This year, it looks like this:
Why does it bother me that a "trayf" menorah has been replaced with an even "trayfer" menorah?
I'm not sure. Maybe because it looks more like a Christmas tree than a real menorah.
Al-Zeidi maybe one of the bravest men on this globe because not only did he defy and humiliate the emperor but also he knew very well what to expect at the hands of those who created Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and all the other secret prisons in every dark corner of the earth.Arab News again:
Al-Zeidi has proved to be someone who can unite all factions and ethnicities.Al Arabiya:
The alleged maker of the shoes that an Iraqi journalist hurled at U.S. President George W. Bush has had to take on 100 extra staff to cope with a surge in demand for his footwear, he said on Monday.Saudi Gazette:
"Between the day of the incident and 1:00 pm today we have received orders totaling 370,000 pairs", Istanbul-based Serkan Turk, head of sales at Baydan Shoes, told AFP.
Shoe: A sign of insult, not freedomDaily News Egypt:
Journalist Montazar Al-Zaidi’s name will not only be listed alongside kings and rulers, Shajarat Al-Durr and Nikita Khrushchev, but will be part of an infinitely more important list which includes thousands of Iraqis who resist the American occupation that violates all the human and legal values which Baghdad introduced to the world long before the United States of America ever came into being ranging from the Mesopotamian civilization to Islamic Baghdad./blockquote>
One of the saddest things about the incident involving the Iraqi thug who threw his shoes at President George Bush is that sometimes he is referred to as a journalist. The name of the noblest of professions has been dragged through the ditch into a dark place indeed.Daily News Egypt 2:
Although I completely sympathize with this view and do not in any way detract from the tragedy of what has happened in Iraq, I still believe that even though the shoe attack was symbolically momentous, it also served to bring home more starkly than ever the complete impotence of the Arab world, whether on the mass public level or on the elite diplomatic one.This last editorialist gets closer to the truth. The Arab world has a massive inferiority complex, after decades of coddling terror, mismanaging trillions of petrodollars, ruling by sloganeering and human rights abuses. Their only relevance come from the disparate but related issues of happening to sit on top of huge oil reserves and supporting terror, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly. Terror itself is simply a means to get attention, another puerile but deadly gesture to get the hated but admired West to sit up and take notice, like a toddler's temper tantrums.
Adding to the tragicomic nature of the whole sorry affair is the fact that not a single one of our revered journalists or even activists has ever had the grit to hurl a size 10 reminder of the unpopularity of his own Arab leader — many of whom have been around for close to three decades and who have likely caused just as much damage, if not more, during their respective reigns of terror.
Neither side seems to want such an all-out fight -- particularly not Israel, whose defense minister has pointed out that an invasion could cost hundreds of lives and leave thousands of Israeli troops stranded in Gaza without an exit strategy. But neither Israel nor Hamas has been satisfied with the informal cease-fire they reached in June with the help of Egypt. During the summer and fall, the rocket fire from Gaza diminished but never entirely stopped. Israel, in turn, allowed only a modest increase in the flow of goods into Gaza, which has been under virtual siege since last year, and frequently sealed off the strip entirely in response to fresh attacks.The cease-fire was also supposed to include no more Hamas weapons smuggling, and the "modest increase" of goods included cement that Hamas seized for itself to build an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers. The rocket fire did diminish, at least until early November.
But an increasing number of Israeli thinkers are pointing out that the prevailing strategy of trying to isolate and destroy Hamas while building up the rival Palestinian leadership in the West Bank hasn't worked.The "unnamed expert" ruse of editorial writers as well as journalists is the time-honored way to put forth their own opinions as if they belong to a higher power, conveniently ignoring any other.
Some 200,000 Gazans recently turned out for a rally in support of Hamas; a war would only strengthen the movement's most radical factions.The two parts of this sentence have nothing to do with each other. I recall the pro-Hamas rallies last year far exceeded 200,000 - and the pro-Fatah rallies did as well. The idea of pacifying the radicals by giving in to them is so extraordinarily wrongheaded that it could only have been written by an MSM editorialist.
Israeli officials rightly point out that no country should have to tolerate missile attacks on its cities; such attacks justify a military response. But Israel would be better positioned to defeat Hamas politically and diplomatically if it allowed the full resumption of food, medicine and fuel deliveries to Gaza and made clear its willingness to end other restrictions on civilian trade in exchange for a full cessation of rocket attacks and other hostilities.Wow. Israel sent in daily deliveries of goods essentially every day from August through October, truckloads of food, medicine, fuel, clothing, building materials, and other goods. In return, Hamas built up an arsenal of more rockets, imported tons of explosives, gathered more money by taxing smuggled goods, didn't lift a finger to take administrative responsibility of Gazans' daily lives (leaving that to Western money filtered through Fatah institutions,) and created an infrastructure to kidnap more Israeli soldiers. And the wise old men of WaPo now say that Israel should do exactly the same thing again?
If Hamas is to be toppled, it will have to be through a political process led by Palestinians.Every poll over the past year of Gazans shows that Fatah would get more votes in an election than Hamas. Yet Hamas still holds power. Perhaps it is because Hamas is a military dictatorship that has wiped out its political opposition in Gaza? Hamas' hold on power has only increased as its popularity has gone downhill. How, exactly, would more pro-Western Palestinian Arabs manage to seize power politically from ruthless Islamic extremists?
1 | 11/27/06 | A | Barak: “A solution to the Qassams will be found faster than what most people believe” |
2 | 12/25/06 | B | Olmert: “Israel cannot accept the incessant rocket fire or ignore the plans to set up a military base along its border." |
3 | 2/21/07 | C | Olmert: “Israel is close to launching an operation in Gaza". |
4 | 4/29/07 | D | Olmert "warned that the truce may be short-lived... Israel has warned against such breaches and will now consider the counter measures at its disposal." |
5 | 5/16/07 | E | Livni: “"I don't care who fired. There must be an immediate military response to every violation.” |
6 | 5/21/07 | F | Olmert: "Nobody will shy away from the need to retaliate harshly" for Qassam attacks |
7 | 5/29/07 | G | Olmert: “The Israeli government sees the firing of missiles and attacks from Gaza as a basic violation ... and we will not tolerate it” |
8 | 2/28/08 | H | Olmert: “We shall not tolerate the price tag the terror organizations are attempting to set. “ |
9 | 3/03/08
| I | Olmert to Sderot residents: “We know what needs to be done, we also know when and how to do it so that you won't live in fear, you won't have to run short of breath. We know what to do, how, and when and we will do it.” |
10 | 6/6/08 | J | Barak to Sderot: “No country can accept the constant bombardment of its citizens from a foreign authority.” |
11 | 6/24/08 | K | Livni: “The Israeli government will do everything to protect its citizens. “ |
12 | 6/26/08 | L | Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised a harsh response to the barrage of Qassam rockets that has hit the Negev city of Sderot over the past day. |
13 | 7/1/08 | M | Olmert: “"We will decide when, where, how and if we take action. It will not be dictated from outside.” |
14 | 11/14/08 | N | Olmert: “The continued attacks challenge Israel's patience. In the end, if the attacks continue, we will respond." |
15 | 11/16/08 | O | Olmert: Israel "cannot continue to ignore the Qassam launching and infiltration attempts of terrorist cells." |
16 | 11/17/08
| P | Israel's Foreign Ministry: "Israel is demonstrating restraint and has avoided retaliating at this stage, but warns the Security Council that this restraint cannot continue for much longer." |
17 | 12/9/08
| Q | Defense Minister Amir Peretz: “Any attempt to fire into Israeli territories would be considered a breach of the cease-fire and treated with severity. Israel is interested in quiet, but would not accept attacks on its citizens. “ |
Remember that some 34 Qassams and 30 mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza over the past three days, including three rockets today.Convoys carrying food and medical aid worth six million pounds ($1 million) sent by the Egyptian Red Crescent to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Monday await inspection at the Israeli controlled Karam Abu-Salem [Kerem Shalom] border crossing. Mohamed Orabi, the head of the organization in North Sinai, told AlArabiya.net that five trucks were loaded with 40 tons of flour, 20 tons of rice and some medical supplies and sent to Gaza Strip.
An Egyptian official at the Rafah border crossing said Egyptian authorities had agreed with Israel to allow the trucks in on Monday however through the Karam Abu-Salem border so that Israel could ascertain that no weapons were being smuggled into the Strip.
A Saudi court has rejected a plea to divorce an eight-year-old girl married off by her father to a man who is 58, saying the case should wait until the girl reaches puberty, a lawyer involved told AFP.A mother is not even allowed to protect her own daughter from being abused, thanks to the all-wise sharia law of Saudi Arabia.
"The judge has dismissed the plea—filed by the mother—because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty," lawyer Abdullah Jtili told AFP in a telephone interview after Saturday's court decision.
The divorce plea was filed in August by the girl's divorced mother with a court at Unayzah, 220 kilometers (135 miles) north Riyadh just after the marriage contract was signed by the father and the groom.
"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," Jtili said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.
Relatives who did not wish to be named told AFP that the marriage had not yet been consummated, and that the girl continued to live with her mother. They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage is not consummated for another 10 years, when the girl turns 18.
The father had agreed to marry off his daughter for an advance dowry of 30,000 riyals ($8,000), as he was apparently facing financial problems, they said.
The father was in court and he remained adamant in favor of the marriage, they added.
In Yemen in April, another girl aged eight was granted a divorce after her unemployed father forced her to marry a man of 28, who forced the child to have sex with him.
Iranian authorities on Sunday closed the office of the country's main human rights organization, headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.Nothing says "human rights" more than arresting people for "publishing statements, writing letters to international organizations and holding news conferences."
Dozens of plainclothes detectives and local police officers entered the Center for the Defense of Human Rights in Tehran and shut it down hours before a ceremony was to take place commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
An Interior Ministry commission that issues permits for political organizations said the center was carrying out illegal activities, such as publishing statements, writing letters to international organizations and holding news conferences, the semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported.
The commission, according to the news agency, accused Ebadi's center of distributing propaganda against the state. The report also cited repeated warnings delivered to the center and said the building had been sealed on the order of Tehran's top prosecutor.
Iran has a history of arresting and pressuring dissidents who question the country's record on human rights and democracy.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!