The Commentator - The real Rachel Corries

Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, was a 23 year old woman run over by an Israeli D9 bulldozer on the 13^th of March 2003 in Gaza.

She was killed after a standoff with the IDF that lasted several hours; the D9 bulldozer she was standing in front of ran her over and killed her while she attempted to use her body to prevent it from moving forward. She was wearing a high visibility jacket and standing on a mound of mud. This occurred in an area that saw Israeli troops regularly come under fire and killed...

Click the link to read more.
The Commentator - The real Rachel Corries:

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Tel Aviv Beach

Marc Goldberg (marc_goldberg) on about.me

Marc Goldberg (marc_goldberg) on about.me:

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The Long Road to Success

No one has ever given me anything and I like it that way.

The world of the writer isn't easy, I make my own money doing something else, all the while fighting with myself after getting home from a long day's work to decide whether to write a few hundred words or to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and be able to wake up the next day fresh for whatever it is that the office holds for me. Inevitably the instinct to write more is overpowering.

I am not writing stories right now and I'm not writing my book (dammit why aren't I writing my book!!!!) I am writing commentary on the day's events, commentary that is forgotten as quickly as the day upon which I comment. Indeed I wonder to myself what it is, this fire within me, this voice within my mind that continually shouts at me, screaming at me that not enough people have read my words, that I have not tried hard enough, or written enough, or sacrificed enough in persuance of a goal I barely understand and yet, here I am writing even more, when I know that I should be asleep in preparation for the next day.

Not only did no one ever say that the path to fame and glory was easy they also never said that the prefferred method for arriving there at all was via the written word.

I am 33 years old and I lust for literary power, though I love the fact that I am still searching for it, I hold back from giving my all in appreciation of the struggle. Marc Goldberg will never...ever be able to say that he was plucked from obscurity because no one with the power to do so ever plucked me from anything.

I have had to fight for even the most obscure of honours.

I am now right in the middle of the list of the popular bloggers on the Times of Israel, the currently preferred place to blog your heart out in the holy land. Usually I am not even entitled to this slender honour, usually I am a bottom feeder, that is to say that I am usually on the list somewhere in between the very bottom and a couple of names worth of redemption beyond.

I am in limbo in that place.

I don't pretend that I am an easy person to work with, but then why should I be? I give up that which is most important to me for nothing, asking in return only recognition. But recognition is hard to define and even harder to inspire.

For the moment all I am is Marc Goldberg, blogger at Marcs Words, I guess we'll see where it is possible to go from here.

If the spelling is bad or if the entire blog makes no sense then I have no sympathy for I am a little drunk and on my way to getting more so and I have no interest in how it looks...no one ever gave me a break and I don't want anyone to, I'll make it on my own...despite myself.

The Place For Israel News

This is the site that I use to get all my Israel info in English direct from the Iraeli Press.

Jerusalem Online is a translation of Channel 2 especially for the diaspora world

Go to JERUSALEM ONLINE for all the latest Israel news

Immodest 6 Year Olds?

The latest necessity for 6 year old Jewish girls is apparently modest dress, at least according to state funded modern orthodox schools. I’m not quite sure who it is that would be offended by the sight of a 6 year old wearing a T shirt but clearly someone was offended enough to ensure that it never happens on their watch. Does this mean that up until now 6 year old girls at state funded orthodox schools have been dressing immodestly?

I can’t get over this concept of modest dress for a 6 year old. Exactly what is it about a 6 year old girl going to school in ‘regular’ clothes that is immodest? Can someone please step in and explain to a normal person why it is absolutely essential for certain men to be kept away from 50% of the population for fear that they might…I don’t know, think a sexual thought? Is that the fear that has forced these little girls to wear different clothing to other little girls?

But that’s not all…

The revelation that 6 year old girls have been dressing immodestly to school since 1948 comes in the wake of 4 women being arrested at the Kotel for daring to put on tallit. Those EVIL women I am sure that they are suffering at the hands of the police for their evil crime and over the moon that the boys in blue were able to spend their time dealing with this crime instead of doing something, you know, useful!

These 2 incidents serve to hi-light a more general tension which is sweeping through the country right now, especially over what compromise is to replace the now defunct Tal Law. In a country that has seen rioting in Bet Shemesh between Ultra Orthodox and well…regular orthodox Jews it is certainly fair to say that there isn’t a week that goes by without some new ugliness that comes from an extreme interpretation of religion and I resent it!

Let me be clear. the women of the wall were not novices who innocently put on tallit at the Kotel, I believe that they knew exactly what they were doing when they put on these ‘forbidden garments’ and as a consequence of their actions they were arrested and I salute them for it. Yet even as I salute them I am still in a state of shock that we have gotten to the point where we are so petrified of rioting at the hands of anti Zionist, non tax paying, draft dodging nutters that we are actually arresting women for wearing tallit. Or is there another reason? Please anyone tell me that there is a really good reason that these women needed to be arrested for their actions, please tell me what they did that was soo bad!

These 4 women have hi-lighted the extent to which we, the people of Israel, have allowed our religion to get so out of hand. Perhaps religion and God are perfect but men (and women) certainly aren’t. As the interpretation of Jewish law becomes stricter and stricter so the most nonsensical elements have seeped into the laws of the state. The arrests of these brave women should serve as (yet another) wake up call to all of us. But of course they won’t.

We live in a world where Gay rights are top of the agenda but in a country where 20,000 citizens feel the need to leave the country every year in order to avoid the stranglehold that the rabbinate has over this fundamental right that should be open to every Israeli citizen. A friend of mine at work had to get married in Eastern Europe because her husband was declared to be a non Jew (his service in Paratroopers was of course irrelevant), she is by no means the only one to be made to feel outcast in her own country by a rabbinate that has neither the wit nor the inclination to understand that every meeting it has with secular Israelis pushes them further and further away from Judaism.

The only people who can do anything about this are our politicians and they seem to be the most insistent that there is no problem at all. There was a brief moment of hope when Kadima entered into the government. For a while there it looked like we might find real solutions to real problems but naturally that collapsed amongst petty squabbling.

While the biggest parties in the Knesset argue with one another it is the smaller special interest parties who reap the rewards. Now is the time for real leadership yet none is forthcoming. It’s wonderful that Bibi prefaces every speech he makes with words about Iran but perhaps he should look a little closer to home for there are domestic enemies gaining in strength on his watch.

It’s about time someone stood up for sanity, risked the taking the bottle from the baby and actually made some moves towards laying down the law and stopping the onward march of persecution at the hands of religious numpties before Israel becomes Pakistan!

Office of Smiles

It's amazing who you meet when roaming around in Tel Aviv, just today I bumped into an official campaigner for a law to enforce smiling.

This man was just sitting there in the sweltering heat smiling at everyone who walked past while playing klezmer music from the speaker under his seat. The only thing he asked (after asking me to smile) was that I pass my smile on.

Anyone lucky to encounter this smiling lobbyist got a free sticker!

Of course not everyone was that into it...

How refreshing to meet someone who is prepared to give of their time for something as simple as a smile on someone's face.

So here I am playing the smiles forward!!!

Living in Gotham City

The latest and final instalment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy left me breathless. The action, the excitement, the twists and turns of the plot were all so intense that I barely noticed the fact that the air conditioning in the cinema stopped working half way through the screening.

Almost 3 hours of watching Batman and his alter ego Bruce Wayne fight and win against both physical and psychological demons left me wondering whether it would be worth living in Gotham City just to see the man drive the Batmobile and fly the Bat thingamabob around in a constant quest to beat up but absolutely not kill the villains.

Mind you the fact that you need someone like Batman to protect you means that you must have some pretty dodgy enemies, the kind of enemies who have no qualms about blowing up a hospital or nuking you and that's without even delving into the dozens or even hundreds of innocent people who get killed along the way. I mean it isn't going to be much consolation to the dead and their families when Batman eventually saves the city now is it?

So no, given the choice between a Gotham City protected by Batman or say...Miami Florida protected by the city's finest boys in blue I think I would have to go with the latter as a place to live. But then when I came to that conclusion I had to ask myself what on earth I was doing living here in Israel where we have the double shocker of both terrorist attacks and a Bibi rather than a Batman to watch over us.

I mean at least the Joker and Bane have some charisma, perhaps even some class. Hassan Nasrallah certainly can't compare to those kings of corruption and villainy and don't even get me started on evil mastermind lightweights like Ismail Haniyeh, he didn't even have the balls to fight when Israel moved into his turf in 2006 preferring to hide out in a bunker! This is an unheard of tactic amongst the nasties of Gotham all of whom actually engaged Batman in combat close up...and lost, hmmm perhaps what the real villains lack in charisma they make up for in survival instinct.

Anyway...

Don't worry, I'm not about to go off on one about all of the amazing things that Israel has to offer, plenty of my fellow bloggers have already done that.

What I will say is that living here in sunny, humid Israel I am part of the ongoing saga, part of the story that others can only talk about with wondrous emotion. Living in Israel puts me at the centre of the universe the place that everyone is watching from afar with bated breath, waiting to see what will happen next.

There is something...special about living in a place that is so hotly contested, just by being an Israeli I am making a statement, I am telling the real life Jokers of the world, the Nasrallah's and their ilk, that they have no hold over me, that their scare tactics are all to no avail.

Here in Israel is where we all make our own personal stand against the evils of this world, where just like Bruce Wayne, we fight our enemies both real and psychological, where we put on a uniform, pick up a rifle and move towards the line drawn by our forefathers. The line in the sand drawn by those very same forefathers who screamed to the whole world "we're right here come and get us if you dare!" And then overcame all of their previous hardships to bring us all back from the ashes of Europe.

We came and we settled and we built this thriving nation in the face of, in spite of and in direct response to the kind of terror suffered by the citizens of Gotham. Now, living here, I am a part of the story, an actor in a epic that has been going on for as long as civilisation itself and I will play my part in full.

Israel CAN Live With an Iranian Bomb | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

Israel CAN Live With an Iranian Bomb | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel:

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The Facebook Experiment

I have recently decided to dramatically boost my social media presence both on Facebook and on Twitter.

To this end one of the things I have done is create a Facebook Page where I post both my blog posts from here as well as those from my Times of Israel blog. I also post links to stuff that I find interesting at any given time, the vast majority of which relates to Israel and the Middle East.

At the time of writing this piece I currently have 88 'likes' for the page.

I have decided to take the plunge and invest in raising my profile by allocating £100 for a Facebook advert that will target people who are "connected" to the Marc's Words page.

A small advert will appear on the homepage of people in the United States and Israel with a picture of me and the phrase "like Marc's Words" (or something to that effect).

My objectives are to drive traffic to my blogs and thereby raise my profile.

That means that people simply clicking 'like' on the page isn't going to be enough. They have to appreciate the content enough to both click through to the articles and read them and also to share them with their friends in order for the number of people reading my pieces to grow.

The way that Facebook have set up their advertising section is pretty complex and though it makes paying for the ads easy enough they make it quite hard for someone to know exactly what it is that they are buying.

For example, my £100 campaign was set (by me) to run for 10 days and yet has automatically set itself to run for a month. Facebook say that they will charge me at the rate of 40p per click but they don't say if this means that they are charging me per person who views my page or per person who clicks 'like' on my page or if they charge me for both.

Now I don't mind that the campaign runs for a month instead of 10 days as long as my £100 limit is kept to, if it isn't and the campaign runs for a whole month I am going to be seriously out of pocket. In that respect I would have more peace of mind if Facebook had taken the £100 now, not put any time limit on the campaign and just let it run until the 240 people who I have paid for have 'liked' my page.

Another annoying thing is that once I set the ball rolling I realised that I wanted to add the UK to Israel and the United States as a country in which my ads would be shown but if I can do this it is painfully unclear how.

Time will tell if this initial investment will amount to anything, if I have to continually advertise for people to click like then the whole thing is pointless, the idea is to publicise the page to the right people in order to give the thing a boost at the beginning and then let it run on its own steam.

Hopefully things will work out fine but I am feeling a little sceptical at the moment...I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime get yourself down to my page and click 'like'!

German rower leaves London after reported ties to neo-Nazis surface | Fourth-Place Medal - Yahoo! Sports

German rower leaves London after reported ties to neo-Nazis surface | Fourth-Place Medal - Yahoo! Sports: "Nadja Drygalla, a German rower who already competed at the Olympics, is on her way home from London a bit earlier than she intended. Drygalla decided to leave the Games after reports surfaced that she is connected to a neo-Nazi group in Germany."

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Inside Anti-Semitic Egypt | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

Inside Anti-Semitic Egypt | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel:

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