A brief coda to this post. If the opinion polls are anything to go by then Dilma Rousseff will today be elected President of Brazil. Her father was born in the Bulgarian city of Gabrovo. Gabi Ashkenazi is the 19th Chief of Staff of the IDF. His father was also born in Bulgaria, just 90 kilometers south of Gabrovo in the city of Plovdiv.
Archive for October, 2010
When waged with appropriate means to achieve realistic ends, the answer is, “It’s a really effective means of imposing your will on the enemy”. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar. He classifies those who continue to fire rockets at Israel as rebels and continues:
Over at The Tablet and in the context of the attempt to bomb synagogues in Chicago Lee Smith writes:
Terror, violence, and bloodshed against Jews now come pre-packaged with a sanctimonious justification. It’s not seen as crazy, sick, irrational violence. It’s political violence. Terrorist violence is irrational and incomprehensible-unless the victims are Jewish. Why do terrorists bomb America, bomb London, bomb Madrid, bomb Casablanca, burn Mumbai? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. With the Jews, well, there’s the occupation. There’s Israel. There’s America’s support for Israel. Terrorism may be abhorrent, but when it comes to the Jews the terrorists themselves have a lot to be angry about. Accordingly, we’re supposed to regard these acts with both horror and reason at the same time-”sure, it’s not pretty, but we get it.” In other words, terror against Jews may produce violence and bloodshed, but not moral revulsion.
Huffington Post blogger MJ Rosenberg has a strange and unhealthy obsession with the American Jewish Committee. Twice in the past week, Rosenberg has used his column to accuse AJC of attempting to derail President Obama and the Democrats’ chances in this Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Says Rosenberg:
“It really says something when a mainstream multi-issue organization like the American Jewish Committee issues a poll just three weeks before the upcoming election that seems designed to politically damage the president.”
Andrew Whitley is an UNRWA official who, at a conference last week, dared to suggest that the notion of Palestinians exercising the “right of return” is a “cruel illusion.” More on this in my latest article for The Huffington Post.
1. In response to my post about Ireland’s law of return, a reader who signs himself “lapsedmethodist” asks,
Who would the potential Irish citizen be displacing upon his/her return to Ireland should he/she avail of that option?
I think that this question reflects a view of history that plagues much commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those who hold it see the Zionist enterprise as unjust from the outset because it sought and seeks to persuade a great number of people to move somewhere else, to a place where people who are not part of that enterprise already live.
Continue reading ‘The Philosophy Of History Of Anti-Zionism’
This is a guest post by Joshua Siegel of AJC
Turkish-Israeli relations have fallen to their lowest point in the months following the flotilla dispatched to Gaza by the pro-Hamas Islamist charity IHH. Joint military exercises have been canceled, Israeli tourism to Turkey has dropped by 90 per cent and Turkish officials have threatened “irreparable consequences” to relations between the two countries. Into this breach has stepped Greece.
This article is crossposted from the website of the Quebec-Israel Committee.
The Boycott-Israel conference that ended Sunday in Montreal was supposed to show the growing momentum for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. With barely 100 activists attending the closing plenary Sunday afternoon at UQAM, it is clear that the BDS movement has no noticeable traction or support in Quebec.
Continue reading ‘Crushing Defeat for BDS conference in Montreal’
Here’s a new short film which I wrote and produced, pinpointing a very simple reason why the Middle East peace process has failed to yield results.
1. In a discussion over at Engage in which he offers arguments in support of a boycott of Israel and only Israel, Ran Greenstein says,
Third, any diminishing of the capacity of the Israeli state to continue with its exclusionary and abusive practices is a blow against anti-semitism, because it relieves Jews of the burden of having to pay a price for Israeli policies they do not support and have nothing to do with them.
Continue reading ‘Gurvitz-Goldman, Greenstein And Good Jews’
Israel’s Law of Return is sometimes held to be racist because it confers the right to citizenship on Jews born outside Israel who may have had no previous connection with it. In posts on this blog I’ve often made the counterargument that many countries offer privileges to members of their diaspora when it comes to obtaining citizenship and in this regard I’ve pointed to the example of Ireland, of which I myself am a citizen, and stated that having just one Irish grandparent entitles any good-for-nothing from Buenos Aires or Brooklyn to an Irish passport.
The Basque terrorist group ETA announced a ceasefire at the beginning of September and, as I described here, the response from the Spanish government was to tell the nationalist gunslingers where they could shove it.
This article by Dan Yurman is reposted with permission from the ANS Nuclear Café, where it was originally published on October 20, 2010.
In July 2010 a software worm, which is malevolent computer code, appeared on the radar screen of cyber security firms when it was found to be targeting computers in Iran and several other countries running industrial control systems.
Continue reading ‘As The Worm Turns ~ Malevolent Software Hits Iran’
El País is a leading liberal and progressive newspaper in the Spanish, Roman Catholic and Democratic Kingdom of Spain. It has long campaigned to put an end to Jewish self-determination and today’s contribution to that campaign comes in the form of an op-ed from M. Á. Bastenier, one of its most senior journalists.
Continue reading ‘The Latest From The Spanish, Roman Catholic And Democratic Kingdom Of Spain’
Just a line to recommend this conversation between Haim Watzman and his friend Frank (a disciple of Professor Dwight Geist?) in which they compare the state of democracy in Israel and the United States.
Continue reading ‘The Indigent In India And Unemployment In Um al-Fahm’
