Administrivia/open thread

The last couple of days have been busy.

My post about the ungrateful PalArab mom in the Israeli hospital has been linked to from all over. A commenter points out, accurately, that the documentary about the story may have a slightly happier ending, but I think that the story stands on its own as an example of the incredible hatred that generations of Palestinian Arabs are being raised on. A similar story from 2002, linked to from DaTechGuy, illustrates it well.

I had the distinction of being on Memeorandum as a source for two posts simultaneously - one the aforementioned post, and the other was my criticism of Thaddeus Russell's plea for the US to cut off support for Israel. In other words, both those posts were referred to by a number of prominent blogs.

Over the past couple of weeks I had the privilege of having people email me quality articles that they wrote for which they didn't have a good outlet. I published articles written by Zach, Israelinurse, Adam Levick as well as commenter Zvi. Feel free to submit any original articles you might have been working on; I am happy to use my modest bully pulpit to publicize good material.

I haven't really been pushing the EoZ message board since I started it because I don't have the time to maintain it, and as a result it is sort of dying. It also now has a chat board, which might come in handy in the future, but for now I will let them both sit - if a critical mass of people decide it is a great place to trade information, it is there for you.

I saw that a group of Israel-bashers is coming out with an insta-book about the Mavi Marmara. Just for fun, I put together my posts on the topic and saw that they would span about 100 pages. I wish I had time to edit a similar book that was filled with, you know, facts, both from here and from other blogs and sources. Anyone want to volunteer? Self-publishing is pretty easy nowadays. (Slightly more difficult is getting an ISBN number but it is doable.)

You may have noticed that some of the Arabic articles I have been linking to were using the original Arabic URLs and not the Google Translate URLs. The reason is that I have been using Google Chrome more often, and it has a plug-in to do translation automatically. I find that even though it uses the same Google Translate, it keeps the format of the original page better and will translate some types of text that regular Google Translate doesn't.

Anyway, here's an open thread....