http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4127262,00.html From Marines to Givati Brigade: Israel Moskovitz He survived roadside bomb in Iraq as part of four-year service in American Marine Corps, but Yehuda Medwin decided to contribute to his new homeland as well. Two months after arriving in Israel, young Jewish immigrant dons IDF uniform Yehuda Medwin, 24, has already seen some battlefields […]
http://www.tnr.com/article/tel-aviv-journal/95834/arab-spring-saudi-arabia-israel-turkey-qadaffi Or, better yet, “my ass.” The Arab Spring has been with us for nearly three quarters of a year. This is not a long time as history goes. But the annual flowers of the spare land have long ago vanished into the crude, mostly gritty sand that is the Middle East. It’s not, though, […]
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/the_futile_search_for_mr._goodbar The Pundit Primary is getting silly, as it usually does at this point in the chase, but fortunately it won’t last much longer. Relief will be arriving just in time. The pundits (and some of the pollsters) are waiting for Mr. Goodbar, the elusive good man in a singles bar. They’re hankering for the […]
Happy New Year, 5772, http://www.theettingerreport.com> www.TheEttingerReport.com “Israel Hayom” newsletter, Oct. 2, 2011 http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=576 Time is running in Israel’s favor, in contrast with conventional wisdom, as evidenced by the “global economic walk” and irrespective of the “global political talk.” At the outset of the Jewish New Year, 5772, Israel’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $240BN – […]
http://sarahhonig.com/2011/10/07/editorial-shechtman%e2%80%99s-kudos/
“We – both as Jews and as Israelis – are too few to figure even as a marginal statistical error in world population figures, yet we persevere and excel despite matchless adversity. Shechtman’s own road to the Nobel embodies our oft-downplayed collective tenacity.
When Shechtman first published his theories, they were much too nonconformist and revolutionary for their time. He suffered merciless ridicule for his ideas. Ridicule transformed into out-and-out hostility. Shechtman was roundly maligned in the global scientific community. Even ostensible friends distanced themselves from him.
But in science at least – as distinct perhaps from statecraft and international diplomacy – truth eventually has the last word. Today the production of hundreds of crucial synthetic materials hinges upon Shechtman’s discoveries.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/07/from-israels-bus-300-affair-to-the-al-awlaki-assassination/ From Israel’s Bus 300 Affair to the Al-Awlaki Assassination It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the Israeli “Bus 300” affair is once again popping up in the media just days after the al-Qaeda terrorist with the US passport, Anwar al-Awlaki, was liquidated by a drone in Yemen. Many of the points being raised […]
This week the President of France, Nicky Sakozy, announced that the
very notion of a “Jewish State” is a silly idea. See the report here:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/148556
Well, it occurs to me that if you REALLY want to find a truly silly
idea, it is the idea of a French state.
I reprint here an older posting of mine:
http://www.meforum.org/62/land-for-peace-the-french-solution
Land for Peace: The French Solution
by Steven Plaut
Middle East Quarterly
June 2000, p. 96
May It Be a Sweet Year
http://badrachel.blogspot.com/
To the Jews of Jerusalem, Holy City, whose sovereignty over the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state of Israel is disputed and oppugned, though it is as ancient as King David’s: May it be a sweet year.
To the Jews of Judea and Samaria, whose every stud hammered and floor tile laid in that magnificent, empty lunar landscape summons the disapproving scrutiny of allies and the menacing outrage of foes, and who must contemplate the possibility of expulsion—or worse—every day for the sake of a “peace” with a people whose declared war against them has never abated: May it be a sweet year.
To the Jews of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva, Sderot, Sde Boker, Mitzpeh Ramon, Eilat, Netanya, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tsfat, Rosh Pina, Tiberias, Mahanayim, Kiryat Shmona, and all the kibbutzim and moshavim of the Negev and the Galil and the Golan—ha am im ha Golan!—who live every day under a death warrant issued by Israel-hating nations passing increasingly sophisticated weaponry into the hands of their proxies, Israel’s bloody, baleful neighbors to the south and west, north and east, for whom even the sacrifice of their own children is tolerable—worse, a cause for celebration—in the name of destroying Jews: May it be a sweet year.
To the Jew of Gaza, Gilad Shalit, whose Rosh Hashana this year will be spent, as have the last five, imprisoned in a Hamas hell-hole: May it be a sweet year.
To all the Jews of Israel, surrounded, admonished, maligned, despised, threatened, condemned, attacked, wounded, murdered: May it be a sweet year.
And to the Jews of the United States whose astoundingly self-negating souls are fixed as if by bolts to the chilling heart of a president and a party and a politics progressively ill-disposed toward Zion: Please, wake up, wrench out those bolts, free yourselves, and tell the truth, before the Jewish homeland is destroyed by the erosive thrust of its friends and the blazing bombs of its enemies. And may it be a sweet year.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/279256 Anwar Al-Awlaki’s American Journey He was born in a land of freedom, tolerance and opportunity. He wanted none of it. It is a paradox of modern times: We are committed to diversity yet have enormous difficulty imagining people who actually are different. Americans and Europeans prize peace and, on that basis, assume peace has […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
“Being alone in the Muslim world is not a bad thing morally, though it may be a bad position to be in defensively. That sense of isolation is wearying and dehumanizing, an endless horizon that seems as if it could be bridged with only a little effort. But that is an illusion.On a map Israel seems isolated, but in truth it is the Muslim world which is isolated. It is the Muslim world that has carved itself up into tiny enclaves, each sect, each people, each street divided against itself. The chaos in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya are a reminder of the internal fragmentation and isolation of the Muslim world. An isolation so pervasive that it cannot be overcome except through temporary alliances against a common foe. An ultimate “Other”.
Israel has not been isolated by its choices, but by the cultural failures of its neighbors. As long as its neighbors deal with their own instability through war and tyranny in the name of collective identities that they cannot sustain, that will not change.”
