After it was discovered Wednesday that thousands of children’s books had been shipped with Israel missing from a map, Scholastic Press CEO Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apologized for the error, saying, “We regret that Israel was wiped off the map. It never should have appeared there in the first place.”More where this came from, by Benji Lovitt.
Not the most overwhelming news item, I agree:
The Palestinian negotiating team has resigned and will not participate in peace talks with the Israelis, a spokesman for the Palestinian mission to the United Nations told CNN Wednesday.I hope that John Kerry, the only man in the world who (allegedly) understands and is able to unravel the complicated knots of local politics, will explain the above in the light of the following (from the same article):
"The team resigned due to the Israeli illegal practices, especially settlement activities," Rabii Hantouli said in an e-mail. "There are efforts to convince them to revert."
The announcement came a day after Israel canceled controversial plans to construct more than 20,000 homes in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank.Interesting, ain't it?
Construction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel made the decision after Netanyahu asked him to reconsider the long-term building plans.
An IDF soldier was killed Wednesday after being stabbed in the neck in a bus in Afula. He was rushed to a hospital in the city but later died of his wounds. Security guards stopped the assailant, Hussein Jawadra, a 16-year-old Palestinian from Jenin who is residing in Israel illegally, and turned him over to security forces. The stabber's two brothers are both held in Israel.And then - army radio interviews Michaella, a young woman who was a passenger on that bus and witnessed the murder.
Finally a working and proven channel of communications is open and available:
Rosen lists her profession as “psychic medium,” and her specialty is communing with the dead, acting as “the bridge between the spiritual and the physical world.”This is, probably, my last chance, at least during the current term, to mend my relationships with some (almost all, practically) of my ancestors who turned their backs on me. I can't go into the sordid details, but several... er... let's call them excesses and misdemeanors of my youth ruined me in the eyes of the progenitors. The usual phone links are not of any help, since the elders are blocking my calls, so Ms Rosen is my only hope.
Rosen says she has a nearly eight-year waiting list for her services.Looks like I'll have to beg for forgiveness in face-to face meetings... too bad.
I didn't even know the details:
According to the Hadith (sayings and practices attributed to Islam's Prophet Muhammad), a Jewish woman in the Jewish town of Khaibar served Muhammad poisoned meat. On his deathbed three years later, Muhammad told his wife Aisha that the pain he was experiencing was caused by the poisoned meat that he was given by the Jews.I always knew that Jewish cuisine could be lethal, but I didn't know that there is an option of a delayed effect like this. It might be interesting to know whether Arafat was sharing a meal with a Jew some three years before he croaked.
From the clip attached to this article:
Having finally read the report, here are a few brief non-technical "blogging" thoughts...
The objective of the report wasn't to determine the cause of death. This report was written to prove that Arafat was killed using a source of Po-210. It was commissioned by Al-Jazeera, which is more than apparent from its content (I am not a fan of good ol' Jazeera, but quite frankly any scientist working for any TV company would make me cringe). Two examples of the blatant bias:
Example 1. It is claimed that although there was elevated concentration of Radon (Rn-222), in Arafat's grave, the quantity wasn't enough to explain even higher concentrations of Polonium 210 (Po-210) and Lead 210 (Pb-210) in some of the samples (the last two radionuclides are formed when radon decays).
Given that radon is a gas, I would expect concentrations to drop significantly as soon as the grave is opened. Po-210 and Pb-210 are not gaseous; they would stay in the soil. I am surprised that the authors of the Swiss report were "surprised" by this particular finding.
Example 2. Lack of the well known symptoms of radiation sickness in the case of Yassir Arafat is quite striking. For example he has not lost any facial hair, he has not had low blood cell counts, etc...
This fact is impossible to ignore, but the report tries to explain it away but claiming that the symptoms were not present because Arafat ingested radioactivity rather than was subjected to external irradiation.
Can I say NONSENSE? The dose is a dose, whether you get it externally, via inhalation or ingestion. That's the whole point of calculating dose. It's basic physics: internal or external gamma, alpha, beta... radiation cause the same effect given that the dose is the same - that's 100 years worth of Radiation Protection science for you. Given a large enough dose, one gets radiation sickness . If one were to assume that Po-210 in the samples came from Arafat he got a whack of a dose, enough to kill an elephant.
If you still don't believe me, have a look at the photos of Arafat and Litvinenko a few days before their respective deaths.
I'm supposed to be upset at the news that Open Zionism is closing? That Peter Beinart is moving on? What a shame. With friends like these, does Zionism and Israel need any more "inside" enemies? I'm not counting the usual suspects of the BDS mob, or Electronic Intifida, etc.
Well, upset appears to be what the writer of The Tablet article expects me to be.
Perhaps it's an exaggerated sense of an American notion of freedom of speech. However, my freedom of speech allows me to other than sorry.
By Brian Goldfarb.
The famous by now quote attributed to Tom Cruise: "making movies is like serving in Afghanistan" is refuted by his team of lawyers. They have a recorded proof of the original that says: "Frankly, the movies I do stink, Taliban does a better job, I swear".
And this is the only Afghanistan related sentence issued by the actor.
This is not an easy task I have undertaken: to commit to a review of an essay by a thinker of that caliber and a writer in whose shadow a battalion of puny bloggers like I could hide unnoticed. The essay A Plague: Contesting Syria, in Context by AJA doesn't require my superlatives indeed. It is lucid, it rolls all the points up to their logical conclusion and (I suggest) parts of it could be taught in many a creative writing course. Still, there were a few disturbing points in it, and this is why I just have to. That besides being Jewish, which means an obligatory "yes, but..." to anything at all.
But at least, it is easy for me to deal with the "topsy turvy" part of that task. It is just that I have decided to start with the end of the article. It could have been a good final paragraph of this post, but knowing how the blog posts are read usually, well, you know... Thus, when AJA says as a conclusion to the essay "...U.S. is to find its way, finally, into the twenty-first century, and out of and beyond empire.", I do have a strong feeling of foreboding reading this. It is not the first time I hear the sentiment from American friends, and it is not the first time I sound off on the subject, but let's be clear: the imperial business is not exactly like being an employee in a benevolent corporation, with full pension plan, golden parachute and lifetime health insurance. In most cases in history when you stop being an empire, you become a province at best - or disappear at worst. Province in the meaning of "a principal administrative division of a country or empire", in other words not fully in the sense of "eat or be eaten", rather "rule or be ruled" More on the subject later.
Context
The first part of the essay, titled "Context" is dedicated to two main subjects: the somewhat overbearing lobbying by the American so called "hawks" for increased spending on military high-tech. The second subject is the peculiar predilection of most US administrations since WW II to support and nurture some of the worst dictatorships in existence. I want to say outright that I have no coherent defense (only an explanation, but it will be a trivial one) for the second subject.
The first issue, that of the generals and the hawks, has at least two aspects, only one of which - the underhanded way of the lobby to prove the necessity for additional expenditures - was of interest to AJA. This aspect, true as it is in AJA's delivery, isn't surprising of course. A technical remark: when quoting the numbers for various Soviet military toys of the period in question, one can never be sure about these numbers, even in retrospect. But in general(no pun intended): what general worth his/her stars will behave differently? Isn't it a part of military culture to cry for more money and for reinforcements? Isn't this behavior historically justified by tightfisted civilian attitude toward all things military?
The second aspect, the one avoided by AJA, has to deal with the other side of the Iron Curtain. In other words, with us, chickens, who were watching the Cold War* from a gray discomfort of our lives under the mummified carcass of communist ideology. The adventures of American military abroad and the "arms race", so much decried and maligned by Western "peaceniks"**, so vehemently protested in antiwar demos in the countries of the "socialist" camp, have been our only hope for the eventual escape from under that carcass. And I shall never get tired of repeating the words of gratitude millions of people incarcerated behind the Iron Curtain owe to the warriors of the Cold War, known and unknown, the American and other soldiers who died in the wars all over the world, including the so controversial Vietnam war. They didn't die for nothing.
And if on the way to freedom of these millions more money than strictly necessary was spent - I couldn't care less, to be frank.
As for the Iraq war: yours truly was against it at the time for a simple enough reason: people who commanded the invasion, which was truly a work of inspiration and meticulous planning as far as military part of it was concerned, didn't have a smidgen of an idea what to do with the hot potato, which was post-war Iraq. Still don't, which sad fact costs so many lives and will continue to do so for a long time.
(*) I am painfully aware of the tendency of the younger generation to dismiss the Cold War as a figment of military-industrial complex imagination, artificially created and kept alive for the sake of increased investment into the said complex. For us, though, the Cold War was something entirely different.
(**) Good part of these inspired and financed by the Soviets, as we know today.
Contest
And thus we come to the center of the essay: the situation in Syria and the "whispering of shoulder sprites" - the ostensibly anti-war left, "slack and malign anti-imperial apologists for authoritarianism and illiberalism" and the militant "superpower imperialists". To start with, let's dispense with the identification of the sprites. I must say that AJA, in my opinion, is mistaken in equaling the sprites that were active during the Cold War with those he criticizes today. At least when blaming the right wing "superpower imperialists" in calling for US intervention in Syria. The polls clearly show that overwhelming majority of Americans are against a strike in Syria, at least a strike as response for the Syrian use of chemical weapons(*) against the rebels. Of all my friends on the Watcher Council, all staunch Republicans, some of Tea Party and some of libertarian bend (or both), not a single one supported such strike, in fact all were against it. The fact that a puny minority of Republicans are the very few who clamor for American intervention doesn't change the evidence: both left and right wings of American political spectrum don't want to see any kind of American involvement in Syria (and, probably, anywhere else outside of US).
This was my main point regarding the "Contest" part of the essay. The minor ones that deserve to be mentioned, are:
Two decades ago as well as today, the source of the problem is the same: The president of the United States wishes to represent things — justice, fairness, international norms — that he cannot, or will not, or doesn’t know how to defend in practice. In the future, it would be far more just, and far less cruel, for the president, and the rest of us, simply to say nothing at all.(*) I can't avoid mentioning again that the whole business of "punishing" the Syria's leaders for use of chemical weaponry was a great red herring, created by the POTUS - deliberately or accidentally is another matter. Suffice to say that the herring worked exceedingly well, turning the discussion from the 120,000 or more Syrian citizen killed to the relatively puny and artificial issue of chemical warfare. And even the much trumpeted clean-up of Syria's chemical arsenal may very well appear to be a big lie.
Such, however, is part of the historic pattern in the decline of empires. Yet this is the imperative that serves as the basis for misconceiving and rejecting the Obama international vision. It offers a choice not between a weak America and a strong America willing and able to meet genuine security threats. It presents a choice between an imperial America, however internally democratic, attuned to the brute expression and imposition of its will across all reaches, and a strong America integrated, reasonably and with proper regard to its interests, within a slow-developing international order.In the imaginary future world, organized by John Lennon, I would easily agree with this plan - what could be better, after all? Tend your own garden and smile at the sun (or rain, for that matter). That real world, which has known the rise and fall of many an empire, works differently, however. And the leader of a carnivores' pack is rarely sent off with a golden watch and a retirement party.
Ynet has published a somewhat indignant response to the latest act of Irish BDS activists: placing a yellow sticker on an Israeli product:
A pro-Israeli activist residing in Dublin, Ireland, was shocked this week when he discovered that a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organization had taped yellow stickers on Israeli products reading "For justice in Palestine, Boycott Israel".Here is the offending sticker:
Among the many items found carrying the yellow boycott sticker was a pack of dates from the Jordan Valley. One of the stickers read: "Organic dates – produce of West Bank; Israeli Settlement Produce."
