Category Archives: Israel

Update III: Why No One Robs A 7-11 In Israel:

Feminism, Gender, GUNS, Individual Rights, Israel, Military

The adorable, armed girls of Israel (via Walter Block). (I’d be careful not to shortchange the redhead.)

Clearly, mowing down Israeli soldiers on and off base is not as easy as it is stateside. When a Jihadi committed fratricide last year at Fort Hood, murdering 13 people and maiming 31, Lieutenant General Robert W. Cone, commander of III Corps at that based, boasted: “We don’t carry weapons here, this is our home.”

Invert that and you’ll arrive at my philosophy, and that of most patriots.

Be it on the border or on base, the American treason class proves over and over again that it hates its own.

As hateful as they are to some of Israel’s enemies, Israeli politicians (there is no such thing as a Jerusalem Elite) simply don’t hate their own as much as Washington hates its underlings.

Update I (Feb. 15): Unlike the US Army—and contrary to the utter ignoramuses who’ve called Israel a “bristling Sparta” without ever having visited there—Israelis society, its armed forces especially, is very informal. There is no jumping to attention every second; uniforms are worse than casual (positively disheveled, I’d say), etc. Women—again, unlike our crazy PC military—don’t go into combat. They serve in auxiliary roles, as they should. This does not mean they are unable to drop a Jihadi.

Update II (Feb. 16): Van Wijk makes an astute comment. These Israeli girls carry rifles as naturally as other women carry handbags or pooches, or adopted, exotic ankle biters. That’s precisely what’s so good about the image.

Update III: “Hottie with Krinkov Uses Live Ammo On Attacker.” This is an ad, yes? Which means it’s not real, right? So in a phony universe, where everything comes alive provided it’s on TV or YouTube, a scantily clad bimbo shooting off a machine gun—in real-life probably a lefty who opposes what she’s doings—this is better than ordinary kids buying candy, guns strung across their shoulders?

Phony, stylized illusion (model filmed shooting a nice toy) is preferred over natural, organic behavior (Israeli lasses)?

I give up. Or perhaps the reader was just joking.

The attempts to demote the Israeli youngsters, a representative sample of tens of thousands of such kids in that country, is pathetic.

As reader Alan Butler notes, “the 2nd lady on the right has a 30 round magazine in her belt. Only seconds away from lock and load!!!”

The girls’ outfits indicate to me that they are undergoing basic training, which mean these sweet things are all of 18! Babies.

Shame on their detractors. Most of you, in secret, wish you had such daughters.

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Security With Intelligence

Affirmative Action, Government, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Israel, Terrorism

Inadvertently—and in a characteristically witty way—Isaac Yeffet seems to second my diagnosis that, “Homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America.”

The multi-talented Yeffet is the former security director of Israel’s airliner, El Al, “pioneer in counter-terrorism,” and entrepreneur.

Yeffet attempted to explain the concept of utilizing intelligence, as in brain power, to Huckabee. (Please someone locate and post that YouTube), but Heehaw Huck kept insisting on blaming the system.

Updated: The Golem* Goldstone Goes To Gaza

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Just War, Law, Palestinian Authority, South-Africa, UN

From my new WND column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza”:

“When introducing Judge Goldstone, Fareed Zakaria described the judge as having made his name, among other acts of greatness, in pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid in his home country of South Africa.

Ostracized for his convictions, this writer’s father – Rabbi Ben Isaacson – was a leading anti-apartheid activist. Goldstone had no such history of protest, father assures me. The roaming judge attached himself like a limpet mine to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

Goldstone’s Wiki biography corroborates father’s recollection. The judge joined the cause du jour in ‘the latter years of apartheid in South Africa.’ Goldstone’s “courageous” judicial decisions in the cause of freedom, moreover, comported with what South Africa’s Western system of Dutch-Roman law provided – a system currently being replaced, by the African National Congress, with a blend of tribal and totalitarian laws.

To this expatriate South African, the most anodyne assertion Goldstone made to zombie Zakaria was this one…”

Read the complete column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Jan. 9): A few readers, some via my WND mail box, have told me I’ve erred as far as the meaning of Golem goes. I’m relatively confident that my commonplace use of the term is accurate (if perhaps not true to the original meaning), so I’ve left it. Usually, I hurry to correct blatant errors.

So why am I comfortable with the column’s usage?

I’m an ex-Israeli. My first language is Hebrew. Although I once spoke and wrote a sharp Hebrew (much like my English), slang has since (as in the US and the UK) changed older, popular usage. As old-timers like myself are in the habit of saying, no one speaks Yerushalmic Hebrew on the news any longer as the wonderful Haim Yavin used to. Yavin was the most elegant anchorman in looks and language.

Back to the topic. “Golem” in popular, modern usage is a derogatory term. Call an Israeli of my age group (still way younger than Yavin, of course) a Golem, and, while you’ve not wounded him mortally, you have, in good humor, berated him.