Currently, there is a debate in Israel about the foreign funding of NGO’s. It’s vociferous and brass in a kind of take no prisoners public free for all. This inspires Dr. Dawg with a longing and he admits to the desire to live in an alternative reality wherein he is an Israeli. I have my own Israeli alternative reality where I live in the Golan Heights on a moshav growing grapes and honey. I also get to paint outside in the afternoon sun. Of course, if we did live in our alternative realities – he would be doing his damnedest to have me evicted from my home…but not only would I be fighting tooth, nail and kippots every step of the way; I would still make better cholent.
I thought I would run a follow-up to illustrate one of the examples Dawg used in his post. Ha’aretz ran an article suggesting the Jerusalem Post ’summarily’ fired Prof. Naomi Chazen from their roster of columnists as a kind of pay-back for also being the president of the New Israel Fund whose agenda and sources of foreign funding have recently come under a great deal of criticism. Ha’aretz
Associates of Prof. Naomi Chazan attacked the Jerusalem Post on Saturday in the wake of the English-language daily’s decision to fire the former Meretz MK who is at the center of a right-wing campaign against the New Israel Fund, of which Chazan is president. “The issue now is freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” a source told Haaretz last night. “The paper took a stand against freedom of expression and Prof. Chazan regrets this to the depths of her soul.”
Except, well nothing is as it seems – including ‘freedom of speech and expression’. The Jerusalem Post terminated Prof. Chazen from their roster due to the fact their policy of not employing columnists who sue their employers in the name of ‘free speech and expression’. Personally, it sounds like a no-brainer editorial decision on the Jerusalem Post’s part but I will quote the Jpost and let everyone make up their own mind.
The Jerusalem Post has canceled Naomi Chazan’s biweekly column, after she and the New Israel Fund of which she is president threatened legal action against the paper over a recent advertisement.
The decision was taken by Jerusalem Post management after a legal threat was received at the paper from the NIF and Chazan’s lawyers.
Along with other publications, the Post last Sunday carried an advertisement criticizing Chazan and the New Israel Fund in the context of the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead.
In Friday’s paper, the Post carried an advertisement defending the NIF and Chazan against their critics.
Of course, in my alternative reality I might also be one of Ha’aretz’s litigators part-time so my source of income would remain fluid at all times. No doubt the law firm which handles Ha’aretz’s lawsuits thinks of the newspaper as their own brand of ‘annuity’ client.
Since its Friday and I expect there will be protests in East Jerusalem today so I offer this cautionary tale for all Palestinian civil right groups. Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Municipality on Wednesday evening announced that Mayor Nir Barkat had agreed to carry out a court order to evacuate and seal Beit Yehonatan, a seven-story Jewish-owned structure built without the proper permits in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
Barkat made clear his intention to do this in a letter sent on Wednesday to State Attorney Moshe Lador, who last week sent a letter to Barkat, demanding that he uphold the court order to evacuate and seal the building. Barkat had initially refused to do so.
So more Jews will now be evicted in East Jerusalem from premises which are legally owned by Jews. Now let us all join hands and sing a chorus of ‘we shall overcome’ and hurray for the rule of law…except lawfare is not a one way street in East Jerusalem:
The move will also nullify a recent plan suggested by the municipality, which would have changed the status quo in the neighborhood with regards to building permits, and would have made both Beit Yehonatan and most of the illegally-built Arab homes in the area legal.
In his letter to Lador, Barkat reiterated that the municipality’s plan would have made it possible to reduce the disagreement and friction surrounding illegal construction in Silwan by nearly 90 percent, and that carrying out hundreds of demolition orders in the area would create a “high potential for conflict” instead.
Barkat also made it clear that the municipality would implement the rule of law without discriminating between Arabs and Jews.
And the price tag for forcing the hand of Jerusalem municipality to adhere to the letter of the law rather than implement a municipal plan which had been worked out with the local neighbourhoods to legalized the structures which had been built ‘without permits’ in East Jerusalem? Ynet News:
However, Barkat added that he would also implement orders against 200 illegal structures built by Arabs in the area, so as not to act in a discriminatory manner.
Mazel Tov! What ever would we do without Israeli lefties and their progressive supporters? And I am sure the 200 homeless Arab families will be forever grateful for your continued support.
UAE may be in a position to answer that question. Ynet News:
Dubai will be issuing an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should it turn out that the Mossad was behind a recent assassination of a senior Hamas man in the Emirates, a police official said Thursday.
The senior official told the al-Jazeera network that Dubai will seek to arrest PM Netanyahu “because of the fact that he was the one to approve the execution of the crime in the United Arab Emirates.” Senior Hamas member Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was murdered in a Dubai hotel on January 20th. However, Hamas only publicized the assassination nine days later.
On Monday, Hamas’ Muhammad Nazal charged that al-Mabhouh was attacked by Mossad agents who ambushed him in his hotel room. “When he arrived, they surprised him,” Nazal said. On Wednesday, Dubai Chief of Police Lieutenant Colonel Dahi Khalfan Tamim warned both Hamas and the Mossad against operating in Dubai territory behind the backs of local authorities
Yadda. Yadda, and gGood luck with that but isn’t harbouring a wanted murderer a crime?
I have hardly read the news or blogged this week. Life keeps interfering. I had every intention of making it up for it last night. I got home from work and spoke to the Last Amazon on Skype while dinner cooked. Just seconds after I hung up on my daughter my father called. He was in Toronto and his meeting unexpectedly got cancelled and wanted to know if the me and the boys wanted to meet him out for dinner. I turned off the stove and gathered the boys. When we arrived at the restaurant my father rushed out of the chair and nearly crushed me when he hugged me. I have waited 41 years for my father to hug me like that and it may have been a long time coming but its just as sweet as how I imagined it would be at 6 when he left me behind.
If there is one thing I have learned it is this; once a Daddy’s girl, always a Daddy’s girl and there is always a lingering sadness to a Daddy’s girl who is forced to live her without her father. I have mine now and despite the rivers which run under our bridges, I’d rather have him than not.
Yahoo Finance runs an article on the 13 careers for the next decade and I am left to marvel at the luck of the Last Amazon in choosing a field which not only engages her intellectually but offers only growth and financial opportunities well into the next decade.
• Neurophysics: Understanding the physics of depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, retardation and so on.
Now, if she will only forgive me for refusing to send her to ballet classes as a child.
Newfoundland Premier is a wealthy man with a heart condition who has elected to seek medical care within the United States rather than avail himself of the provincial or national health care system. Medical tourism among the wealthy has always been with us and I expect it always will be.
While I can laud his decision to ‘opt’ out of provincial or the national healthcare system and consequently free up the medical resources within the country by the factor of one. Unless of course, his medical adventurism is paid for out of the public purse. Although, there is no evidence this is the case and I would expect the man who donates his premier’s salary to charity would also be paying for his own out of country medical expenses. We simply do not know and his office is rather silent on this who is footing the bill.
As an individual I completely support his right to do whatever with his own money but…and isn’t there always a but? As premier of the province and as one of the gatekeeper of the public health care system within this country I expect better – not only for him but for all the citizens of this country. Failure to address any deficiencies of the public health care within his home province or even within the country is a gross betrayal of the public trust and therefore; it is simply time for him to resign his office.
The most prominent fact about Liberal candidate Glen Murray is one which I consider the most boring and mundane. Policy, bright ideas, causes, not so much, but he’s gay and while this may have a certain cache in Winnipeg it really doesn’t count for much in downtown Toronto.
The Toronto Star has a puff piece on him in today’s edition. Murray talks a great but there is never appears to be any substance in what he says. For example, he tells us we have to be greener or he wants to put a key to a place to live for every person in the riding which is all well and good but he never tells to us how he actually proposes to do it. Its one thing to say we need to be ‘greener’ and another to explain how to go about it. Ditto on the key. And if Murray wants to get beyond being the political professional gay candidate – my advice would be to stop talking about being gay.
What you really need to know about Glen Murray the politician is what he won’t do. Steve Paikin, host of TVO’s the Agenda, blogged about it recently when The Agenda attempted to host a Toronto-Centre debate with the candidates running for the provincial seat in the current election. Then a funny thing happened. Liberal nominee Glen Murray baulked and dropped out. So in the hopes of filling out the show TVO producers decided to fill the seats with a couple of urban experts to fill out the panel. Conservative party nominee Pamela Taylor then decides a grilling is too much and declines – apparently quite rudely. End result, Cathy Crowe is the last of the big three standing but The Agenda shelves the debate.
Glen Murray is seen as the ‘front-runner’ given his predecessor was Liberal George Smitherman who resigned his seat to throw his hat into the ring in the upcoming mayor’s race for the city of Toronto. So what would make wannabe MPP Glen Murray give up an opportunity to promote himself? I suspect it has more to do with the Provincial Liberal record is a bit of baggage he finds too heavy to carry under the public eye in a debate. Or who knows, maybe he is finding his claim to fame as a former mayor of Winnipeg carries few brownie points to the voters of Toronto-Centre and decided the less seen and heard the better. I suspect he hopes the Liberal brand is all he needs to represent us – so why rock the entitlement vote, and who knows? He might even be right.
I know the NDP did a very smart thing by nominating Cathy Crowe as their candidate. She’s a high profile figure in this riding for almost the last twenty years with impeccable street creds and a resume filled with accomplishments. She’s also been very visible in electioneering in this riding and the NDP made it very hard for me not to vote for her. This is a case of the candidate overcoming my distaste for the party platform. The one thing I know for sure about Cathy Crowe, win or lose, she will still be showing up in Toronto-Centre the day after the election to work to improve the lives of those who live in the riding. Can the same be said for Glen No-Show Murray.
Following up the recent pedestrian deaths the Toronto Star reports 2 more pedestrian injuries but its the sentiment of police which rubs the wrong way.
On Sunday morning, a 31-year-old woman was taken to hospital with minor injuries after she was struck by a Can-ar coach in the city’s west end. Police say she was knocked to the ground around 6 a.m. while crossing the intersection on a green light. The bus was turning left and the driver, a 57-year-old woman, told police she didn’t see the pedestrian. Although the woman was crossing the street legally, Const. William Wang said she should have been more aware of her surroundings. “It’s an unfortunate situation,” he said. “Even though the pedestrian had the right of way, she still has to pay attention.”
Let me guess, pedestrians now need to be psychics in order to ascertain which careless drivers will chose to defy the law. Great gig if you can get it.
And irony of ironies is that charges are apparently pending against the bus driver according to the article, but remember; its the victim who should have been more aware. I have to wonder what role police attitudes have played in creating the current sense of driver entitlement.
I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road
If the bible is right, the world will explode
I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losing hand
- Bob Dylan
This is the hardest post I have ever tried to write. I have started it over and over again. I thought if I did some research I would find a way to begin. So I took a trip down memory lane and went where I rarely go – into the Porajmos. The time of the devouring which raped the soul of the Roma and I realized, the Porajmos never really ends. It ebbs and recedes for a time but mostly it just goes on and on until it explodes into a day of endless night. Its legacy passes from one generation until the next. And it broke my heart. All I could do last night was lay my head down on my desk and cry.
Today is the day in which the world is to remember the victims of the holocaust. Representatives and leaders from countries all over the world are converging in to meet in Auschwitz for remembrance ceremonies. There will be hushed tones and pious words spoken in this place of carnage and all will pledge never again.
They will sit there in this place of torment and the starkest death possible and wonder what strange manner brought the Germans to perform these acts of carnage and shake their heads. Some will sit and be smug and safe in the knowledge they are superior to the Germans of 65 yesterday all the while completely oblivious to the kinship their share with the Nazi Overlords of Auschwitz. But the Rom remember, they always do, its a curse really. Taken from the Holocaust Remembrance Project, I survived.
Markus Pape is spokesperson for the Prague-based Committee for the Redress of the Romani Holocaust (VPORH). He has done extensive research on Czech-run labour camps and his organization has been gathering testimony from Romani survivors for some time now. The vast majority of Romani people living in what is today the Czech Republic are descended from Slovak Roma; their ancestors transferred here to the Czech lands in communist-era resettlement programmes.
Mr Pape says most Romani survivors agree to speak about their experiences only if they are not shown or identified on Czech media, so painful is the memory and so great their fear, even today, of persecution by skinheads and repercussions from other racist groups active in Czech society. Czech officials have been slow to acknowledge the wartime persecution of the Roma. Not only do precious few memorials exist to honour the memory of those killed in the war, but the site of the largest Czech labour camp, near the town of southern Bohemian town of Lety, where over 1300 Roma were interned at a time, is today home to … a pig farm.
Markus Pape again:
“Even though the Czechoslovak authorities made a major investigation into what happened at the Lety camp ? and found most of the perpetrators who caused the death of at least 241 children ? none of the guilty persons was ever punished. This is one fact which is to this day very difficult to explain to the Roma.” “The other fact is that in the 1970s, a huge pig farm was built on the former camp site ? and is being run until today. In spite of protests by Roma and annual memorial vigils held right next to the former camp site. The [Czech] government has not managed to explain why this is the way it is.”
A law establishing Lety as a work camp for “nomads” ? read the Roma ? was passed in March 1939 by Czechoslovakia’s proto-fascist Second Republic. In 1942, the Nazis designated the Lety facility as a concentration camp for Roma. Nearly all of the Roma who survived the torture, malnourishment and typhoid rampant in the Czech-run camps of Lety and Hodonin, met their death in a special “Gypsy family camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not without a fight, says Mr Pape.
“In May 1994, thousands of Sinti and Roma barricaded themselves in, ready to fight the SS men. They had found out that on that same day all of them were to be killed, by gas, at once. The SS decided not to attack, or try to kill these people. Unfortunately, later on, the ones who were still healthy enough to work were sent on to other concentration camps and only a few of them survived; and the children and old people were killed in a massacre in Auschwitz.”
The liberation of the Auschwitz ? sixty years ago this Thursday (January 27) ? came too late for the Roma, as it did for over a million Jews, and tens of thousands of Poles, and political prisoners, homosexuals and “asocials” of all nationalities. Months before the liberation, camp authorities closed the “Gypsy family camp,” gassing some 3,000 Roma in the first days of August, 1944. Over 20,000 Roma had already died there from starvation and disease, or in the gas chambers.
The interned Roma had been allowed to stay together as families only because the Nazis had learned from past experience that separating Romani parents from their children made them impossible to control as a group and exploit for forced labour. Far more Roma people died outside the camps than in them, especially in Eastern Europe, where pogroms and summary executions were a daily occurrence.
In Auschwitz, the Rom children were a special favourite among Dr. Mengele to experiment on.
He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him “Onkel Mengele”. Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:
“ I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents– I remember the mother’s name was Stella– managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering. -Berenbaum, Michael (1993). The world must know: The history of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 194–5.
But I am not done quoting yet. Let me quoted from “Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Robert Karl, Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt”, By Bernd Naumann, 1966, published by Frederick A. Praeger, NY. This book recounts the events which occurred in the trial of 22 SS men who served in the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This trial was conducted by the German legal system, under the German penal code of 1871. From the testimony of Maximilian Sternol (p. 114):
…It was the liquidation of the Gypsy compound. Terrible scenes took
place. Women and children were on their knees in front of Mengele and
Boger crying, ‘Take pity, take pity on us’. Nothing helped. They were
beaten down brutally, trampled on, and pushed on the trucks. It was a
terrible, gruesome night”.
“Did Boger also hit them?”.
“Yes, he killed them. They collapsed and died and were thrown on the
trucks. The entire political section was there. Yes, I saw Baretzki
and Broad”.
From the testimony of Josef Piwko (p. 123):
“It happened about three to four weeks after the events in the Czech
compound [Theresienstat]. The children frequently came to the barbed
wire and we would give them little things. Then one day the trucks
came, and there was great excitement in the camp, because the Gypsies
now knew they that they were to be gassed. They had a good intelligence
network because the SS men had pretty Gypsy girls and they told them
a lot of things”.
The witness tells how he hid in the bushes and saw that the Gypsies
were beaten as they were herded onto the trucks and driven off to the
gas chambers. Then the SS men searched the barracks and dragged out
about six children between the ages of four and seven.
“They were brought before Boger, who first trampled on them, then
grabbed their little legs and smashed their heads against the wall”.
In this very place, Canada will be counted among the smugly pious. The Minister of Immigration, Jason Kenney will represent us. As he sits there he will no doubt take comfort in the fact that Canada was on the side of the angels and had no hand in this carnage of this place where literally thousands and thousands of souls begged for mercy. And yet, who is this man who stands to represent us among the shades of literally 21,000 Roma souls who met their death begging for mercy there? He is the man, who last summer decided there was a dangerous influx of Roma refugee claimants from the Czech Republic and Hungary and sought to put an end to it. There would be no safe harbour in Canada for a few hundred Roma who were simply seeking a respite from persecution in order to simply live a better life, a human life.
It didn’t matter that the vast majority of Roma claimants from the Czech Republic or Hungary met the Immigration and Refugee Board’s litmus test for being persecuted and in need of safe harbour. Why let facts get in the way of keeping Canada safe from the surge of the ‘asocials’? And my countrymen, I heard you loud and clear last summer when you cheered Kenney’s actions. And today, who protests Kenney’s presence at this event where the souls of 21, 000 were slaughtered for simply being different other than me and mine? Look in the mirror, and tell me how different you are.
A standard Canadian performance of Romeo & Juliet brought out the censor vibe in Nashville to protest the bawdy sexuality of the play reports the Toronto Star. After much hullabaloo the play was performed as written and directed. A good time was had by all except for a few who squirmed. Toronto Star
After much discussion, they decided to present the show as planned and Monday’s audience was, by and large, enthusiastic.
Danielle Moffitt, 18, from Goodpasture Christian School, said, “The sexuality was a good thing, the way they addressed it openly back then, not like now.” On the flip side, a woman who identified herself as Val, a home-school teacher from Hermitage, “struggled being here with my son. The sexuality was too much. Our children need to be more pure.” Several other teachers echoed her opinion.
Too pure, uhm. In that case, better to ban their bibles as too racy for their ‘pure minds; otherwise who knows what might transpire if they got a hold of it and read about Lot and his daughters, Ruben’s fling with Bilhah, Amnon raping his half-sister Tamar! They read that, and before you know it; Tennessee will be a kind of ‘your father’s your uncle kind of place’…
