Category Archives: Israel

Immigrants Who Accept Judaism

IMMIGRATION, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Technology

Four minutes and 40 seconds into this rather good video about Israeli and Jewish innovation, an entrepreneur speaks up for the contribution of immigrants who come to Israel. The camera pans out to show North African Jews lovingly carrying the Torah and Japanese Jews deep in prayer. To see Japanese Jews praying at the Wailing Wall is certainly moving. Who would have imagined!


But the distinctly American narrator thinks his Jewish viewers are dumb not to notice that all Israel’s diverse-looking immigrants are wearing kippot (yarmulkes), praying to the same G-d, and holding the same ancient Scriptures close to their hearts.

Do you think this cultural and religious cohesion might have something to do with these immigrants’ love of country and joy of assimilation? Indeed, Israel: Don’t give us the diversity crap: you welcome Jews and Jews only to the Jewish State.

Personally, I wish Israelis would assemble a book of Israeli jokes:

Here’s what a Jewish mother says to a Jewish child aged 7, to spur him to better things:

“After all I’ve done for you, is asking for one Nobel Prize really too much?”

Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap

America, History, Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Terrorism

“Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

A DAY IN THE LIFE. The Bennett family’s day began with a prayer at “the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.” It ended in the murder of the family’s father, stabbed to death in the Old City as he attempted to save wife and son from the same fate. A rabbi who rushed to the rescue was knifed to death, too. Twenty-two-year-old Odel Bennett found herself running for her life, a blade in her shoulder, as Palestinian onlookers jeered and spat in her direction.

As widow Odel Bennett convalesced with her toddler at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, another Jewish woman (an elderly Iraqi) was recovering at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital from gun and knife wounds similarly inflicted. Her husband lay in the morgue. That couple’s day started on a “Jerusalem city bus, when two Palestinians attacked with knives and a gun,” reported National Public Radio.

Surveillance camera footage uploaded to the Internet show numerous Palestinian-on-Jew attacks in real time. Waiting at a bus stop, these Arabs are wont to turn and plunge a knife into a Jewish neighbor’s back, again and again and again.

Religious imprimatur for the current wave of attacks on Israelis comes from the highest authority in the Palestinian Authority and beyond. In mosques across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, clerics deliver sermons brandishing scimitars, inciting the faithful to “form stabbing squads and cut the Jews into body parts.”

Mosques enjoy the support of the Palestinian family, school and authority.

UNIDIRECTIONAL VIOLENCE. This time last year—and decades prior—Muslims from East Jerusalem raided a synagogue, killing five Israelis.

These unidirectional assaults on Jews are nearly as old as the Tomb of our Patriarch Joseph. Oops: The ancient Nablus shrine was torched, the other day, by Muhammadan peaceniks, acting à la ISIS (in Syria and Iraq). …

… Read the rest. “Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

Wolf Blitzer Goes Berserk Over Armed Israeli Civilians

GUNS, Individual Rights, Israel

An interview about the unrest in Israel quickly devolved into a protest by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at the encouragement of legal guns on Israeli streets. Blitzer went berserk, today, as Israeli Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld expressed enthusiasm for the actions taken by the Israeli Public Service Minister, in approving steps that would make it easier for Israeli civilians to obtain gun permits.

Apparently, the Israeli authorities are keen on galvanizing an armed citizenry to help in its own defense.

I paraphrase what this nice young man said:

“Absolutely, there is no problem with that issue whatsoever.” The more the better. Let’s not forget that a week ago a Palestinian woman stabbed an Israeli man in the back of his neck in the Old City. He promptly pulled out his pistol and almost dispatched the cow.

It is effective. Every Israeli has gone through years of IDF training. People who have pistols and permits should walk around the streets with their weapons. There is no problem with that; it’s an important step in the public safety equation.

[SNIP]

Doing what’ll benefit your people? What’s next? Protecting your borders? Oh, Israel already does that.

Watch:

DRUDGE’S Source On Israel & Its Capital, United Yerushalayim

Christianity, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media

DRUDGE can be overprotective in covering Israel. Today, however, the mighty Matt D. has done the opposite. The link provided on The Drudge Report, Sunday 10/11, is to a report by one Mr. Sakher Abou El Oun of Yahoo! And it is puzzling.

The Drudge headline:
“Unrest worsens as death toll rises, attack hits Jerusalem…”

Abou El Oun’s “reporting” is pockmarked with a lot of adjectives pointing toward his biases, as well as some linguistic lunacy pointing to the same thing (bias):

* “Fourteen stabbing attacks have targeted Jews since October 3, when a Palestinian murdered two Israelis in east Jerusalem’s Old City. [“Stabbing attacks” don’t “target”; men with murder on their minds do that. Moreover, if there were 14 attacks, what was the fate of the other victims? Or were the two slain Jews attacked 14 times? … Unless I don’t get this joker’s idea of a news report.]

* An Israeli husband and wife, shot dead in front of their children, are referred to as “a Jewish settler couple.”

AND:

* “… violent protests have since shaken the occupied territory as well as annexed east Jerusalem.” [We call it united Yerushalayim. An unbiased reporter would have dropped the adjectives and written “east Jerusalem.”]

“Hamas warns against ‘foolishness’…” is another Yahoo! headline on Drudge in which these terms stick out like a Muslim woman in nosebag garb:

* “… the Jewish state” [It’s Israel. However, maybe if we call America The Christian State, we’d get to keep her identity.]

* “… annexed east Jerusalem” [It’s United Yerushalayim to a good many peaceful people who know their history and want to preserve the Holy City for all peaceful visitors and inhabitants.]

Come to think of it, America’s news reporting is fast approximating the expansive style of Arabia, minus the literary beauty of “Arabian Nights.”

To my family and to the family at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies: Stay safe.