Exodus from SA to Israel

Crime, Israel, South-Africa

In June last year we advised South African Jews to go to Israel. Almost a year hence, and who knows how many bodies later, mainstream media have finally caught up:
“Sheldon Cohen was sitting in his car outside a Johannesburg sports stadium last week waiting for his son Noah to finish soccer practice.
Sheldon, 47, was talking to his father, Jack, on his cellphone when three young men ran past and shot him in the neck. Jack, realizing something terrible had happened, sped to the stadium.
The killers, who had moments before tried unsuccessfully to snatch a cellular phone from a woman parked nearby who was also waiting for her son, had seen Sheldon on the phone and thought he was calling the police. So they killed him. Jack arrived shortly after to see his son’s body slumped in his car, with grandson Noah standing watch.
A week earlier, a Jewish man walking to synagogue in Johannesburg was stopped by several men in a passing car. One man got out of the car and demanded that the Jewish man hand over his tallit bag, thinking it contained valuables. The Jew refused, and was shot to death. Searching through his victim’s bag, the attacker found nothing of value to himself and left it on the sidewalk.
According to South African press reports, police recorded 126,000 armed robberies in the 2006-2007 fiscal year. Exactly a decade ago, that figure stood at 70,000.
….of the Jews who leave Johannesburg, about a third go to Australia, and two-thirds to Israel and other places.
Ofer Dahan, the Jewish Agency’s emissary in South Africa, says there has been a dramatic increase in applications for aliya over the past two months.
Dahan says there is a 100-percent increase in interest in aliya from last year, and a 300% increase in those opening aliya files over the past two months. In 2007, 240 South African Jews and former Israelis made aliya, an increase from 143 in 2006 and 98 in 2005. Dahan says his staff are working round the clock, and have even had to hire outside staff to help cope with the demand.”
** 
What the Jerusalem Post reporter failed to tell his readers (we didn’t) was why exactly a move to Israel—ostensibly a spot where homicidal Palestinian suiciders often attack—is so much better than SA, and even parts of the US.
We gave the numbers:
“Israel’s overall death rate from crime is very low; lower than that of the US, which is, overall, about 6 in 100,000. … Remarkably, in 2004, Israel’s death by murder was 3.7 per 100,000 for civilians only; 4.3 when soldiers were included. (“Homicide rates in 2004 in a number of major U.S. cities, including the nation’s capital, exceeded rates of Palestinian fatalities at the hands of Israel’s army in the past year.”)
It shows you, this one-woman band is able to offer better statistics-backed advice to desperate South Africans, who need level-headed advisors, than the mainstream newspapers with all their resources and biases. It’s about knowing what information matters.
Afrikaner non-Jews might want to consider converting. Israel may just be their last resort. The country is hungry for western immigrants, affords a nice life-style, as well as the hot weather Afrikaners so enjoy. Military service will also thrill the typical hardy Afrikaner.
And don’t forget: Israel was perhpas the only good friend the Old, orderly South Africa (warts and all) had:
“One of the most hidden but critical of South Africa’s strategic relationships during the apartheid era was that with Israel, including both the Labor and the Likud governments. Israel officially opposed the apartheid system, but it also opposed broad international sanctions against Pretoria. For strategic reasons, much of the debate in Israeli government circles stressed coordinating ties to Pretoria within the framework of the tripartite relationship among Jerusalem, the United States (Israel’s primary benefactor), and South Africa. Israel was also opposed to international embargoes in general, largely as a consequence of its own vulnerability to UN and other international sanctions.
South Africa and Israel had collaborated on military training, weapons development, and weapons production for years before broad sanctions were imposed in the late 1980s. Military cooperation continued despite the arms embargo and other trade restrictions imposed by the United States and much of Western Europe…”

Update: Those who are new to our ongoing discussion of the New South Africa, and in particular to the treatment emigration from that accursed country has received on BAB, please read “Advice to South Africans Contemplating Emigration,” and “Please Can My Sister Become and Illegal Immigrant.” We also direct welcomed newcomers, and or weary old timers with who’ve forgotten, to our Africa Archive.

Mitt’s Gone; Bill’s Back

Elections 2008, John McCain, Neoconservatism

“It doesn’t take much to sunder a debate about the Republican Party’s inconsequential core. The Rush Limbaugh-led insurrection against John McCain gave the fleeting impression that the movement was on the cusp of such a reckoning. No longer.
 
In close succession, Romney resigned, and McCain wowed the Conservative Political Action Conference. Behind the scenes, Bill Kristol practiced his curtain calls. Kristol is the uncrowned come-back kid—the attractive, affable neoconservative mastermind has backed McCain’s campaign for some time now. Philosophically, Kristol is the king of consistency. Neoconservative all the way. Like McCain. Just as it appeared the neocons were slowly being inched out, they’re back.
 
It’s proving well-nigh impossible to Kill Bill…”

Mitt’s Gone; Bill’s Back” is a particularly hot column, if I say so myself (No one else will; I’m sorry; these here lovely people have, in spades, and they’re worth more to me than mainstream media and publishing.) It was written in one sitting today, after listening to McCain’s CPAC speech. I made my deadline, just.

Feel free to disagree.

Updated: Grammar Tutorial For Malkin

America, English, Human Accomplishment, Judaism & Jews, The West, The Zeitgeist

I know most of you don’t share my apparently anachronistic devotion to syntax and grammar—English, not Spanish. But I couldn’t help sharing with you one of Ms. Malkin’s grammatical infelicity:

“There are a new generation of combat veterans running for office who haven’t made a career of trashing the base.” So Ms. Malkin wrote.

Let me do the schoolmarm’s dues: the subject of the sentence is “a new generation of combat veterans running for office.” It is singular, not plural. Therefore: “There is a new generation of combat veterans running for office that hasn’t made a career of trashing the base.” 

Grammarians: Is it “that” or “which”–that’s my dilemma here.

(I was not particualrly enamored of these tortured sentences.)

Those of you who’re interested in staying faithful to English may appreciate this post: “Conjugate The Verb, Dammit!”
Of course, I always welcome corrections.

Update: Wouldn’t you know it; we got a few letters from the new kind of conservative. Who is he? He is the ultimate social leveler. An egalitarian. He views exceptional abilities as a threat to the banality he feels so comfortable around. He loves that English has been debased and no one is the wiser. Why? It makes him feel good about himself. He considers it the height of meanness for the knowledgeable to impart a lesson to the less knowledgeable. Teaching to him is “elitism.” He is the parent who charges headlong into class if a teacher dares to correct his crappy kid. “What are you doing to little Johnny’s self-esteem,” he’ll bleat. He is the reason good teachers are scarce and kids are as high on themselves as they are pig-ignorant.
Self-esteem, not objective knowledge and standards, is his catechism. Pointing out errors–teaching–hurts feelings, so it must be shunned. “I don’t want to learn, I want to feel good” is his credo. Far better to wallow in ignorance than point out the god-awful error of a seasoned “writer.” (This was not a typo or a spelling error—mere trifles—but a serious grammatical error, one that indicates the writer hasn’t a clue about syntax and grammar.)  He’s the creep who wants to invade every “Aayrab” country–that he considers a proper defense of the West; defending the English language; not so much. (And yes, he still pronounces it Eyeraq instead of Eeraq.)
Russell Kirk, a brilliant writer, would be sick to his stomach on reading what passes for an op-ed these days (to say nothing of what passes for books).
Do me a favor; go slum it elsewhere.

Update # II: An example of this despicable mindset: a reader writes, on the one hand, that my “abilities as a writer…are exquisite.” This is a good thing, right? Not to the “Idiocracy“. He quickly qualifies that this skill I have, which I’ve honed with is evidence not of passion, hard work and wicked self-scrutiny (the last column was written in one sitting), but of a “snippy or smug, uppity aura.” Get it? If you can use the language to convey so much, as I do, you’re not to be praised or appreciated, but picked upon.
Shall I begin to write like Billo to please this standard bearer? Wait a sec, Ilana; you already know that had you agreed to become a political Ho, your syndication would not have fallen through.
Sing along with me y’all to the tune of “Aquarius” from that great piece of art, “Hair”: this is the age of the idiot, the age of the idiot, the idiot…

(Another reason to love Malkin: she made internment chic again.)

Update # I: NEOCONS MAD ABOUT MCCAIN

Elections 2008, Neoconservatism

The “Fairness Doctrine” is a wicked, illiberal effort to limit speech—a no-brainer for principled individuals on both the left and the right. Yet Michael Medved attempts here to frame McCain’s apparent opposition to this FCC instrument as a sign of his man McCain’s principled conservatism. This is indeed a very poor argument, as even bad liberals will—and have—reject such abuse of power.
More material, Medved, whose ideological trajectory has taken him from the left to the neoconservative left, is mad about McCain. Need I say more?
In the dust-up between Talk radio and the Republican Party establishment, I’m beginning to detect a trend: The neoconservative whey is separating from the conservative curd. What remains is not the best concoction, but it’s an improvement. McCain is the curdling bacteria.
 
McCain can run but cannot hide from the pollution he has dropped along his political path:
* McCain-Kennedy illegal-alien amnesty bill
* McCain’s opposition to a defensive, passive barrier on the border with Mexico
* McCain’s vote for radical lefties Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court
* McCain’s collusion with 7 Democrats and other bottom-feeding Republicans to sabotage conservative SC nominee
* McCain-Feingold: self-explanatory
* McCain’s 100 year-war in Iraq, and the promise of more wars
* McCain’s opposition to tax cuts—twice
* McCain-Lieberman’s legislation of Al Gore’s Malthusian hatred of humanity and progress, including to reject drilling in Alaska
 
If I’ve forgotten anything, please remind me and BAB readers.
posted by Ilana Mercer on 02.05.08 @ 8:19 pm

Update # I (Feb. 6): As usual, BAB readers and posters have filled in the blanks, pointing out by way of examples that McCain is guilty of major philosophical infractions:

* He puts “patriotism,” by which he means allegiance to the state, ahead of the thing that makes the world go around, profit. The last he maligns, which show an utter lack of grasp of the natural laws of human action.
* He departed from conservatives and sided with Democrat neocons in prosecuting the one war conservatives opposed: the war on Serbia. Lesson: McCain loves war so dearly, he’ll cross party lines in the off chance his pepes are not behind the war du jour.
* We’re waiting confirmation (URL anyone?), but it seems that McCain didn’t miss out on the biggest business shakedown in history—the prosecution of cigarette manufacturers under the “scientific” guise that free will is null and void and that smokers believed they were inhaling water vapor.
* I’m not sure what the “Keating Affair was about, but I see in the URL provided hereunder that McCain likes to move in packs of Democrats.