Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 18, 2008

Israeli pop culture going mainstream

Joseph Cedar, director of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film Beaufort, and an Orthodox Jew, has resolved a thorny Shabbat dilemma.

Traditionally, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds a high-profile public symposium for the five finalists vying for the best foreign-language film Oscar on the day before the award ceremony.

This year, the symposium will be on Saturday morning, Feb. 23, and Cedar was uncertain whether he could participate on a Shabbat.

"I had a long talk with my rabbi in Israel," said Cedar, 39, who is in Los Angeles with his family now in anticipation of the awards. "He decided that I could attend as long as I didn't use a microphone and walked to the event at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater."

Cedar figures he can cover the two-mile distance in about an hour, an almost unheard feat for pedestrian-phobic Angelenos, but no big deal for Israelis - even for an Israeli who was born in New York, but whose parents made aliya when he was five.

In the meanwhile, the excitement in Israel about its film industry's first Oscar nomination since 1984 is building up.

Gilad Millo, the resident Israeli consul for public affairs, said that more than a dozen of the main Israel media outlets will send television and print reporters to cover the Oscar ceremonies.

Millo termed the Oscar nomination a "landmark event" and an auspicious beginning of Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations.

And also from JPost:

An indie artist from Ramat Hasharon has become the first Israeli to crack the Billboard Top 10.

Yael Naim, a 29-year-old IDF veteran, earned Billboard's coveted "Hot Shot" designation last week with "New Soul," an English-language single that scored the highest debut of any song on the music magazine's singles chart.

The song ranked ninth in total sales across the United States on the chart issued February 16...The song also ranked second on Billboard's list of digital singles, while Naim's self-titled album landed at sixth on the magazine's digital albums chart.

The song's soaring Billboard debut follows a week spent at #1 on the iTunes Top Songs list, and certified Naim's rapid emergence on the American music scene.

Unknown in the US a month ago, Naim has become the breakout performer of early 2008 with "New Soul," which earned massive exposure last month after being selected for an aggressive marketing campaign for the MacBook Air laptop.

Born in Paris to immigrants from Tunisia, Naim moved to Israel as a four-year-old, later serving in the IDF and recording songs in French, English and Hebrew.

Here's her New Soul video, watched over 2.7 million times on YouTube:

Adar I 12

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls President Bush and tells him, "George, I had a wonderful dream last night. I could see America, the whole beautiful country, and on each house I saw a banner."

"What did it say on the banners?" Bush asks. Ahmadinejad replies, "UNITED STATES OF IRAN."

Bush says, "You know, Mahmoud, I am really happy you called, because believe it or not, last night I had a similar dream. I could see all of Tehran, and it was more beautiful than ever, and on each house flew an enormous banner."

"What did it say on the banners?" Ahmadinejad asks.

Bush replies, "I don't know. I can't read Hebrew."

Saudi women rush to ditch their hijab when abroad

From an op-ed in the Arab News:

Everyone knows that Saudi women not only remove their abayas once they leave the country, but they also compete in following the latest fashion trends when abroad. They spend a fortune on their outfits so that they don’t feel left out of the fashion parade that Saudi and Gulf women start during summer vacations in other Arab or European countries. The famous streets of London, Paris or Cairo are like carnivals displaying the latest in fashion trend worn by Saudi and Gulf women.
This proves that it’s impossible to impose a certain trend on people when it comes to dress codes or behavior. Threats and terrorizing make people have dual personalities. They become schizophrenic. They will rush at the first opportunity to ditch anything that’s been imposed on them when they’re sure that they are neither monitored nor supervised.
Prohibiting things that the scholars disagree upon and imposing traditions on people will lead to social hypocrisy. It will increase the number of people who secretly do things that they oppose publicly. We need to review many of our social habits that are practiced in the name of religion and are severely restricting Saudi society. We might at one point make peace with ourselves and manage to stand in the face of the changing world.

Unlike many right-wing bloggers, I sympathize with Muslim women who truly want to dress modestly (as long as it doesn't conflict with other human rights or security issues.) However, the Muslim world forcing all women to a certain dress code is nothing less than abuse, and this editorial neatly shows how it is destructive to the very society that pretends that it is acting "morally."

Adar 11 (on time, no less)

A man arrives at Ben-Gurion Airport with two large bags.

The customs agent opens the first bag and finds it full with money so he asks the passenger, "How did you get this money?"

The man says, "You will not believe it, but I traveled all over Europe, went into public restrooms, each time I saw a man pee, I grabbed his organ and said, "donate money to Israel or I will cut off your testicles."

The customs agent is stunned and mumbles: "well...it's a very interesting story... what do you have in the other bag?"

The man says, "You would not believe how many people in Europe hate Israel..."

PalArab rocket hits Egypt

From Reuters:

A locally made Palestinian rocket exploded on the Egyptian side of the crossing point with Gaza on Sunday, damaging an Egyptian administrative building, security sources said. There were no injuries.
The rocket, about 50 cm (20 inches) long, knocked out communications at the Egyptian border post but the building was deserted because it landed early in the morning, they said.

"Maybe it landed there by mistake and was meant to go into Israel. We have informed the Palestinian side and asked for explanations," said a security source who asked not to be named.

This was not the first time this has happened; two weeks ago a Gaza rocket also hit Egyptian territory, causing no damage.

Last week Hamas fired some bullets over the heads of some Egyptians building a new wall between Gaza and Egypt.

The "brothers" are apparently squabbling.

(h/t Backspin)

Adar 10 (also belated)

A rabbi, a priest, and a minister were talking one day. The priest told of an occasion when he was caught in a snowstorm so terrible that he couldn't see a foot in front of him. He was completely confused, unsure even of which direction he needed to walk. He prayed to God, and miraculously, while the storm continued for miles in every direction, he could clearly see his home 20 feet away.

The minister told a similar story. He had been out on a small boat when a hurricane struck. There were 40-foot high waves, and the boat was sure to capsize. He prayed to God, and, while the storm continued all around, for several feet in each direction, the sea calmed, and the minister was able to return safely to port.

The rabbi, too, had such a story. One Saturday morning, on the way home from the synagogue, he saw a very thick wad of $100 bills on the sidewalk.

Of course, since it was Shabbat, the rabbi wasn't able to touch the money.

So he prayed to God, and everywhere, for miles in every direction, it was still Shabbat, but for 10 feet around him, it was Thursday.

Adar 9 (belated)

On the sixth day, G-d turned to the angel Gabriel....

"On this day, I shall create a magic land. It shall be called "Israel". It will stand as holy. Its magnificence will be known the world over. I will choose to send to this land special people of goodness, intelligence and conviction, so the land shall prosper. I shall call these inhabitants Jews."

"Pardon me, Lord", asked Gabriel, "but aren't you being too generous to these Jews?"

"Not really. Wait and see the neighbors I'm giving them."

That legendary Times-UK objectivity

Now, I certainly believe that Israel was behind the assassination of Mughniyeh, the fact is that it has not been proven. For a prestigious newspaper to headline an article "Israel kills terror chief with headrest bomb" seems a bit, shall we say, premature.

Biggest "work accident" in years kills Islamic Jihad family

From Reuters:

Eight people were killed, including a commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, and some 40 were wounded when an explosion destroyed a house in the Gaza Strip late on Friday, a group spokesman and local medics said.
The Israeli army denied any involvement. Islamic Jihad said an air strike caused the blast, which also killed three other militants as well as the wife and two young children of the commander, Ayman Fayed, better known as Abu Abdallah.
Some residents of the al-Bureij refugee camp said they believed there had been an air strike. Others said they heard no aircraft noise or other indications before the explosion.

Witnesses at the scene said they saw debris among the rubble of what looked like the locally manufactured rockets the Islamic Jihad and other groups fire at Israeli towns.

Israel has used air strikes on cars in Gaza to kill a number of militants lately but has not bombed a house there since 2006. Militants have also been killed in accidental explosions and faction fighting, while some Palestinians also accuse Israel of using undercover methods to set off explosions in the enclave.

Haaretz adds:

In contrast to Islamic Jihad, Hamas initially declined to blame Israel, saying it might have been a "work accident" - i.e. that some of the explosives stored in the house might have gone off accidentally. That is also the Israel Defense Forces' assessment, and the IDF stressed there were no Israeli operations in Gaza at the time.

But yesterday all the Palestinian organizations, including both Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, issued statements blaming Israel for the blast.

This is a slam dunk case of a "work accident:" Israel has not been bombing houses; when they used to their targets were always the leaders of the terror groups; Israel admits when it kills terrorists' and the house was apparently a rocket factory.

Of course, Ma'an - the most reliable Palestinian Arab"news" source - doesn't bother to mention any of that as it blames Israel explicitly, showing once again the quality of Palestinian Arab "news".

The 2008 PalArab self-death count is now at 25.

UPDATE: PCHR adds more details, and many more of the civtims were under 18, so I am adjusting the self-death count.

The latest episode of Hamas kidTV

Reuters finally noticed that Hamas is inciting - against Danes, and also Jews:

A man-sized talking rabbit appeared on television in Gaza on Friday to denounce Danish newspapers over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that offended Muslims.

The latest in a line of cartoon-inspired characters that take the message of the Hamas Islamist movement to Palestinian children, the actor in the Bugs Bunny-style outfit also railed against "Zionist filth" and Israel's control of Jerusalem.

The Friday show "Tomorrow's Pioneers" on Hamas's al-Aqsa channel has become a weekend fixture for pre-teens since shortly before the Islamists seized control of the Gaza Strip last year.

A Mickey Mouse-type creation provoked outcry in Israel and was condemned elsewhere as inciting hatred among the young. The mouse, eventually shown being beaten to death by an Israeli, was followed by a talking bee and, now, by Assud the rabbit.

"I want the West to hear this. I want the Danes who offended the great Prophet to hear it," the rabbit said, gesturing to viewers after the show's co-presenter, a girl of about 12 named Sarra, condemned Danish newspapers for reprinting the cartoons after police accused several men of plotting to kill the artist.

"Where are you Muslims? Where are you Arabs?" said Sarra, wearing a headscarf and speaking with precocious eloquence.

"We are all a sacrifice for the Prophet. The soldiers of Tomorrow's Pioneers will redeem the Prophet with all they have."

Earlier, several thousand Hamas supporters demonstrated in Gaza over the cartoons, which were first published in 2005.

Returning to the show's favoured theme of explaining Hamas's goal of an Islamic state in all the area now divided between Israel and the Palestinians, the rabbit told viewers they would recover Jerusalem's holiest Muslim site and cities in Israel:

"We will liberate al-Aqsa mosque from the Zionists' filth," said Assud, whose name means Little Lion. "We will liberate Jaffa and Acre. Will liberate the whole homeland."

Though some parents are uneasy about the show's message it has proved popular with children, not only in Hamas-controlled Gaza but also in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. One girl called Rasha said she was phoning in from Bethlehem, near Jerusalem:

"Who has sabotaged the world if not the Zionist plans?" she sang down the line to the studio in Gaza. Dancing and singing along, Assud the rabbit chimed in: "They have bombarded us." (Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Pseudo-intellectualism is fun!

I noticed a few articles today that where the authors use really big words and have no clue what they are talking about.

Our first example comes from The American Muslim magazine, where author Robert Crane asserts:

In any false ideology, the prefix “neo” indicates that it is false. Placing the “neo” in front of “conservatism,” indicates that it is fraudulent, which is precisely why it is so dangerous.

This is pretty absurd (the prefix "neo-" means "new") and really nonsensical - does he mean that any ideology that isn't prefixed "neo" is true, or does his syllogism only apply to "false ideologies" to begin with?

Crane knows his audience knows nothing that would contradict an even dumber statement:

Much less has Neo-Conservatism had anything to do with spiritual Zionism, which Jews have traditionally understood as the return to God. In this sense, every Muslim should be a Zionist and should be a follower of the greatest spiritual leader of the twentieth century, Rebbe Abraham Izaac Kook, who was the Chief Rabbi of Palestine from 1919 until the outbreak of the first great Palestinian intifada against Brtish imperialism beginning in 1935.

Rav Kook was an ardent Zionist and not only in the "inner jihad" sense that Crane is applying to him; he supported a Zionist state (although not a secular one.) The statement that every Muslim should be a Zionist in Rav Kook's sense of the word is accurate but far from Crane's intent.

Notice also how Crane now retroactively refers to the riots and infighting of the 1930s - where hundreds of Arabs murdered each other - as a "great intifada."

His entire essay is filled with such quasi-scholarly garbage, but it is fun to pick apart.

Similarly, the weekly Al-Ahram English edition is always a source for pseudo-intellectual gibberish. Check this out:

All modern theories, from Hegelian dialectics to Marxian class struggle, from Max Weber's theories on the evolution of government to Sigmund Freud's analysis of civilisation and its discontents, offer insights, however varied, on the law of historical change.

These theories came my mind as I read the Winograd Report on Israel's war on Lebanon in July 2006....The pioneers of the Zionist project were cunning, managing to convince world Jewry that the rape of Palestine was a legitimate thing to do.

What gave momentum to the Zionist project was international support and the sense of vitality Ibn Khaldun so aptly described. For nearly half a century, this vitality survived as new settlers grappled with a foreign land and the fact that they had little in common. Israel was a hybrid. At the top of the social ladder were white settlers from East Europe, followed by Jews coming from Arab countries and Iran. The bottom of the social ladder was left for Jews known as the Falashas. The duality of the Ashkenazi and the Sephardim was only one aspect of disunity in Israel. And war proved to be the one rallying cry that would cement the new country. The Israelis needed wars to keep them together. Indeed, the Zionist project -- as I have said many times before -- is a project of war. It was Israel's very social fabric that triggered what the Zionists like to call "preventive wars".

The amount of projection in this last paragraph is breathtaking. While no one will argue that there wasn't discrimination against Sephardim in the 1950s, to say that the 1948 war was only meant to give unity to Jews who commonly suffered at the hands of their host nations is too absurd for words, let alone the implication that the Jews started it. (He also seems to think that the Ethiopian Jews were a part of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.)

Again, the readers of Al-Ahram, thirsty for some sort of scholarly-sounding justification for their own prejudices and hate, lap this stuff up.

French and Saudis refused to nab Mughniyeh

From the WaPo:

...Lebanese officials, exploiting a monitored telephone call, traced Mughniyah to Paris in 1985, only five months after the hijacking of a TWA jetliner, to which he had been linked. He was staying at the Hotel de Crillon, a luxurious hotel across the street from the U.S. Embassy. Tipped off by the Lebanese, U.S. officials asked French police to arrest him and turn him over. Instead, as previously reported in The Washington Post, French agents met with him several times over a six-day period, according to a source closely involved, and worked out an agreement to release him in return for the freedom of a French hostage.

From ABC News:

[Richard] Clarke says the CIA learned that Mugniyah, wanted for a string of terror attacks, had boarded a commercial flight in Khartoum that was scheduled to stop in Riyadh [in 1996.]

"We appealed to the Saudis to grab him when the plane landed, and they refused," Clarke said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on ABC "World News With Charles Gibson."

After the initial refusal, Clarke said, U.S. officials went to the then-crown prince, now king.

"We raised the level of appeals all the way through Bill Clinton who was on the phone at three in the morning appealing to the highest level in Saudi Arabia to grab him," Clarke said.

"Instead, the Saudis refused to let the plane land and it continued on to Damascus," Clarke said.

The same people who complain about "extrajudicial killings" don't give people the opportunity to bring them to justice.

While the French actions were despicable, at least they got something concrete out of it - the release of a hostage.

The Saudis, however, were given a clear choice in 1996 as to whose side they were on - their "good friends" the United States, or Hezbollah. And we see which side they chose.

Another attack in Gaza - by Muslims against Christians

The YMCA in Gaza was attacked:

A band of 14 masked gunmen forced its way into YMCA offices in the Gaza Strip and exploded a library there, Israel Radio reported Friday.

Thousands of books were reportedly burnt in the ensuing fire. The YMCA in Gaza also operates a gym and a wedding hall.

The gunmen laid a second explosive device near a computer in the library but it failed to detonate. Two security guards on the scene were not able to block the intruders; they were taken by them from the YMCA and later released in the northern Gaza Strip.

The latest incident is another link in an ongoing chain of attacks against Palestinian Christians which has worsened since Hamas took power of the Gaza Strip last June.

Notice their target - the library. Any knowledge that is not Islamic is "haram" for the Islamists, so much so that they want to destroy it everywhere.

What they fear most, apparently, is the possibility that any other points of view might be more valid than theirs. Which says a lot about their confidence in their own beliefs.

I've been noticed

There is an Arabic thread about this blog in a message board site called paldf.net. The autotranslation is funny as they note my post about the glossy Hamas magazine and then notice my 2007 self-death count. Plenty of side mentions of "wicked Zionists" and "Zionist criminals" and, of course, that I have a strong relationship with World Zionism. I've received about 40 hits from that site so far!

Even funnier, they put a URL for the Google autotranslation of my site into Arabic! Which, I suppose, is only fair.

By the way, my name autotranslated to Arabic and autotranslated back is either "Hakim Zion" or "Wise Zion." Hakim is of course like the Hebrew "chacham/חכם " meaning wise; ironically al-Hakim was also the nickname of the late terrorist George Habash.

(If anyone knows how to change an uploaded Blogger picture to something else, so that the pictures they stole from me might be changed to something a little more interesting, please let me know.)

Abbas: Most of PA budget is spent in Gaza

Trying to interpret auto-translated text is sometimes tricky but one part of the Wafa transcript of Mahmoud Abbas' speech today at Sanaa University seems interesting:

President Abbas confirmed that despite what happened, the power [PA] is still completely responsible directly for all staff in the Gaza Strip and 77,000 staff members, while in the West Bank 73 thousand staff, and budget spent on the Gaza Strip rather than spent on the West Bank where it is disbursed 58% in Gaza and 42% disposal in the West Bank.

It appears that the West gives hundreds of millions to the PA and the PA gives the lion's share of that money to the same Gaza Strip that the West is pretending to sanction. And the PA, with Western money, still bankrolls tens of thousands of employees in Gaza who are doing next to nothing.

Meaning that Hamas has the luxury not to worry about Gaza residents rioting over not getting paid and can use all of its smuggled cash for building bombs and rockets.

UPDATE: I found confirmation in a February 3 article from Xinhua:

Fayyad explained that his government has spent 58 percent of its budget on Gaza Strip "to ease the life of the people and enhance their living conditions."

As Abbas makes clear, most of this 58% in in paying salaries, so the PA is not even trying to limit its spending of our tax dollars.

It also means that the PA is spending more than double per capita on Gaza than in the West Bank.