Happy Nakba Day!

Michael L.

I love Nakba Day.

I understand that that many Arabs are not happy about the fact that the Jewish people escaped from the Islamic system that we call dhimmitude after thirteen centuries of second and third-class non-citizenship under Arab-Muslim imperial rule... but I could hardly be more pleased.

The Muslim Brotherhood is unhappy with Jewish liberation from Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

Hamas is unhappy with Jewish liberation from Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

The Islamic State is unhappy with Jewish liberation from Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

Islamic Jihad is unhappy with Jewish liberation from Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

Boko Haram is unhappy with Jewish liberation from Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

Speaking for myself, I could not be happier or more satisfied in the rightness and justice of the failure of Islamic rule over the Jews.

Nakba Day is one of my favorite holidays, but my favorite holidays are generally concerned with issues of liberation.  I love Thanksgiving, for example, because it represents the roots of the United States and, thus, the liberation of millions of people from European authoritarianism and monarchy.  I love Passover for much the same reason.  It represents the freedom of the Jewish people from persecution by non-Jews, which is why we drink our wine in a lounging position.

Slaves do not get to lounge.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in the United States serves much the same purpose for African-Americans.  It represents their ongoing efforts over centuries to free themselves first from slavery and then from Jim Crow and finally from de facto racism.

It is all about liberalism and freedom.

But Nakba Day is really something special.

It is the day that the Palestinian-Arab losers in their war against the Jews get to whine at one another - and everyone else - just how unfair it is that the Jews succeeded in freeing ourselves from their bigotry and persecution and domination over thirteen centuries since that Muhammad fellow started chopping off Jewish heads.

I think that we make a mistake when we merely leave it to the Palestinian-Arabs to celebrate the defeat of their aggression against us.

I think that we should embrace Nakba Day as a Jewish day of celebration, as well.

Our Arab brothers and sisters should not celebrate alone.  We should join them.

The question is, what form should Nakba Day take for the Jewish people?  I am thinking of a celebration along the lines of New Years Eve.  Lots of partying and fireworks and singing of joyous songs among friends.

What do you think?

Unfortunately, I will be on a plane heading home tomorrow and will miss out on most of the festivities.

I very much hope that you guys enjoy yourself and if you have any suggestions for how Nakba Day should be celebrated by Jews, please share.

Maybe by this time next year we can agree on the rituals of the holiday.

Perhaps falafel can be part of the traditional food-stuffs of Nakba Day for the Jewish people.

Peace to you, please, my friends.

Good friends and great friends

Sar Shalom

In the controversy over Pamela Geller, much has been made about Geller's pro-Israel bona fides and her willingness to call a spade a spade when it comes to Islamic radicalism. It is true that Geller is a good friend of Israel. However, I doubt that she is a great friend of Israel. To understand why, one would need to know the difference between a good friend of Israel and a great friend.

A good friend of Israel is someone who supports Israel in any conceivable circumstance. This characterizes Pamela Geller, George W. Bush, and most of the Republican candidates from president.

A great friend of Israel is someone who induces others to support Israel. A prime example of inducing others to support Israel is Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel which led Kasim Hafeez to turn 180 degrees from instigating on behalf the Palestinians and Jew-hatred to full-fledged support for Israel.

This is a difficult measure to apply. In assessing someone's support for Israel, one only needs to read what they write for varying situations. However, to directly assess how someone affects others' support for Israel, one needs to survey people's changes in opinions about Israel and identify what information influenced their opinions. In this sense, the example of Kasim Hafeez provides a clear case of one individual's writings inducing support for Israel because Hafeez repeatedly says that it was reading Dershowitz that convinced him that everything he had been taught about Israel and Jews was a pack of lies.

However, there are some principles to apply in order to make an indirect assessment of one's inducement of support for Israel. The first principle is to realize that what makes Israel-supporters feel good about their support for Israel would not necessarily make Israel-opponents feel uncomfortable about their opposition to Israel or even be convincing to fence-sitters. An example of words providing the former but not the latter is when Bush declared, "[Ariel] Sharon is a man of peace." For a supporter of Israel, that is a heartening sentiment, however, for any non-supporter of Israel whose source of news about the Middle East was a constant drumbeat about how Sharon was a war-monger, the only information gleaned from that statement was the Bush was out of touch.

What's needed instead is to provide incontrovertible facts. In this department, anything about Hamas would not qualify because its relevance would depend on Hamas' platform being applicable to Palestinian society more broadly, which however accurate it may be is not an incontrovertible fact. What is incontrovertible is the fact that the Palestinian Authority is engaged in an anti-normalization crusade directed at ordinary Palestinians who meet with Israeli Jews for any purpose other than "resistance." Combine this with the principle that does not require any partiality in the conflict that peace requires good will between the peoples, and you have something that may convince people. Such a line of argument may not succeed, but continuing the current line of argument, in the hopes that repeating it often enough from enough sources would convince the as-yet unconvinced, would be like Westmoreland saying that air raids had killed many Viet Cong (along with many innocent South Vietnamese), but have not the Viet Cong so what's needed is more air raids and more sweeps in order to kill a larger number of Viet Cong which would do the trick in subduing the Viet Cong.

Pope Francis Recognizes anti-Semitic Genocidal Organizations

Michael L.

The Pope has recognized the PLO and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah and their various sub-organizations as equal to Israel in legitimacy.

This is a significant turning point and will require strength in response.

My expectation is that Israel will equivocate and knuckle-under because our numbers are too small and our supporters are too weak.

Western-left Jews will do or say almost nothing, because, for the most part, they're too "chicken-shit" to challenge Arab and European defamation of the Jewish State or of the Jewish people.

The reason for this is because they tend to believe that Arabs and Israel-Haters have a good point.

This is because they came to accept the Arab victim-hood narrative and because they still want to kiss the feet of their progressive-left friends and because they absolutely loathe right-leaning Jews who are strongly supportive of Israel.

The truth, however, is that the Jewish people are in the process of being run over by much larger forces because our primary source of integrity, Israel, is being hounded by much larger forces, including Europe, the United States (under this president), and, needless to say, the entire Muslim world.

To European Jews:  If you can go, you should go.  Europe is hostile territory and things seem to be getting worse.  There are only a few places on this planet where Jews, as a people, can live without significant hostility.  These places, for the moment, include North America and Australia.   They do not include Great Britain.

In the Middle East, of course, Obama and the West has given the signal to Arabs that it's Jew Killing Season.

They honestly think that 300 to 400 million Arabs have every right to go after 6 million Jews because they tell themselves that those Jews were mean to the "Palestinians."

To American Jews:  Your faith in Barack Obama was misguided from the start, as was mine.  One thing that differentiates you from your more thoughtful co-religionists is that some of us were not so ideologically blinkered as to fail to acknowledge that which is before our nose.  Now that the Pope has turned on Israel we can expect American Catholic support for the Jewish people to erode, with the full passive-aggressive support of the American President until, hopefully, the next election.

To Israeli Jews:  Declare the final borders of the State of Israel and defend yourself without apology.

Eliminate Hamas and point to their charter, which calls specifically for the genocide of the Jewish people on religious grounds.

I am back next week

Michael L.



Terrible picture of me, but a terrific picture of a 30 pound striped bass.

This was a trophy fish in need of taxidermy fame... but I let it go.

This fish still swims in Tims Ford Lake in Tennessee outside of Lynchburg.

{Maybe you can catch it!}

By the way, the Jack Daniel tour is more interesting than you might think.

Our tour guide, Ron, was hysterical and pretty brilliant, actually.

And, if you know the American South, you can easily see how the man represents.

That guy is Lynchburg and the South in the best way... educated, laid-back, and hairy-scary.

Bosch Fawstin: the winner of the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas

Michael Lumish

{With thanks to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.}

These idiots gave their lives to prevent anyone from seeing this depiction of Muhammad.

Yet, there it is.

I wonder what percentage of their friends and relatives think that their sacrifice as shaheeds or šuhadā or martyrs was worth it.

Whiplash

This was a terrific film.

It is what I suppose one might call a morality play with an ambiguous ending.

Essentially it is the story of a young and talented drummer at an elite music conservatory and his relationship with a driven, but abusive instructor.

J. K. Simmons of Farmers Insurance fame plays the sadistic teacher and did, to my mind, an absolutely terrific job.

But, y'know, look at that face.

It takes a special kind of person to have a face like that, I think.

It's a face Walter Matthau would love.

Anyway, Laurie and I are off to the southland tomorrow, so I will be in and out.

And don't worry, VB, I have not forgotten you.

{Patience is a virtue.}

Besides, there are perfectly innocent Largemouth Bass in Tennessee starting to get nervous.