Members of congress should experience what Israelis’ lives are like. The Bomb Shelter Museum will be in D.C. July 22.
Even people who are closely following the news about the current conflict in Gaza and Israel tend to focus on the rockets, the bombs and the casualties, but few focus on what it is like to race to a bomb shelter, and fewer still consider what it is like inside those shelters, for the lucky ones we make it to one.
Artists 4 Israel, a collective of creative geniuses who approach issues differently than do you or I, saw that gap and have done something quite inventive to fill it. They built a Bomb Shelter Museum, and then they took it on the road.
For those lucky enough never to hear the “Tzeva Adom” (Code Red) alert and have to race to the nearest shelter, the Bomb Shelter Museum provides the opportunity to approximate that situation.
Craig Dershowitz is one of the founders of Artists 4 Israel. He explained to The Jewish Press that the BSM is a multi-media, fully immersive experience that simulates living through a rocket attack in Sderot or Ashkelon or, sadly, pretty much throughout Israel.
The idea occurred to A4I when they visited Sderot during Operation Cast Lead to paint murals on the bomb shelters there. One of the artists was really shaken by the shelters.
Dershowitz explains: “He had always considered the shelters to be safe havens and, after visiting them, he realize that they were traumatizing and fearful places. He wanted the world to experience it. So Artists 4 Israel joined with an installation artist and a lighting artist.”
The artists collaborated and, through a “mind-blowing artistic process,” the Bomb Shelter Museum was born.
The experience starts with the Tzeva Adom going off. People rush into the BSM. Once inside, they watch videos of rocket attacks and hear the screaming and crying all around them. The Bomb Shelter shakes, and smells fill the space. It is a serious dose of the barebones, stark, painful reality.
Maybe it’s the tight space, maybe it’s the loud sounds, or perhaps the darkness combined with the videos and the engagement of various senses, but the combination creates an experience that profoundly affects nearly everyone who goes through it.
“Most people,” Dershowitz explains, “leave the shelter physically affected – some cry, others are ashen, others are weirdly exhilarated. Not with joy, but because they have had an emotional and visceral connection to a truth they had never before considered.”
Lionel Leventhal is the chairman of the board of Artists 4 Israel. Leventhal said one of the animating principles behind Artists 4 Israel, and in particular behind the Bomb Shelter Museum, is that “children should never be collateral damage of a political disagreement.”
For terrorists, the death of innocent children is irrelevant. In a society that promotes martyrdom as the ultimate sign of success, the death of innocent children can sometimes even be seen as a public relations blessing.
In every action, intent is paramount. There should never be a moral equivalence painted between the deliberate killing of civilians, and a retaliation that tragically leads to casualties among civilians.
There is, however, one small difference: in the Middle East, reporters are threatened, except in Israel. Their choice becomes a simple one: promote the Palestinian point of view or stop working in the West Bank. Keep the eye of the camera dirty or lose your job. This show should not go on.
“This whole conflict,” the foreign journalist said over coffee, “is a prime time show; the Palestinians provide us with the more romantic story.”
Terrorism is a show; it needs a producer and a distributor. Without a certain complicity from the international media, terrorism would not be so effective and might even disappear altogether.
While Hamas is raining rockets and missiles on the Israeli civilian population, and in return, is suffering a high level of destruction and hundreds of casualties as a result of collateral damage, one might ask: “What is the purpose?” The same question is also true of suicide terrorism. The genuine aim seems to be to gather sympathy while terrorizing the enemy, with an audience on an unlimited number of channels.
Casualties, in this show, whether Arab or Israeli, always play for the same side of the conflict: the one they hope will gain the most sympathy for the victims. These are usually Hamas and other terror organizations. In this round, they are mostly of Muslim origin, originate in the Palestinian territories and are funded by Iran and other countries with oil revenues
If a rocket succeeds in going through Israel’s anti-missile defense and causing damage to Israel, Hamas is “showing its strength,” by hitting the Jewish state. If a retaliation by Israel sadly results in the death of Arab civilians, Hamas is “showing how inhuman Israel is,” and therefore how much Israel deserves the world’s opprobrium. For Hamas and similar terror groups, therefore, the “show” is always a win-win.
Why is the dirty eye of the camera always playing for the same actors? Let us forget antisemitism, which obviously plays a role in this current equation. Many media outlets even belong to Jews, but they use the same images, often from the same point of view.
I started to write about the coverage we’ve been getting all across the board, radio, TV, newspapers, but then came word about the IDF casualties in the snake pits of Gaza and nothing made sense any more. A nation mourns. Evil had a good day. But Amalek will fall. Israel will prevail.
This is Israel. These are all our children.
I remember a park on Aliya Street in Haifa outside the Naval base. It was tranquil and some old-timers were reading the paper. A child ran out from somewhere and nearly ran into the traffic. The elderly man with whom I’d been gabbing rushed over, sternly brought the child to safety, disciplined him, and then lovingly caressed the child and kissed him on the cheek.
“Your grandson?” I asked.
“No. This is Israel. These are all our children.”
So to any one with a Jewish heart, this hurts, the news we’ve been getting. They are all our kids. I summon Christian hearts as well as you too suffer from this plague.
As for the coverage, it has been strange. I have been reading about writers in the Arab press siding against Hamas and rooting for Israel.
So they too have awakened to the pestilence that has invaded their borders, “tribe against tribe, greedy, barbarous and cruel.” (Lawrence of Arabia)
What, then, is to be said of the non-Arab press? I could give you the grand tour, but prefer to focus on the BBC – the BBC because it reaches millions around the world.
When I turned from journalism to writing novels, the work, of course, was called fiction. That’s what you’ve been getting from the BBC. Fiction.
The Patriots of Murrieta — on The Glazov Gang
Civil Rights Activist Ernie White sheds light on the pro-U.S. citizens standing up to an invasion.
This Week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Civil Rights Activist Ernie White who is one of the organizers of the pro-American demonstrations in Murrieta. He came on the show to discuss The Patriots of Murrieta, shedding light on the invasion on our southern border, Obama’s role in the catastrophe, the grassroots activism of patriots in Murrieta, and much, much more:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-patriots-of-murrieta-on-the-glazov-gang/
Texas to Take Action on Obama’s Border Crisis
Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Monday afternoon that he is sending 1,000 members of the Texas National Guard to the U.S.-Mexican border. “Over the years I have repeatedly called on the federal government to live up to its responsibility of protecting this great nation by securing the border,” said Perry, who added that he will “not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor.”
Under assault might be an understatement. According to Perry, more than 203,000 illegal aliens responsible for committing more than 640,000 crimes, including 3000 homicides, have been booked into Texas county jails since 2008. He further pointed out that the thousands of unaccompanied minors apprehended crossing the border comprise less than 20 percent of total influx and while enforcement agents are giving humanitarian aid to these children, “drug cartels, human traffickers and individual criminals are exploiting this tragedy for their own criminal opportunities.”
Perry’s contention about the percentage of children that illegally gain entrance to the United States was given substantial credence by the Obama administration itself. In a late Friday afternoon news dump aimed at minimizing media coverage, U.S. Border Patrol data revealed that while the number of unaccompanied alien children crossing the border has doubled to 57,525 in the nine month period from the beginning of FY2013 to the present, what the agency refers to as “family units” has seen a 493 percent increase from 9,350 to 55,420 over the same period. As the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro explains, the far more explosive growth of these family units “has been hidden by White House and agency officials, who have tried to portray the influx as a wave of children fleeing abuse and violence.” He further notes this portrayal “has been picked up and spread by Democratic legislators, reporters and bloggers” in an effort to mute the public’s anger regarding the Obama administration’s failure to secure the border.
In other words, a de facto invasion becomes a “humanitarian” crisis.
Perry was forced to address that portrayal on Sunday with Fox News’s Brit Hume who wondered if sending the National Guard to the border would actually work when children who have “undergone these harrowing journeys to escape from the most desperate conditions in their home countries” are confronted by troops “who won’t shoot them and can’t arrest them.” Perry replied that Hume was talking about “two different things” and that it was necessary to “send the message back now so that we can staunch (sic) the bleeding” even as the humanitarian crisis that already exists is addressed. “The issue is with being able to send that message,” Perry said. “The visual of it is more important. We know that. We listen to those conversations–or, I should say, conversations are being monitored with calls back to Central America–and the message is, ‘Hey, come on up here, everything is great, they’re taking care of us,’ and that needs to stop.”
Despite the cries of furious hipsters waving cardboard signs stained with fake blood, there is no ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza. No more than there was when the US began bombing the Taliban.
The last act of ethnic cleansing took place in the summer of 2005 when the Israeli government gave in to international pressure by forcibly evicting all the Jews from the Gaza Strip. Even the graves were dug up.
The media, which had been up in arms when Israel had evicted 400 Hamas terrorists, had nothing but applause for the forced ethnic cleansing of thousands of Jewish families. The synagogues they left behind were also torched to the applause of the same media now filling the airwaves with fake outrage.
CNN described one synagogue as “very controversial because it is the Jewish synagogue.” The Los Angeles Times wrote of Muslims venting “their fury over the occupation by laying waste to the synagogues.” “Youths set fire to synagogues and other symbols of the hated occupation,” the London Times scribbled. The Age tried for the poetic with “Burning synagogue lights Gaza dawn”.
The Nazi Minister of Propaganda had written under similar circumstances, “I wish to return to my hotel and see a glow as red as blood. The synagogue is burning.” The mainstream media had erased any distinction between themselves and the Kristallnacht propaganda of Joseph Goebbels
The ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza made the Hamas takeover possible. The current conflict is rooted in that tragic act of appeasement.
And it wasn’t only the Jews who suffered.
Under Muslim Brotherhood rule, the Christian population of Gaza was cut in half. The Baptists nearly disappeared after a Christian bookstore was bombed twice and its manager was clubbed and shot.
What happened to the Christians of Gaza was the same thing that had been happening to Christians across the Middle East under Islamic rule. While the media is focusing on Gaza, ISIS has just finished ethnically cleansing the Christians of Mosul by demanding that the non-Muslim residents of this Iraqi city convert to Islam, pay Jizya or die.
Periodically so-called “buzz words” and “buzz phrases” become fashionable. Of late, the concept of “wage equality” has been bandied about by members of the administration, politicians and some media personalities.
In point of fact, on July 15, 2014, the publication “Mail Online” published a report with a self- explanatory title: “America’s 1 percenters are even richer than we thought: Richest actually control 37 percent of U.S. Wealth”
It has been said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Similarly, the term wage “equality” is an emotionally evocative term that is viewed as something good and worthwhile to achieve. Generally this is the proper perspective, but of course it is important to pose some significant questions. For example, “How will equality be attained?” It is also critical to understand what baseline will be established for achieving equality. (Will wages be increased or will some wages be decreased to bring about this change? If, in fact, some wages will be lowered, whose wages will be lowered?)
Finally, as we will see, sometimes inequality in wages may not be a bad thing, after all.
Before we consider the words many politicians use, we would be wise to consider two important quotes from George Orwell, the author of “1984” and other significant literary works.
“Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Having been forewarned let us now consider the definition of “equality.”
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines equality this way:
equal·i·ty
noun \i-ˈkwä-lə-tē\
: the quality or state of being equal : the quality or state of having the same rights, social status, etc.
The term equality is often equated with fairness and an entire government agency, the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) was established to combat discrimination against protected groups of workers who are treated disparately (unequally) because of factors such as race, religion, gender, disabilities or age.
Even young children inherently understand the concept of fairness — think of how many times a frustrated child is likely to complain bitterly that something or someone is “not fair!”
Recently various talk shows have discussed how the top one percent of Americans control a huge amount of wealth. Last week, the Los Angeles Times posted a video, “John Oliver tackles income inequality on ‘Last Week Tonight’“ in which Oliver spent considerable time on this issue.
America has made great strides to create a level playing field to provide all people with equal protection under our laws — indeed, the goal of the civil rights movement and the laws it inspired was to provide equal protection under our laws for all people, especially black Americans, going back to the issue of slavery, with equal treatment in the criminal justice system, where employment opportunities and where housing issues are concerned.
In short, equality has taken on the cloak of being, as the saying goes, “As American as apple pie.” Simply uttering the word “equality” evokes the emotional image of an American flag billowing in a gentle breeze with a clear blue sky serving as a backdrop.
Obviously if “equality” is good, “inequality” is bad. In most situations this is certainly true.
However, when Obama and other politicians, as well as talk show hosts, bring up wage inequality, they don’t ever discuss whose salaries will be used as the baseline against which paychecks should be compared as efforts are made to eliminate or reduce wage inequality. People tend to see and hear what they want to see and hear. It is akin to a Rorschach or inkblot test where the test subject is supposed to describe what they see in a blotch of ink.
The question that is never asked (or answered) is, “What groups are to be made more equal?” Today the average CEO of major corporations often earn salaries that are hundreds of times greater than the wages paid to the workers earning the least money in those corporations where, just a few decades ago, this disparity in wages was far smaller. It is naïve and, indeed, wishful thinking to believe that the push for “wage equality” is about narrowing the gap between the CEOs of most companies and the other employees of those companies, thereby expanding the middle class and increasing the standard of living for American middle class workers and their families.
In point of fact, the goal of the majority of advocates for the reduction of “wage inequality” is exactly the opposite: to lower the wages of American middle class workers and greatly reduce the gap between the middle class Americans and Americans living below the poverty line.
You will find proof of this in the prepared testimony provided by Alan Greenspan, when he testified before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee five years ago. We will get to his testimony shortly. His statements unequivocally dispel any doubt about the true goal of reducing wage inequality, the engineered destruction of America’s middle class.
The American Dream is inextricably linked to a vibrant and upwardly mobile middle class. The incentives for the creation of the middle class are created by an element of wage inequality. If this is confusing, consider that it is expected that generally, more highly skilled or educated workers should expect to earn more money than their lesser educated or skilled counterparts in the workforce.
This makes perfect sense and has, for generations, provided a strong incentive for American students, spurring them on to remain in school to obtain college degrees and even graduate degrees. This is why most people think of the money, time and effort expended in pursuit of advanced degrees or enhanced skills as an important investment in their futures. You could say that this is a case of “learn more to earn more.”
Where prospects for Americans, even those with the advanced degrees, achieving the “American Dream” in this economic era are concerned, a four-word phrase sums it up concisely:
Don’t count on it!
In December 2011 “Dan Rather Reports” aired a disconcerting hour-long report, “No Thanks for Everything” which reported on how highly educated and experienced American computer programmers are being replaced by programmers from India.
On May 15, 2007 a four-minute infuriating video was aired on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on CNN. It features an immigration lawyer’s conference in which lawyers were being coached to “not find qualified U.S. workers!” The lecturer is identified in the video as being Lawrence M. Lebowitz, the Vice President of Marketing for the firm of Cohen & Grigsby.
Contrary to international rules of warfare, Hamas has commandeered a large hospital in Gaza City as its “de facto headquarters,” the Washington Post reported.
Buried eight paragraphs in, The Post‘s correspondent, William Booth, wrote on July 15:
“At the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, crowds gathered to throw shoes and eggs at the Palestinian Authority’s health minister, who represents the crumbling ‘unity government’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The minister was turned away before he reached the hospital, which has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”
Last week, The Post also reported, and also included near the end of an article, how Hamas was hiding rockets inside of a mosque, also against international rules of war. On Friday, buried toward’s the end of The Post’s dispatch from the front, one of its correspondents reported actually seeing rockets being moved into the mosque during Thursday’s five-hour humanitarian ceasefire:
“During the lull, a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.”
According to international rules of military engagement, civilian public and religious buildings cannot to be used to shield weapons, but that has been a long-held Hamas tactic in Gaza.
On Thursday, UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, said it discovered 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school it operated in Gaza.
UNRWA said the rockets were discovered during a “regular inspection” and that it immediately “informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects in order to preserve the safety and security of the school.”
The UNRWA came under criticism on social media for handing the rockets back to the “relevant parties,” who readers interpreted as being the Hamas militants who hid the arms in the school.
http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/IDF-shows-photos-of-alleged-Hamas-rocket-sites-dug-into-hospital-mosques-368307
IDF shows photos of alleged Hamas rocket sites dug into hospital, mosques
The images were taken from the northeastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaia, which was the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.
Hamas fires rockets from Wafa Hospital in the Gaza neighborhood of Shejaia Photo: IDF SPOKESMAN’S OFFICE
The IDF on Monday released declassified photos showing how Hamas uses hospitals, mosques, and playgrounds as rocket launch sites.
The images were taken from the northeastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaia, which was the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.
Israel’s army said it had been targeting militants in the clashes, charging that they had fired rockets from Shejaia and built tunnels and command centers there. The army said it had warned civilians to leave two days earlier.
Sounds of explosions rocked Gaza City through the morning, with residents reporting heavy fighting in Shejaia and the adjacent Zeitoun neighborhood. Locals also said there was heavy shelling in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip.
“It seems we are heading towards a massacre in Beit Hanoun. They drove us out of our houses with their fire. We carried our kids and ran away,” said Abu Ahmed, he did not want to give his full name for fear of Israeli reprisals.
The Islamist group Hamas and its allies fired multiple missiles across southern and central Israel, and heavy fighting was reported in the north and east of Gaza.
Non-stop attacks lifted the Palestinian death toll to 496, including almost 100 children, since fighting started on July 8, Gaza health officials said. Israel says 18 of its soldiers have also died along with two civilians.
Despite worldwide calls for a cessation of the worst bout of Palestinian-Israeli violence for more than five years, Israeli ministers ruled out any swift truce.
“This is not the time to talk of a ceasefire,” said Gilad Erdan, communications minister and a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner security cabinet.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/55180#.U8xixZD7uuk.yahoomail
Lethal Narratives
Many of you are drowning in floods of information, can’t keep up with your email correspondence, don’t have time to read the best compilations let alone the middling ones, not even time for the “must reads” sent by trusted sources… But I encourage you to buy and read my book, Al Dura: Long Range Ballistic Myth. It sheds original light on events that are turning our world upside down, with the Middle East as the pivot. While Israeli civilians run for the bunkers to escape the murderous intentions of Hamas rockets and Israeli soldiers confront Hamas mujahidin on their own territory in the confines of the Gaza Strip, “international opinion” has mobilized for another round of lethal narrative warfare. On the third day of an all-out Hamas offensive against Israeli civilians, the lethal narrative kicked in. Today it has reached the height of frenzy. And Western media have gone berserk, in step with the raging crowd.
Metula News Agency [Cessez-le-feu humanitaire (info # 022007/14) ] reports today that several journalists that wanted to leave Gaza were blocked at the Erez Crossing by Hamas operatives. Why? Might they fear that once outside Gaza, journalists would report the truth about what is happening there? Western media fervently defends the fighting forces of a jihad movement that would just as easily behead them as enslave them, but would never allow them to report freely as they are doing today. Even though they abuse that freedom, they enjoy it.
The question is not “why do they act against their own interests”? It’s like asking a gun why it shoots bullets at this or that target. A gun is a weapon in the hands of a gunman. The media, academia, international organizations, charities…the list is endless of entities and institutions that have become weapons of 21st century jihad conquest. Israel, a democratic nation, is the target of an all-out genocidal assault from the Hamas branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and one week after it mobilizes in self-defense, Kill-the-Jews stampedes are on the march worldwide, and the facts have disappeared from mass media. We are assailed by something that is not reportage. It is not biased, one-sided, twisted; it is non-existent, and it fills the eyes and ears for hours on end. It’s not news, not journalism, it’s lethal narrative. A weapon. And it works.
Kill-the-Jews stampede in Paris on July 13, 2014
My brief article published in Tablet http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/179169/anti-israel-protestors-attack-paris-synagogues was based on information available at the time. When the July 14th holiday weekend ended I started to receive eyewitness accounts from Web sites, Jewish radio, and my own sources. It became apparent that the original Agence France Presse release, used by outlets worldwide, was concocted in lethal narrative format. Now we have videos of the “demonstration” from start to middle to semi-finish at Place de la Bastille that reveal its true nature. It was not a peaceful gathering slightly tarnished by a few rowdies at the last minute. [annotated links to videos below] Distinguished members of the Jewish community who were in the synagogue, including the Chief Rabbi of France, testified to the violence of the attempted intrusion. A [bad] translation of a text by a member of the congregation is posted on Tablet.
Interviewed on radio Communauté Juive, a peace & love novelist, Valerie Zeccati, eloquently described the mobs that fanned out from the Bastille into the nearby Marais: they were filled with murderous rage, they wanted to kill, they were thrilled by their own blood lust, the masses of demonstrators applauded them as they ran screaming, “We’re going to smash the Jews!” The “imam” on the sound truck declared “No provocation, and segued to a resounding allahou akhbar followed by other blood lust cries.
