they don't share my religion or race doesn't define them as a person nor say anything about how they think and feel.
I expect that everyone to a greater or lesser extent feels an instinctive prejudice towards just about everyone else and I would only be surprised to find a person who had genuinely never felt a pang of baseless, animal hatred towards someone else.
What I find really abhorrent is when the instinct defeats the intellect, when the mind of a person is utterly subjugated to the instinct for hatred.
The other day I met a woman to whom I pointed out that a statement she had made about Arabs was simply racist. She looked my straight in the eye and shrugged her shoulders "Yes, it is" she said. There was nothing left to say to her.
Some people defeat their inner racism without much of a struggle at all, others spend their lives fighting with their urge to hate, but, there is nothing so sad as to see a person who has been utterly dominated by their instinct towards baseless hatred.
The person who not only feels racism but whose very intellect has been subjugated towards finding a justification of their hatred, a need to express it and recruit new people into abandoning their own intellect in pursuit of hatred for its own sake.
Ultimately there is no difference between a hatred of Jews and a hatred of Muslims or a hatred of people with blue eyes, it all comes from the same place, that place inside us that longs for easy answers to complicated problems, the need to blame the 'other,' the need for instant solutions.
The people who stand up and promote hatred are never clever, they are in point of fact the opposite of clever. They will invariably posit their views as intellectual but they are in the grip of nothing more than an outmoded animal instinct for survival and it is only by appealing to this same instinct in others that they are able to win new recruits.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Sunday, 8 July 2012
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Images From the Edge of Israel
When you see this as you drive past you know you're in Injun Country!
Guarding at the end of the universe
The eerie night
The forgotten base
Where the houses end the border sits, on the right Israel, on the left Syria
Bunks, snoring, guitar playing and not much else
If there was ever a place that could be haunted...
Officer discussing the security of the base with one of his soldiers
And everything you see below is Syria
Me on my throne
Elad looks down at the clouds after patrol
The mountain at the break of dawn
I love the above photo, my friend Iddo walks towards his father on Har Chermon, his father spent years of his life posted in the same place and the torch has now been passed from one generation to the next.
Preparing to leave...finally
The long road home
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)