Letter From Israel

elinor        אלינור   

   

                                                                                                                     

Australia, August 2014

Just came back from Australia.  Departed Israel during a ‘temporary’ truce in the war between Hamas and the Iron Dome; returned to a ‘permanent’ truce. No one knows exactly what that means yet but children are playing in schoolyards, so it can’t be all bad.

If there is an experience more stunning than leaving Israel during wartime and landing anywhere in Australia, I haven’t had it yet.  There had been efforts to bomb Ben Gurion airport just days before our departure.  Leaving on El Al, I realized I was undertaking what one might call a tightening of certain muscles, even though El Al is now equipped with anti-missile deflectors, or so we are told. Looking around the cabin I can guarantee that I was not the only one doing such exercises.

The route of the flight was weird.  It usually goes over one of the charming countries to the east of Israel, but this time we headed right down the Red Sea and over India.  Good that India is still talking to us. The path to Bangkok, our first stop, might have headed over Russia but no one wants to tangle with Russia these days, so other choices were made.  At that point, I fell asleep, figuring if they don’t know how to get there, hell with it.

If one is a member of MATMID, El Al’s cheery passenger club, one can acquire up-graded seating.  We were seated in the forward cabin in two seats right in the middle of the /\-shaped space.  If you enjoy being stepped on, becoming part of other people’s conversations and the local authority on whether or not the lavs are occupied, it’s a great place to sit, although without a chair back or a bit of unoccupied floor to use for ones bits and pieces, it has its drawbacks. 

Apparently we were sterling passengers because on the way back, we were upgraded twice during the same flight.  The woman ahead of me said she refused to have a mother and baby as her seat-mates, so we were shifted to accommodate her mishegass.  I never knew one could do that!  The second time was best.  Lots of leg-room and for the first time in years, I sat by the window. Had to watch my head when I stood up, though. 

Anyway, Australia.  Absolutely amazing place, so very laid back.  No one checks handbags, or cares if you speak Arabic, but don’t try to bring anything into that country which the cute little Customs dogs don’t like—that’s when you’re off to jail instead of heading for sand and sea. And it’s really funny for me to hear Sorry, I didn’t understand your accent.  Sometimes it takes two tries for me to understand that sentence!

At this time of year our usual destination, Melbourne, is freezing cold, so we went northward to a small town, usually warmer.  This year it was truly awesome, with only the most intrepid surfers out in the ocean; wind to blow a zipped jacket right off; days of rain and temperatures lower than those in the south, with phone calls from relatives and close friends that began Greetings from sunny Melbourne—and it was.  Tant pis, I thought, so what.  I’ve left both a Middle East war and an over-heated summer behind. I win.

cross posted geoffff's joint

Another Reason I Hate Kos

Doodad

I can remember when people of good will cared about stuff like innocent people being beheaded, dispossessed and trampled on. Some still do but not Kos, or it would appear, Kossacks.

We've spent billions arming our Middle East allies to the teeth. They are the ones directly threatened by Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL. Not us.
So why is it us that have to do the fighting? It's their backyard, but they can watch comfortably as the United States bleeds trillions more to bail them out? Nice gig, if you can get it.
Let those directly threatened by Islamic State put their skin in the game.

The Racists Never Miss An Opportunity

geoffff

Have a look at this very typical slice of muck from the Australian university based academic left and tell me that Australia and the West is not facing a crisis of belligerent over the top racism sourced in the publicly funded institutions and individuals with which we entrust the advanced education of our kids. 

Something has to be done about these people. This thing has just got too serious to ignore any longer. Remember this is a terrible situation that is not without precedent. In the 1920's Australian and Western universities were stuffed to the flood lines with academic admirers of fascism. Not just the usual suspects in the Arts and Humanities departments by the way. The leading scientific academic in the US in the 1920's  was an adherent of the discipline of eugenics and who advocated the "humane" euthanasia of people who were deemed by him to be genetically sub standard.

He recommended gas chambers.

He was the US Chief Scientist.  This was a decade before the rise of Nazi ideology. These academics laid the foundations for Nazism.

My comments, and that of some typical lefty dickhead interloper, follow.   

Rivers Of Devilry, Oceans Of Pluck

By Liz Conor

Keywords: 

joan rivers

liz conor

robin williams

Celebrities are only immortal because they’ve managed to patent their own inimitable afterlife in the form of electronic wakes, writes Liz Conor.

If Robin William’s death occasioned much public angst about suicide and anxiety, including reams - more accurately prolixed scrollbars - of confessional identification (who could resist) Joan Rivers’ decease will surely cathect much schadenfreude on the dangers of endoscopy.

Or not. Celebrity deaths come thick and fast. One could be mistaken for thinking they’re knocked off with less impunity than… people who’ve recently died in mass atrocities it would be too offensive to name here.

But of course dead celebrities’ disproportionate media dissipation is due to the capacity of fame, on death, to funnel a lifetime of public exposure into one photovoltaic cell of reckoning.

Since they tend to sneak up on us, and rather imperiously can’t be scheduled to the news cycle, cultural pundits have to sit up to the wee hours compiling biograbs of their most memorable moments, stenographing as best they can from YouTube.

All try to fathom why this particular personage assumed the significance they did in our lives, that is, how we came to know them better than our own neighbours.

Once the dead luminary’s work over decades has been distilled into a clever epithet their ‘unique contribution’ then strap-lines the meaning of some notable aspect of them, say, plastic surgery.

Joan Rivers’ ‘brand of humor’ - she may have invented the notion – traded on transgression. It was as though at some point she sat down, listed off all the expressions of late-modern misogyny and decided the best way to exact her revenge was to embody them and mouth them off at their most extreme.

Rivers was the apocryphal ‘fright-bat’ of our times. If Greer kicked off her Female Eunuch arguing few women have any idea how much men hate them, Rivers might’ve replied (after making a few asides about Greer’s then over-plucked brows and perhaps something or other about her vaginal discharge), ‘Well, I dunno about you, bitch, but I came out of my mother’s fanny knowing that, and I’m gonna bust it apart with invective neologism and a complexion with more pin-back velocity than the Challenger space shuttle’ – though Rivers’ precision would lead her to a more raw and recent tragedy.

The rest of this is here.  Note how quickly the subject turns to Israel and the Jews.

My comments.

geoffff
Posted Monday, September 8, 2014 - 12:17

How on earth did I miss this contemptible article?  Frankly it sums up exactly what is wrong with Australian academics and for that matter the Australian left and you can be certain it will be up on my blog and other blogs I contribute to within ten minutes of posting this comment here.

Firstly let me declare a personal interest that some here and especially the resident Holocaust denying racists will no doubt find material; I am a seventh generation Australian who just happens to be a Jew who hasn't seen the inside of a functioning synagogue in over forty years and about a week ago saw off close relatives and friends who had been visiting for two weeks and were flying home to Israel which was then still under attack.

Go figure. Ask Syd Walker. He will explain it all to you. Visit his blog. It's all set out in an academic detail that even Liz Conor will admire.

Joan Rivers was obviously a genius in her old and honourable profession that I take some irrational projected pride so many Jews pioneered and excelled. I don't know if it was her who said she would have been cracking jokes in Auschwitz if it helped relieve for a moment some of the stress on the people but it easily could have been. It could have been any one of them. She wasn't my cup of tea but I never had any question at all about where she was coming from. I have no doubt at all that there were Joan Rivers in Auschwitz

That she was a Jew is relevant. It has been made relevant by academics such as Liz Connor and commenters like Syd Walker.

Like the overwhelming majority of the world's Jews Joan Rivers was outraged by the completely unprovoked attack on Israel in a war that was declared by Hamas in the most depraved way imaginable. Have you all forgotten what they did to those three kids? The Israelis have a recording of their last moments and the exalted death cult shreiking of their killers who incidentally are still on the run.

Have you forgotten that? Because let me tell you something true, Liz Conor. The Israelis haven't.

How is that any different to what ISIS is doing to those hostages? What difference at all is there between Hamas and ISIS? They are both adherents to the same women-hating fascist ideology bent on world domination including but not necessarily starting with the physical elimination of the Jews from the Middle East.

That is what they say. They make no bones about it. Why aren't you listening to them Liz Conor? Because let me tell you something else that is true. The Israelis are. The Israelis hear them loud and clear.

Have you forgotten the hundreds of rocket attacks at random on Israeli homes  in an attempt to murder as many people as possible? Because how else would you describe this Liz Conor? In your calculus it seems almost as if the vast investment in missile defences and shelters that Israelis have been forced to make some how cancels out the sheer moral depravity that drives this necessity in the first place.

Have you forgotten the dozens of attack tunnels dug with enough concrete to upgrade the housing of half  the people of Gaza, all of it smuggled through the "embargo" from Israel and certified for use by UN and NGO agencies? THe plans Hamas had to launch an attack by a thousand terrorists armed to the teeth on Israeli townships some of which were within a kilometre of  tunnel openings?   The actual attempt, foiled by Israel. to kidnap some Israeli civilians, probably kids?

Have you forgotten even this? Because from reading your article and especially your comments in congratulation of Syd Walker it would seem that this has had not even the slightest impact on your thoughts. 

I'm not sure what you think Israel should have done in these circumstances Liz Conor because in my experience people like you get all fuzzy and angry when asked that question. But for sure hundreds of civilians were killed in the Israeli attack on Hamas and for certain many of those were kids. But over a thousand terrorist killers were also killed in the act and it was that that got the missiles stopped and stopped the slaughter in Gaza of civilians dragooned into the frontline by Hamas and its even uglier and crazier sisters as shields.

Have you forgotten this? Because it did happen you know. I am not making this up. Why are you avoiding these truths?

The IDF in Gaza achieved a better precision in reaching the enemy than has ever been achieved by any modern military engaged in urban warfare in history. That is the truth. Before attacking the IDF on moral grounds have a look at the performance of the US Marines and British Army in Falujah. Of course that is little consolation for innocent civilians caught in the swathe of war . But ever single one of them was a casualty of Hamas and to be frank about it it very difficult to take at all seriously the moral judgements of academics who are unable to allow these moral truths to enter their thinking at all.

One last thing, Liz Connor, have you checked out Syd Walker's blog yet?

Congratulations. You are right at the point where the extreme rabid left meets the fascist genocidal right.  I hope you don't take it personally when people like me ask questions about public funding of universities when we see this sort of thing.

This has nothing to do with academic freedom, you understand.  It is about defending freedom from a terrible and insidious attack.  

jexpat
Posted Monday, September 8, 2014 - 13:41

@Geofff

Has it ever occurred to you that these sorts of over the top Israel über alles comments -much like Rivers' own appalling comments, are a major source of 21st Century anti-semintism around the world?

If it has, then perhaps it would be wise to consider the irony inherent in your own extremism.

geoffff
Posted Monday, September 8, 2014 - 14:57

jexpat. people like you have been blaming the Jews for antisemitism for as long as there has been racist hatred. It's part of your ideology. The Islamist version of your ideology also blame Afro-Americans for the KKK and women for rape.

Syd Walker is an unashamed and outspoken Holocaust denier. He is not the only one who hangs out around this place like blowflies around cow dung. Because this is Australia that is their right.  I can't pretend to know the motives of those who dispute or deny what is probably the most closely recorded and studied event in all of history and therefore put it all down to some kind of Jewish conspiracy which they invariably link in Israel some how. But I know something that is pretty ugly on sight and racism does not come uglier than that.

I make my point again. You are right at the point where rabid right wing racism meets left wing crank conspiracy mongering and you can be certain I will be doing my little bit to point that out.

Get it into your heads. Military action is taken by Israel only after every other option has been exhausted. Naturally.  That is because Israel is a civilised democracy whose citizen army and their families do not regard fighting it out with Hamas terrorists in their ratholes as something they would have planned for the weekend.  This really shouldn't be that difficult to understand even if you are on the other side of the planet..

Civilian deaths are regarded by Israel as a military failure. It is impossible to avoid killing the families of Hamas terror bosses who refuse to provide them with any shelter at all. But it is a shocking fact of this conflict that Hamas and its even crazier sisters regard children as frontline martyrs to be used as required and it does nothing at all for moral clarity to ignore this obviously inconvenient truth.

Over 300 kids were killed digging those tunnels. Apparently their size and agility make them prized as diggers. That is also a fact. Hamas and the PA are the sources for this.

For Israel killing civilians is a military failure. Military action is always a dull instrument. Once the trigger is pulled then the exact landing of the shell can never be certain. Misfires occur, probably a few percent, but the truth is the Israelis wield military power with more precision than any other military.

For Israel killing civilians is something to be avoided and they went  to extraordinary lengths to achieve this. Phonecalls, text messages for crying out loud. In one of the last acts of the war the IDF was taking out whole apartment blocks that harboured Hamas war headquarters and weapons stocks without causing a single civilian casualty.  

For Hamas child murder is state policy. 

You would do well to bear that distinction in mind before working yourselves up in moral indignation at the very thought of the sight of Jews defending themselves against organised homicidal maniacs of the type that plague the Arab and Muslim world from Tehran to Gaza and beyond.  

My blog.

cross posted geoffff's joint

Evaluating the ending of Operation Protective Edge

Sar Shalom

In pro-Israel circles, it has become fashionable of late to excoriate the West, and in particular Barack Obama, for pressing Israel to end Operation Protective Edge against Hamas prematurely, and to apply that cudgel against Binyamin Netanyahu as well for yielding to that pressure. A better approach would be to bare in mind the admonition from Conrad Crane and Andrew Terrill in Reconstructing Iraq, a pre-Iraq War planning document prepared at the US Army War College that was unfortunately ignored by the people who mattered, that "national objectives can often be accomplished only after the fighting has ceased." While a simple analysis would suggest that leaving Hamas in place would clear the way for Hamas to rearm and thus subsequently conduct terror operations while removing Hamas entirely is the only way to prevent this. However, as Crane and Terrill indicated, what matters more than what is accomplished during operations is what happens following operations. Even if Hamas had been fully routed, post-operations attention would be needed to assure that whoever would fill the vacuum would not acquire arms and perpetrate terror at some future date. Douglas Lovelace emphasized this in his foreward to Reconstructing Iraq with the following, "Otherwise, the success of military operations will be ephemeral, and the problems they were designed to eliminate could return or be replaced by new and more virulent difficulties."

What all this suggests is that rather than browbeating over how much of the needed objectives were achieved by Operation Protective Edge, the effort now must be on preventing Hamas from acquiring any further materiel. Unfortunately, there is not much precedent for how to prevent a determined party from acquiring weapons. Further, the international community has given little reason for confidence that doing so is even a priority, let a lone that they would be competent at doing so while the movement of materiel into Gaza absent an immediate conflict would not attract the media attention that live conflict does. Yet, monitoring is what must be done, and no accomplishment during operations could have obviated that monitoring.

Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men

Or maybe not so much.

In the universe of the progressive-left the guy above, and his "allahu akbar" screeching congregation, are merely innocent victims of Jewish aggression.

A Big Tip 'O the Kippa to the Elder.

Muslim and Leftist Aggressors Driving Jews from Europe

Michael L. 

In Y-Net we read:

More Jews have left France for Israel so far this year than from any other country, a leading Jewish group said on Friday, blaming a "climate of anti-Semitism."

"France is today the leading country for Jewish emigration to Israel. It has never been before," said Ariel Kandel, head of the French office of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

He cited a "climate of anti-Semitism that is losing its taboo" as well as economic difficulties in France, which is suffering from zero growth and record high unemployment...

In addition to the largest Jewish diaspora in Europe, France is also home to the continent's biggest Muslim community, which is estimated at around five million...

Concerns have been raised by violent attacks on Jews, including the murders of a rabbi and three Jewish children by an al-Qaeda inspired gunman Mohammed Merah in 2012 in the southern city of Toulouse.

Are we supposed to believe it to be some big secret that the Arab-Muslim world is absolutely riddled with the most blood-curdling anti-Semitism?  What's going on in Europe is that violently inclined anti-Jewish immigrant Muslims are driving Jews off of that continent and doing it with the complicity and encouragement of our friends in the progressive-left.

If Europe's Muslims tend to harass the Jewish minority there, they do it with the encouragement of western "liberals" who believe that Arabs and Muslims have every right to harass, if not murder, Jews, due to Israel's allegedly bad behavior.  Of course, no good "progressive" would ever explicitly say that Arabs have every right to kill Jews.  Instead, they will simply cite chapter and verse of alleged Jewish crimes against Arabs in cold and biased tones and then simply let things take their natural course.

It is pointless to suggest that Jews in France are innocent of anything that Israel has done to defend itself.  Most European Jews would never dream of insulting their Arab neighbors by doing anything so aggressive and drastic as defending oneself or one's children.

For the most part, but not entirely, diaspora Jews are not big believers in self-defense.  They believe in defending others, true, but themselves, not so much.  This being the case, western-progressives provide the necessary justification for violence against those Jews by inciting hatred not merely against Israelis, but against "Zionists," more generally.

If there are too few Israelis in Paris to chase down with rocks, there are other Jewish families that work just fine as proxies.  If a young Muslim Jihadi in-training has yet to make it to Karachi, Pakistan, or northern Iraq, he can start practicing in England or France or Sweden on whatever victims that are available.  If Jews are available for attack, so much the better.

But the main thing racist Jihadis require from western progressives is the kinds of justifications that will resonate with other westerners and liberals.  Thus fourteen centuries of Koranically-based Jew Hatred and thirteen centuries of persecution within the oppressive system of dhimmitude gets veiled by anti-Zionist Edward Saidian gibberish concerning the "white imperialist oppressors" of the innocent "indigenous" population.

With the merest sleight of the hand, thirteen centuries of Jewish second and third class non-citizenship under the boot of Arab-Muslim colonial rule simply goes poof.  All context disappears and is replaced by a fantasy of Jewish militarism following World War II.  Arab genocidal intentions toward the Jews directly after the Holocaust are also entirely whitewashed out of existence by western progressives who honestly - but, falsely - believe that they stand for social justice.

Have you ever wondered how it happened that the western world turned its back against the Jews during the Holocaust?  The answer is that they did not turn their back on the Jews during the Holocaust.  On the contrary, they turned their backs on the Jews prior to the Holocaust as the Nazis were developing the process of defamation that would ultimately justify the violence itself.

The conditions that led to the Holocaust are obviously not in place in today's world.  Instead we have other conditions, but two things remain the same.  The first is the violent hatred of a large hostile majority population and the second is the justification given for that violence by ethically-bankrupt western intellectuals and ignorant, but idealistic, political activists.

When western intellectuals and writers and journalists and, yes, bloggers, defame and denigrate Israel as a racist, imperialist, colonialist, apartheid state, they project lies grounded in willful distortions, wild exaggerations, and unjustifiable malice.

The result is the whipping up of hatred not only toward Israeli Jews, but to all Jews, everywhere, including Paris.

Let's give professor Richard Landes of Boston University the last word:

In the Jewish diaspora community and Israel, the alarm was palpable. “Time to go?” asked Shmuel Trigano rhetorically about France. Why? Not only because once again, people killed and sought to kill Jews in the streets of Europe, but because the news media continually played down the amplitude of the violence and hatred, and the authorities, both police and judiciary, resisted it half-heartedly. In France, as in England, anti-Semites no longer hide; unafraid of police, they roam the streets like the brown shirts of yore. Is this the “beginning of the end” of a two-millennia-long Jewish presence in Europe?