Moadim L'Simcha

A guy who calls himself LudwigVanQuixote over at Little Green Footballs put this comment up today. If he had a blog, I'd link it. But he doesn't (as far as I know). So here's some food for thought and for conversation, an extrememely important point that doesn't get made often enough.

For those who claim that Israel does not want peace, they really need to consider the Temple mount.

In Judaism the is only one Temple. The one in Jerusalem, the one where we believe Abraham took Isaac, the one that was the center of our faith, the place where our tradition teaches the very presence of G-d manifested itself in the Holy of Holies.

There is no more sacred place to us in the world.

Yet we leave two Mosques squat on top of it.

If the Muslims had ever taken the Vatican and turned it into a Mosque, how long would the Catholics let it remain so if they got it back? How long would Haiga Sophia stay a mosque if the Greeks ever got it back?

How long would the Muslims let there be a Church in Mecca?

Yet,

We leave those structures squat on our holiest site - even when we know it was built specifically to announce Islam's supremacy over us and all other faiths. I will be clear. I have nothing against mosques, but that one is a painful abomination to my nation.

Yet,

We would rather have peace.

Anyone who thinks that Israel and the Jews have not sacrificed for peace is a fool. We have given our dearest blood.

Indeed.

Chag Shavuot Sameach and

Shabbat Shalom.

Eternal and undivided

So the palestinian arabs "demand" a militarized state on every inch of the land Israel "occupied" in 1967, with Jerusalem (including the Old City) as its capital? Too damn bad.

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu speaks for me, and for most Jews I know, and for most Israeli Jews, without question:

United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided.

Emet (truth).

And I may have my differences with Israeli President Shimon Peres, but today, on Yom Yerushalayim, he was hitting on all cylinders.

The size of Jerusalem is measured not by its geography but by its history," said the president. "Geographically, Jerusalem has no distinction; no river runs through it, there is no beach nearby and the mountains surrounding are not extraordinarily high. But there is no city in the world with a historical wealth to match Jerusalem, both political history and spiritual history.

Yes.

Jerusalem was, and remains Israel's capital. Israel never had a different capital and Jerusalem has never been the capital of another people. Fierce battles took place here, more than anywhere in the world. The city charmed rulers who wanted control of it, it drew in peoples who wanted to force the city to serve their purposes. Legions sieged its walls, and the Jewish people had to defend its spirit as well as its alleyways time after time. At times Jerusalem almost met its undoing but it remained the inextinguishable hope of the Jewish people, which pledged 'never to forget thee, O Jerusalem.

Absolutely.

When Jerusalem was in non-Jewish hands, Jews were not allowed to pray at the holy places, while under Jewish rule, it is open to all faiths and all forms of prayer.

Yet another point that bears repeating and that the rest of the world was only too willing to ignore and is only too happy to forget. Not again. Never again.

The blood spilled in Jerusalem was the blood of our soldiers, but also the blood of the Jewish people, flowing through the veins of our existence.

42 years ago today, Jerusalem was reunited under the sovereignty of the State of Israel. Jerusalem is the beating heart of the Jewish people. For millenia, we have cared for her, yearned for her, prayed for her, adored her and adorned her. You don't rip the heart out of a living body. Not while it has an ounce of breath. Not while any of us do.

Block break

It's one of those things. Just as soon as I break through this block ... I do hope to be back. In the meantime ... here's a beautiful blooming bush at Qumran.

Shabbat Shalom.

Headache

I do not get migraines and I rarely even get headaches. But there's this one muscle in my back that sometimes goes into a knot and then I can't do much of anything until someone works it out or it goes away on its own. Today I've had one that refuses to respond to rubbing, pushing, prodding, kneading or any other sort of attention. It just keeps getting worse. And as a result I'm just a big puddle of uselessness. Sorry.

Meanwhile, Israel had a birthday Wednesday. It's not like me to miss commenting on that joyful occasion but stuff has been going on and this knot is likely in part a response to that. Stress. I need to make some changes, I think.

Happy belated Yom Ha'atzma'ut and Shabbat Shalom.

Israel remembers

Yom HaZikaron 5769:

After the official ceremony in memory of Israel's fallen soldiers, a ceremony memorializing victims of terror attacks was held in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, the father of Rivka Holtzberg, who was slain along with her husband Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg in the horrific terror attack in Mumbai in November 2008, spoke at the ceremony at Mount Herzl.

[ ... ]

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also spoke at the ceremony.

"Dear bereaved families," he said. "As a member of a bereaved family, I recognize and know your pain, the pain that accompanies the family members every day, and is not focused on a particular day or event. Today, Remembrance Day for the fallen of Israel's wars and those who fell in terrorist attacks, the entire State of Israel, bows its head with you and to you, salutes the fallen and embraces you."

The prime minister said that the entire country stands with the victims' families and remembers and recalls the relatives who are no longer among the living.

And tonight, the celebration of Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, will begin.

Sticky opinions

Some stuff that's been on my mind ...

This was a very bad day for America. I'm becoming more and more convinced that so was this. I hope we survive it. I know that sounds a little hyperbolic. And still...

This guy is NOT a hero. He's an instigator. And he's clearly confused about what, exactly, are his Fourth Amendment rights. Then again, so are the Border Patrol guys who beat him up, it would appear. The dog was totally unnecessary.

This one has me in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, David Duke surely deserves whatever is coming to him. On the other hand, the hate speech laws in Europe give me the willies. They could just as easily be turned on their heads. There are those who are already doing their damnest to see that happen. For now, I guess I'll just indulge in a bit of hypocrisy and work on sorting all this out later.

This and this make me literally ill. So it's time I officially weighed in. Yes, I've read beyond the headlines. I've been following this sad story for well over a year now. I do hope and pray that both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer come to their senses, before it's too late. I'm not holding my breath.

Well, that's about enough out of me for now.

Shabbat Shalom.

Yom HaShoah 5769

A day late ...

Never again.

Their Last Steps / Leurs derniers pas -- David Olère (1902-1985)

Please visit this website.

Holiday-itis

It's not like there's not what to post... (huh?) I just seem to have been pre-occupied with other stuff last week, and this week. Taxes are all done now but another holiday approaches.

I'll be back after.

Chag Pesach Sameach.

Friend or fig leaf?

The known civilized world has its knickers completely in a twist over the impending departure of Salaam Fayad as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. It's quite pathetic, really.

As the Jerusalem Post headline today laments, "Trusted PM's resignation could affect US aid to PA." Trusted by whom?

Well, by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), apparently.

"It certainly makes it much more difficult," said US Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-New York), who chairs the House foreign affairs subcommittee on the Middle East, of efforts to allocate funds to a PA absent Fayad. "He's good, and he instills much confidence in the part of those [in Congress] who will have something to say about that money."

Rep. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), too.

"I'm hoping that he will be the prime minister because he's been a very important leader and earned the respect of Congress," she told the Post. "His leadership has been critical."

President Bush and Condi Rice were also fans. The European leaders adore him. The Wall Street Journal calls him "a Western favorite." He has gained a reputation as the last and only honest palestinian politician, seemingly due primarily for his ongoing insistance upon transparency and integrity in the management of PA funds and particularly those that have been donated by generous foreign governments.

But the fact is that Fayyad has clearly been fighting an uphill battle and has gained no traction in his attempts to reform financial business-as-usual in the palestinian fisc.

Hamas despises him, which is, of course, a point in his favor. Nevertheless, his "moderate" credentials don't stand up all that well to scrutiny.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has said Palestinians have a legitimate right to resist Israeli occupation, even if the phrase does not appear in his new government program.

"We are certainly an occupied people and resistance is a legitimate right for the Palestinian people as an occupied people," Fayyad told reporters in Cairo, where he is leading the Palestinian delegation to an Arab League meeting on Monday.

Palestinian officials confirmed on Friday that the platform of the new government omits the phrases "armed struggle" and "resistance" against Israeli occupation.

But he implied that "resistance" did not mean "armed struggle." Necessarily.

And a few months ago, while lauding the importance of Jerusalem to the world's major religions at a "UN organized interfaith peace conference," he ... left one out.

"Jerusalem is home to the third most holy place to Islam, the place where Muhammad rose to the heavens, and the place where Jesus, the Christian, was resurrected," the Palestinian leader proclaimed.

So are we in the West, already cash strapped and struggling to prop up our economies with gimmicks and slight of hand, so incredibly anxious to continue doling out money to the Arabs in Gaza and Ramallah that the departure of Fayyad is causing such wailing, moaning and gnashing of teeth? Again, from the Wall Street Journal.

"The feeling is that Fayyad is a guarantee for our support and our money," said a Western diplomat in Jerusalem. "Fayyad has overwhelming support from Moscow to Washington to Rome and without him it will be a lot harder to persuade our domestic parliaments to give money to the Palestinians."

Is Fayyad really a guarantor that our support and our money will be spent wisely? Or is he just a fig leaf that allows us to claim it's protected while we keep shovelling it out. And if his presence is the magic balm without which we have no confidence in the integrity of the system that oversees the use and distribution of our largesse, isn't is just possible that we shouldn't be sending it there in the first place?

Shabbat Shalom.

Both sides now

It's no surprise. Benjamin Netanyahu is literally caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

On the one hand, we have the morons at the EU, who are clinging desperately to the world's worst idea (or at least one of them)...

The European Union once again sent strong warning messages to Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday, cautioning him that EU ties with Israel could take a turn for the worse if he rejects a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On the other hand, we have the staunch right wingers in Israel, whom Bibi never pretended (much) to be courting (what choice did they have?), throwing their own hissy fit over his partnership with labor.

Ah, well. Israeli politics. The more things change, the more that stays the same. Unpredictable and motivated by many of the baser human instincts. Those who pretend to be shocked (shocked! I say) at this are fooling no one.

As always, stay tuned. Oh, and a parting message for the EU: please to STFU.

Shabbat Shalom.

Dear Noam and Aviva (Shalit)

Parents who lost their children in terrorist attacks explain in an open letter why they oppose a deal "at any cost." Eloquent and heartbreaking.

... We sat across from you on the sidewalk in order to present the people of Israel with a different stance, an unpopular one perhaps, an unpleasant one perhaps, but the right one in our view. Gilad needs to be released in a way that secures our future, that would ensure the cessation of abductions, and that would prevent terror. We must do it in a way that chooses the present and the future, for the sake of all citizens of the country, over Gilad's wellbeing.

Quietly, within us, we asked for your forgiveness a thousand times. We debated every day whether we are convinced that what we are doing is right. We tried to find excuses for why we should give up and go back home.

As you asked us many times, where were you for three years? We were at the same place where many of the country's citizens are found today. We were scared to hurt you. Yet every day, when we returned home, we saw our children who are still alive, the ones we promised to protect over the graves of our dead children, and we decided that we will do everything in our power to stop the terrorists. ...

As indeed we all must.

Shabbat Shalom.

Meat

This past weekend, we were celebrating ... meat. It all started here, as a protest against PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign and, well, it's become a tasty tradition.

Sharing is part of the fun. So here are a few samples of what was for dinner here at our house on Saturday and Sunday night.

That's a hunk of raw buffalo tenderloin, just waiting to be thrown on the grill. And here's a chunk of said tenderloin post-grill, about to be enjoyed ... by me.

Eland is a kind of African antelope (sort of). They're quite beautiful, very plentiful and extremely delicious. This loin chop didn't disappoint.

And that's it for this year's EATAPETA, where we eat well and make fun of stupid, offensive and over-the-top "animal rights" organizations all at the same time. Cheers!

Consistency

Further to the Chas Freeman withdrawal, SoccerDad meticulously sets forth the case for What Was really behind it (as well as What Wasn't). There's too much good stuff in there to effectively excerpt and it hangs together too well as a whole so you really should just go and read it all. But here's the core of his analysis:

One can only conclude that it was Freeman himself who feared the revelations of the IG and stepped aside before they became an issue. His accusation that the Israel Lobby scuttled his appointment was calculated to obfuscate the real issue. Still there was a credulous media ready to accept it.

Yeah. And they'll always have help. (See also...)

In other news, Charles Krauthammer's excellent op-ed this week exposes yet more of the moral bankruptcy and overweening arrogance of the Obama administration. It just keeps coming.

While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

Those of us who favor federal funding for embryonic stem cell research with appropriate safeguards and restrictions in place have now been thrown under the bus along with those who disfavor funding of such research. To the tiny crowd of those still standing, I hope you enjoy your brave new world.

And George Will makes a similarly salient point in an entirely different area: the economy.

The president's confidence in his capacities is undermining confidence in his judgment. His way of correcting what he called the Bush administration's "misplaced priorities" has been to have no priorities. Mature political leaders know that to govern is to choose -- to choose what to do and thereby to choose what cannot be done. The administration insists that it really does have a single priority: Everything depends on fixing the economy. But it also says that everything depends on everything: Economic revival requires enactment of the entire liberal wish list of recent decades.

It appears we can at least tentatively award Obama a few points for consistency.

Nevertheless, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 9% this week. Yes, it may be a bear market rally but I'll take it.

Finally, Daylight Savings Time began last Sunday. I love DST. I'm not a morning person so it really is a gift of an extra hour of sunshine and I already feel like I'm emerging from my winter doldrums. I do think they're pushing the envelope starting it this early in March, but I especially appreciate it on Friday afternoons, which never seem long enough in the winter. See? Today, I'm early!

Shabbat Shalom.

Withdrawal

On a day when the most virulent of Israel bashers are trying their best to pin the withdrawal of Chas Freeman on the efforts of "Steven Rosen, a former director of AIPAC awaiting trial on espionage charges [sic], who has a long history of attacking and undermining anybody he deems hostile to Israel," it's more than surprising to find Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum working to help them out.

I'm not going to publish the text of the email Pipes sent out to his readers yesterday. You can find it here, on one of the most hysterically anti-Israel sites on the blogosphere, which was more than delighted to have "confirmation" of "The Lobby" conspiracy.

Jeffrey Goldberg (admittedly neither Rosen's nor AIPAC's biggest fan) went out of his way to dismiss this charge today.

It is widely believed on the blogosphere that the campaign against Freeman was coordinated by AIPAC or by Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC official no charged with espionage. I've been away, so maybe I've missed a couple of Elders of Zion meetings, but no one coordinated this "campaign" with me. In fact, I haven't spoken to Steve Rosen since he screamed at me for writing this profile of him in 2005.

(Ah. You'll have to follow the link to get the link to that profile. I believe in feeding my sources.)

Fact is, the Freeman appointment was derailed by the hard work of a number of people and in the end was driven more by Freeman's glaring conflicts of interest, foreign entanglements and anti-American statements than by the anti-Israel bias that Rosen first exposed. So why does Pipes reiterate the rationalizations of Freeman's defenders by characterizing the derailment as Rosen's "achievement?"

Needless to say, it was quickly picked up by Freeman's supporters. Glenn Greenwald gloats:

...And Antony Loewenstein notes that neocon fanatic Daniel Pipes is sending out mass emails crediting indicted AIPAC official/espionage suspect Steven Rosen with being the catalyst of the anti-Freeman campaign.

(Follow those links if you must. It's the first and last (I hope) time you'll ever find a link to either of those twits here. But as compensation I must refer you to this classic post which, if you haven't read it, you haven't truly lived.)

Pipes is hardly a "fanatic." But I can't imagine what he was thinking here. And the Zionist Organization of America, for some reason, is exercising a similar lack of common sense and discretion in sending around a memorandum claiming its own title in the Freeman KO.

The fact is, it wasn't the efforts of Rosen or the ZOA or the "Israel Lobby" that defeated Freeman's appointment. If anything, those efforts made it a bit harder by generating resistance to the appearance of "caving in to pressure." What ultimately mattered was that enough members of congress, including several Democrats, started to realize that this guy had way too many negatives and that the appointment was making them look bad.

Yes, it appears that "the Lobby" would love to take credit for this one. They can't. In the end, Freeman defeated himself.

One more thing

Last week, I posted an update to the ongoing saga of the campaign against Bangladeshi pro-Israel Muslim journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. He has since then published this press release at The Blitz. It's a detailed account of the latest physical attack on him and the reluctance of the Bangladeshi authorities to take any action against his attackers. Please do read it all.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) has been among the leading voices advocating for Choudhury's freedom and release from the scurrilous charges brought against him by his government. You can read more about Rep. Kirk's efforts here.

This week and last, Rep. Kirk has been instrumental in launching this offensive to challenge the appointment of Chas Freeman to the chair of the National Intelligence Council. Kirk's appeals to the Inspector General are designed to shine light on Freeman's numberous conflicts of interest and failures of disclosure, which are already raising uncomfortable questions in Congress among Republicans and Democrats alike. This could get interesting.

Sincere thanks to Rep. Mark Kirk for his hard work and support on so many fronts.

Shabbat Shalom.