The Last Exile

‘Cause no Sabra man would be caught dead in this – unless he was on active duty in the IDF and part of special commando mission in Lebanon.

There should be a dating rule or hazard warning for any female dating a man who would wear these clothes.

I am going to quote the entire Arutz Sheva article which appeared to given the relevance to a recent blog posting.

There are so many international organizations set-up to protect the rights of children and youth, rescue and rehabilitate ‘child soldiers’, and yet, not one of these organization appears to be operating on any appreciable level to stop the Palestinians from militarizing their children and youth.

Update: Ynet News is carrying the video surveillance tape of these two Palestinian ‘children’ going on a shooting rampage against Israeli civilians…

And B’Tselem wants us all to worry more about these children being interrogated without their parents being present rather than worry about the lives these children appear committed to murder.

h/tip Daled Amos

The original UN vote for partition of the British Mandate for Palestine called for the ‘internationalizing of Jerusalem, although there was a tiny significant point, which hardly any one wants to acknowledge or even discuss; the ‘internationalizing’ of Jerusalem had a best before date.

Ten years after partition, the citizens of Jerusalem would determine, in a majority vote which nation – Israel or Arab Palestine – they would want to join. If that vote was held in 1948 or even ten years later in 1958; the majority of citizens of a united Jerusalem would have been Jews, and I suspect the vast majority of Jerusalemites would have voted to join Israel. Even today, if all the citizens of both West and East Jerusalem, Arab or Israeli, the vast majority of Jerusalemites would still vote to remain as part of the Israeli nation. This ‘clause’ was on the prime reasons it was imperative for the invading Arab armies to ethnically cleanse – at all costs or at any price – ‘East Jerusalem’ of all its’ Jews.

The history of Jerusalem did not start in 1967. Thousands of years of Jewish history took place in what is now called “Arab East Jerusalem. Only when the Jewish residents were driven from their homes in 1948 was the city divided between East and West. This video shows the reality of Jerusalem today and includes interviews from survivors of the fall of Jerusalem.”

Dr. Dawg has his gotchies all in a twist over this Guardian article alleging mistreatment of Palestinian teenagers by Israeli prison authorities. Oh my bad, The Guardian makes a point of calling all teenagers in the article ‘children’.
Now I will say this, if Israeli authorities are routinely abusing Palestinians who have been incarcerated in Israeli prisons…it is wrong, and those responsible should face the full penalty for breaking the law – Israeli law. The Guardian ends with this dire warning:

On the other hand, it is truly hard for me to feel a great deal of empathy for those Palestinian ‘children’ who deliberately choose to throw Molotov cocktails…

and/or stones at people’s children just because they are Jewish.

In the universe of Dawg’s Guardian, these little moral monsters are the result of the ‘alleged abuse’ which they have suffered at the hands of Israelis authorities – long after they have been arrested for throwing Molotov cocktails and stones at Jews.

As a mother of many, I have actively discouraged any of my children from throwing anything at anybody – without exception.

So my question becomes, at what point does the Palestinian family unit/culture take responsibility for the fact that throwing Molotov cocktails and stones at Jews is a true coming of age ritual for Palestinian teenagers?

Dawg ends his two bits by asking how many violent settlers are jailed and tortured by the Israeli Defense Forces. Now I could quibble with Dawg because he refuses to note the difference between Israeli prison authorities, the Shin Bet and the IDF – three separate organizations, but I am not going to.

Instead, I will just point out that he needs a long talk with Noam Federman, and refresh his memory over who arrested the Jewish Bomb Plot terrorists…or we could just start the discussion at ‘Amona’. Of course, that might not be filled with as much bloggie goodness for Dawg as writing the ‘bad, bad Jew’ narratives which we all know the good Dawg loves to do.

I’m filing this one under Officer Bubbles has relatives in NB.
The CBC is reporting that Fredericton New Brunswick police officers raided a local Fredericton man’s home to execute a search warrant and charge him with ‘criminal libel’ under probably one of the more obscure sections of the Criminal Code of Canada. In fact, I’ll wolf down a bag of artificial bacon bits; if more than 20 people have been charged with criminal libel in the last 50 years – anywhere in Canada.

In my opinion, the very fact that a Canadian police chief attempts to justify this type of police bullying against an obnoxious loud-mouth blogger; speaks more to his general unfitness for duty and a rather marked leadership deficit on the Fredericton police force. Let’s just strike New Brunswick off the list of civilized places to visit – oh, wait – does anyone actually vacation there?

There is this really looney tunes quality to this Ha’aretz report. Apparently, a group of Bedouin have taken over an almost empty resort and demanded a pay-offout to leave or their will trash the place and steal equipment.

The Egyptian army could certainly act, and there are several thousand Egyptian troops currently in the Sinai. I suspect this is a special joint mission between Egyptian troops and the Bedouin to shakedown a pay-offout from the hotel owner and who better to blame than the Joos.

I don’t know. I wrote two books in the past 12 months and started a specialty line of women’s wear. My Israeli partner took the samples back to Israel. Not only will the website be built in Israel, but Israel will be the corporate home to my dress company. After 17 years of excuses for avoiding the shtetl, and cracking jokes about never going north of Bloor Street in Toronto; I am moving back into its heart. My children are all late teenagers and my inner Jewish mother wants to assert a measure of control over their social life/pool. Go figure.

So yes, I might blog or not.

I have three pet peeves about the Israeli-Arab conflicts. The first, is this notion that the Jewish nation is not an indigenous people to the Middle East, but rather some kind of European hybrid plant exported and planted in alien or foreign soil.

The second, is the notion that the United Nations created the state of Israel. The state of Israel was created by the blood and sweat of the nascent Israeli nation willing to fight to establish their right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. The UN never rushed in to defend the state after David Ben-Gurion publicly declared the re-establishment of the Israeli state.

This Toronto Star article on Ariel Sharon touches on third peeve.

“The only way to respond (to attack) was by establishing new ground rules,” Gilad writes. “Jewish lives were not just for the taking; the harming of Jews was a crime that would be paid for.”Starting with the 1948 War of Independence, Sharon carved a wide swath through the Middle East, winning a starring role in its violent drama. At the height of his early popularity Sharon was Israel’s Spartacus, breaking the chains of oppression that had afflicted the Jews for centuries. Later he became “Arik, King of Israel.” But he also infuriated his superiors by following his own military doctrine of striking hard and fast, whatever the orders from above. His philosophy helped reshape the fledgling Israel Defense Forces from an inexperienced band to a crack commando army.

Do not misunderstand me, the Haganah were significantly under manned and under-armed given the far superior numbers of men and weaponry arrayed against them, but this idea, that the Haganah forces were an inexperienced band…is laughable and butt-ignorant.

At the time of War of Independence, Haganah forces numbered 20,000 – among the 20,000 troops were 4,000 Polish Jews; who were battle hardened and experienced in the finer arts of modern military warfare. Men who were forged in Rommel’s gardens are exactly who you want in your army when the military numbers/armaments game is stacked against you. Those Jews were made up with men like Jaques Bar, who received advanced military training at the Academy of Science in Moscow, and who later went on to learn the finer points of fighting and operating behind enemy lines where access to supplies and weapons was practically non-existent.

It was a wealth of experience which these 4000 Jews from the British Polish Corps II brought to the Haganah and the Palmach. I realize that the Labor Zionist myth has helped perpetrate the notion that the Haganah did not know how to ‘fight’, but given the reality, that the state of Israel fought its first official war as a state against armies of superior numbers and weapons but still prevailed…well, isn’t it time to give this myth a rest?

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not point out, that Sharon was far too young and far too low on the military ladder in the 40’s and early fifties to have had ‘his philosophy helped reshape the fledgling Israel Defense Forces. In fact, the ‘philosophy’ of the IDF was directly shaped by men like General Yitzhak Sadeh, and the men Sadeh hand picked to join the Palmach and lead its operations. Other than that, carry on.

We hear so many horror stories about Canadian hospital health care that getting ill or needing emergency assistance is enough to induce an off the wall anxiety attack. I know because I had one last Friday night. I had a small Shabbat dinner and as I was walking my friend to his car my knee locked and I suddenly went crashing down on my right ankle. I didn’t hear the ‘crunch’ but when I could get up immediately I knew I was facing, at least, a very bad sprain.

Being a former ballet dancer means that I am not a stranger to either to pain or sprained ankles. Gabriel carried me to chair and packed my foot with ice. He wanted to take me to the hospital and being an Israeli, he has yet to feel or understand the dread the very idea of visiting a hospital induces in Canadians. I insisted I would be fine. I showed him I could wiggle my toes which goes to prove that old adage of it not being a fracture bone if one can still wiggle one’s extremities is false. The truth is, I have extremely strong toes, toes stronger enough – even to this day – that I can pick up all kinds of unnatural things with my toes, if I so choose. Very reluctantly he left me.

By 2:00p.m. Saturday afternoon, I knew I would have to go to the hospital and face the inevitable. I was still hoping for a very bad sprain but the pain was very different from any sprain I had experienced in my career. My son carried me out the door and into a cab. I live in the midst of at least 4 major hospitals and raising three children means I have had experiences at all of the them. I chose Mount Sinai, only because, I was so impressed with the treatment both my son and daughter have received there in the past. Need a CAT scan or an MRI? Mount Sinai has it arranged in hours or within in three days at the most.

We arrived at in the emergency room at 3:00p.m., and seen right away. After the initial nurse triage examine and paper work filled out, I was sent to the waiting room. A brief stay in the waiting room and then I was wheeled into an examining room. Maybe it took 10 minutes – tops. Five minutes after I in the examining room, I was being wheeled into the x-rays room – and attended to immediately. By the time I was wheeled back into the examining room, my x-rays were up on the examining room screens. Ten minutes later I was examined by a resident. Ten minutes later, the resident was conferring with the attending doctor. A fiber-glass air cast was fitted ten minutes later. I was fully discharged and loaded with instructions. The longest single wait I experienced was waiting for a cab to arrive at the emergency entrance to take me home. I was back home and fully kitted out with crutches, cast and drugs by 4:30pm.

Now, maybe I was lucky, and it would be foolish not to see an element of luck in the timing working for me, but this is my 4th experience at Mount Sinai. And each time, I am amazed at the speed and quality of care. I suspect that a great deal of those Canadian hospital horror stories happen due to dysfunctional management policies of individual hospital administrations rather than signs of a ‘broken’ health care system. If this is indeed the case, maybe it’s time to take a long hard look at how and who is running our hospitals.

Everyone is all a twitter about the alleged open mic moment between US President Obama and France’s Prime Minister Sarkozy. Sarkozy accused Israeli Prime Minister of being a liar and ‘being fed up with him’ reminds me of what passes for appropriate small dinner time chat among France’s diplomatic corps.

While I have no reason to doubt Sarkozy’s animus towards an Israeli Prime Minister, after all there is a French tradition for that kind of thing- what is far more striking is just just what Sarkozy has against the US President. If anything, Sarkozy’s ‘gaffe’ really smells far more like ‘set-up’ to me. Sarkozy actually leads Obama into making ‘personal’ admissions about the Israeli Prime Minister.

The open mic ‘gaffe’ will hurt the Obama Administration far more with Democratic and Republican voters than it will hurt Sarkozy among his natural constituency in France. But this kind of ‘gaffe’ by Obama, when relations among the White House and the US Jewish community are at an all-time low – and in a lead-up to a major US election cycle for the Presidency…well, Sarkozy just handed Obama a shovel to keep digging his political grave..